“Aren’t you trying to invent books?”
Cory Doctorow and Graham Linehan in conversation at The Story 2011
In the run up to this year’s The Story conference on Feb 19th, we’re publishing a few transcripts of our favourite talks from the last 7 years of the event. In 2011 Cory Doctorow talked with Graham Linehan about procrastination, cat pictures, and using the internet to collaborate.
The Story 2016 conference is on 19th February 2016, at Conway Hall in London. You can buy tickets now via Eventbrite.
Cory Doctorow: So, you’ve confessed to me that you are a procrastinator.
Graham Linehan: Yes.
CD: That your normal way of working is a very Douglas Adamsy — ‘I love deadlines, I love the sound they make as they go whooshing overhead.’
GL: Yes.
CD: Wait until the last minute and get it all in, and that you’re not particularly happy about it.
GL: No, it’s an unhappy life.
CD: Well, the great thing about the Internet is it’s this wonderful way to pass the time. My intuition — I’ve never confirmed with you, but my intuition is that all the ‘netty stuff you do, where you interact with your audience and you craft your stories with the Internet and so on, are basically you skiving off and going, ‘Hang on a second, I can call this work’. Is that right?
GL: Yes, more or less. I’ve now built in a period before I start writing any series of the IT Crowd of about six months, where I say, ‘Well, this is where I collect material.’ All I do is, I just tell my wife, ‘Oh, I have to work. You know, I have to really work today,’ and I go upstairs and I sit at the Internet for five hours.
CD: Right. Fourteen-hour click-trance. Digging stuff and burying stuff.
GL: Yes, yes. I spend a lot of time looking for programmes that might, I don’t know, put all that stuff in a file for me. I just do anything except work, you know?
CD: This is like that Iain Banks travelogue he wrote about great whiskeys of Scotland. You can totally tell it was like — ‘I will find a way to allow the Inland Revenue to let me deduct my whiskey for me.’
GL: Exactly, but the thing is, things do pop up, you know? There’s this most stupid thing you can imagine, a YouTube video of a child I found — it was one of those vending machines for toys, and the kid is looking up at toys, then he looks at the little hole going up, and then goes into the hole. This was filmed on a security camera. Then, after a few seconds, you see the toys start to shake and the kid pops up in the middle of them.
I thought, ‘Oh, that could happen to Moss in the IT Crowd.’ Because all you need is this — you see him looking down at the flap and then you cut away. Then you come back, you see the toys rumbling and his head sticks up. Things like that I do collect. I’m only half-joking because all this procrastination — there is a percentage of it that goes into the show.
CD: So, It’s a room full of story practitioners here today — what specific tips can we give them? Have you systematised goofing off to maximise your productivity while you’re doing it?
GL: That’s a really good question. Well, my system is cards, basically. The thing about the IT Crowd, Father Ted and the type of comedy I do is that I like big set-piece moments. The late producer of Father Ted, Geoffrey Perkins, pointed out that in a sitcom, which is only about 24 minutes, you just need about two or three big set-piece moments so that people can go later on, ‘Oh, that was the episode where Dougal drives the milk float.’
So what I do is, during that period of procrastination, I write down anything that feels like a big moment. Moss stuck in the vending machine, whatever it happens to be, and I compile a stack of cards. When I’m finished, when I have about a 100 or something like that, then I colour-code them with different characters. Yellow ones for Roy, blue ones for Moss, and so on, and then put them on the ground and I have fun.
It’s like a, kind of, playtime where I just see, ‘Oh, that feels like it could have something to do with that,’ and I try and look for little connections. Thematic connections, or just mirroring storylines. One story’s about this thing, the other is kind of the same thing, but in a different way. After a while, I have a pack of, say, ten cards that seems to be a story. It may not be in the right order, and some of the cards might get thrown out along the way, but it’s a starting point anyway.
CD: You have two major TV shows you’re known for — one is Father Ted, which was largely a pre-Internet project, and one is The IT Crowd, which is about the Internet in some way. What is it that, if you could go back to the Father Ted days, you’d bring back from The IT Crowd stuff, and contrary-wise, what is it that the pace of the Internet era has robbed from you that you would love to be able to bring back from Father Ted?
GL: I think that’s probably a wider question. I think that what I love about the Internet is that it just seems like everything’s possible, you know? Except reading a book. That seems to be the only thing that has been rendered impossible by the Internet.
I know you’re different from me, but I don’t think I’ve read a book for six months and it really worries me, because I place a great amount of value on books and I love them. I’m worried about it, but at the same time, I feel like my knowledge of a far wider range of subjects has grown hugely and I don’t know how to square it.
The thing about Ted is, when we were doing Ted we would take turns. Arthur would write a bit at the computer, then I would look at his stuff and edit it, and vice versa. During that little period when I wasn’t writing, we just had to buy loads of magazines to kill the time, and I’d just sit down and read an article or something. With the Internet that’d be a lot more fun. I think there’s a wider problem with the Internet that I haven’t really resolved to my own mind yet.
CD: You mentioned books, and people say, ‘What will you do, Cory Doctorow, when everybody reads all their books on mobile devices and you continue to give your books away for free? How will you earn a living when no one’s buying print books anymore?’ My feeling has been this, that it’s very hard to do a task of more than five to seven minutes in front of the screen, because there is this, kind of, little voice going, ‘Somewhere on YouTube there’s a man with a lemon in his nose,’ right? It’s one Alt-Tab away, right?
GL: Yes.
CD: Maybe some time in the future we’ll figure out how to make a device that’s about ten pounds, and that gets down that cheap without having to throw in a bunch of other functions to give it a bigger value, like make it a game device, or do lots of other things. That’s just an e-reader for a tenner, and maybe then I’m stuffed.
GL: Isn’t that what a Kindle is?
CD: Well, no, but they’re, like, a £100.
GL: Oh, okay.
CD: Right? So, like, the only way to get a Kindle down to £10 is to make it really, broadly appealing. So, you add in an NES-emulator, and all of a sudden there’s a, you know, one Alt-Tab away from Mario putting a lemon in his nose.
GL: Aren’t you trying to invent books?
[Laughter]
CD: Yes! So, I just figure, the affordance of the book is that you can’t do anything else. So you don’t need the iron self-discipline of a monk to finish a book if it’s in print form. You just need to be too lazy to get off the sofa and go to your computer.
GL: Oh, yes, well, I’ve got that. I recently started experimenting with writing with a team. I thought, technology is such now that I can spot funny people and ask them to write for me rather than wait for funny people to apply to me. When it was announced that I was using a team for the next series of The IT Crowd, a lot of agents got in touch and said, ‘Will you consider this or that writer?’ and I had to say, ‘No, I’ve already chosen what looks like seven or eight people who kept making me laugh on Twitter.’ So we used this site called Basecamp, which isn’t very good for this purpose, but it was just the best that there seems to be.
What we do is, we create a kind of blog post. You do a blog post, where I say, ‘I’ve got this funny idea. Anyone have any ideas where it could go, how we get there?’ Then in the comments it becomes a conversation on how to make it happen.
When it was successful, it was really interesting, because I let people do it at their own speed, and as a result what would happen was, the stories started to kind of accrete. You know, like a coral. If I was away for a week or something, I’d come back and the story would be really worked out. You know, often a lot of dead ends and things that weren’t right, but what was enjoyable about it was seeing stories automate ourselves, you know what I mean?
CD: So, where are these people?
GL: There are two in Scotland. People might know this very good sketch show called Burnistoun and I had the two guys who were on that. Another guy was in the Isle of Skye, another guy in The States, and a couple of people from London.
CD: Do they aggregate around a certain time zone? Are there core hours?
GL: No. No, no. But I think that might’ve been another thing that didn’t quite work. I think it would’ve been better if we’d all sat in a chat room and done it at the same time. I think that would’ve worked too and I’d probably have gotten more stuff on the site that was actually worthwhile.
So there are lots of things wrong with it, and Basecamp, as a tool for collaborative writing, it’s not what I want. I started doing research and trying to find a programme that would do it, and there was really nothing. It’s very odd.
CD: I had another moment that I wanted to ask you about, which is how you used Twitter during Father Ted Night on Channel 4.
GL: Oh, yes. I was talking to people on Twitter while it was on. You know, it wasn’t anything too unusual.
CD: It is! because I’ve had Twin Peaks marathons that David Lynch never joined me for.
GL: I’m annoyingly available. You know, there’s no mystery to me. David Lynch, Jesus, I’d shit myself if he came online.
GL: Okay. Can we get that cat picture from the internet up on screen? I was reminded of this when I saw Martin Parr do his talk earlier, and I thought, ‘Wow, I wonder if he has seen Awkward Family Photos or Awkward Pet Photos,’ which this is from.
One of the ways that we work on Basecamp is, I posted up this photograph and I said, ‘How can we get Roy into this situation?’ So, everybody was throwing stuff back and forth, and finally, what we came up with — and I don’t know whether it was good enough to do, but it’s interesting to me — it’s that they get a cat, they find out that the cat’s going to die, and so they decide to show the cat a good time. When they realise that the cat is eight year old, they think, ‘Well, what do eight-year-olds like?’
The thing about this picture is, I don’t think we can actually do this and make it as funny as this picture is, because why is there an Easter Bunny? Why is he visiting the Easter Bunny? Why is that? Why has he brought his cat?
So, we thought ‘Maybe we’ll make it Santa,’ and the idea was, to make up for the fact that we’ve lost the comedy of it being the Easter Bunny for some bizarre reason, we’ll have Roy and Moss in floods of tears as they bring the cat to see Santa. The thing about Chris O’Dowd and Richard Ayoade is, they’re really good actors, so they could play the tragedy of that and it would be really funny if it was played straight.
So, that was actually the very first post I put up on Basecamp — that picture of the cat and the Easter Bunny. I said, ‘How can we get Roy in this situation?’ So, that gives you some idea of how it can work.
CD: So, this raises a question that squares the circle between Father Ted Night and this, which is, why not just take a tiny URL of this and put it in your Twitter feed, and say, ‘How do we get the boys in the scenario?’
GL: Well, I did something like that. In the last series of The IT Crowd I was very late with one episode, and in the end we had to throw out the last ten minutes, because they didn’t work, and we’d already filmed them.
I had to rewrite and get a good, better ending in there, and it turned into a kind of courtroom drama ending. The storyline was that Roy was kissed on the bottom while getting a massage, and he took the guy to court. He sued him. Now, the thing about it was, I wrote that and was just about able to get its shape right, but what I didn’t have time to do — and it was, literally, the Friday when we were shooting — was come up with as many imaginative alternatives to the word ‘arse’ as I could.
So in the morning, while we were shooting stuff for the pre-record to play it into the audience later on, I was tweeting, ‘Does anyone know any good euphemisms for arses? I’ll give you a ‘thanks’ in the credits of the DVD’. I sent that out and, people are clear what they get if they do it, so I felt that that was okay, and they sent back some great examples, you know? My favourite was ‘bike rack’. I thought that was genius.
CD: My experience of doing that kind of thing on Twitter is that it’s great as far as it goes, but it has at least two substantial problems. The first one is you get responses like ‘No, I don’t know any good synonyms for “arse”, but here’s a great synonym for “foot.” It’s, like, ‘Well, that’s great, it’s really funny, but I’m looking for synonyms for “arse”.’ The second one is, ‘Great, I’ve got all the synonyms I need for “arse”, folks,’ and you stop, and a week later you get ‘Hey, Graham! Graham, do you ever think about “toast rack”?’
GL: Yes, yes. It’s not ideal. That’s why I decided to use Basecamp to do this. There’s also a thing that I think might be interesting called Beluga, which seems to be a, kind of, Twitter for smaller groups. One thing I might do is see if there’s some way of saying to people-, you know, finding funny people, saying, ‘Do you want to be part of this Beluga group?’ and just post up funny pictures, images, anything you find that’s interesting.
Like Chuck Palahniuk — he goes to parties and he hands out business cards that say ‘Do you have any interesting stories? Call me’ or whatever. That’s very quaint.
I think it’s a great idea. I read that and I thought, ‘Great idea.’ Then, like a month later, it was out of date, because you don’t need to do that anymore. You can just say it on Twitter, but it’s kind of hard, because you don’t want to take advantage. You don’t want to just get a great comedy writer and mine their brain, and not give them any payback. There has to be at least a credit or-, I don’t know. It’s hard. I don’t think we’ve yet worked out how to do this, all this stuff that it is now actually possible to do.
CD: So, you’ve got Why, That’s Delightful, which is your blog, but it’s, compared to what you do on Twitter, it’s very thin.
GL: Twitter just took over.
CD: It’s pretty clear, and you’re really great on Twitter, but for me the thing that a blog gives me is, like, everything that’s interesting I write up in five sentences. Trying to reduce something that’s interesting to five sentences that convey to a stranger why you think it’s interesting makes you think about it. Then I pop it online and it forms a searchable database, and also people who think the way I do come along and they annotate it. They’re, like, ‘No, it’s not interesting, this is more interesting,’ or, ‘Here’s the thing you missed,’ or whatever, in the comments. I find it’s like an exercise. If I do enough of this, eventually the pieces that I hadn’t realised were connected, cohere into something. A story, an essay, a novel, whatever. I’ve been surprised that you don’t do that, because that sounds so much like the way that you work.
GL: Yes, well, that sounds better than what I’m doing. I’ll do that.
CD: I’d say, you know, paper cards with colour codes-,
GL: Oh, yes. Yes. There’s a bit of, you want it to be your thing as well, you know? People say, ‘Oh, I’ve got a great idea for The IT Crowd,’ and I usually say, ‘No,’ because if they come up with an idea and it’s similar to one that I’ve already had, then it’s too hard to explain. ‘Well, I had that idea, here’s my Google entry or the Google email with a date on it to prove it.’ I don’t want to get into that.
CD: Do you know anyone who has had direct experience of someone saying, ‘I’ve got a great idea for you’? This is common among people who do creative work, especially as you get into higher stakes, TV and movies, that if you ever let anyone whisper an idea in your vicinity, you’re risking a lawsuit. This is why if you ever go to, like, Disney Studios for a meeting, you have to sign something that says ‘I waive all title to any idea I have now or will have in the future or I’ve had today.’ That’s not just because they’re evil, it’s because they’re gun-shy about this stuff.
GL: We should get terms of agreement on our t-shirts.
CD: That’s right, yes. ‘By listening to this talk you all agree’. Yes.
GL: . ‘By meeting me you agree not to get angry at me at any point in the future’.
CD: That’s right. So, have you ever had the direct experience of someone claiming that you ripped them off?
GL: Yes. A woman said that we stole Father Ted from her. She said she put on a play and her friends thought that it looked a bit similar. The Daily Mail printed it and didn’t print the fact that she dropped the case a week later when the Hat Trick lawyers got in touch with her, and pointed out that we’d written it at a completely different time.
CD: So it doesn’t sound like it was actually a problem, right?
GL: It’s never a problem until you get a massive success. I’d say if I’d been responsible for something that’s pulling in the kind of money that Seinfeld was pulling in, I think you’d probably be in court every other week. Or, at least your lawyers would be. Luckily, writing in England you never get that success.
CD: It’s interesting, because it’s such a firmly entrenched belief. I know in science fiction there is an infamous case where — I think it was Marion Zimmer Bradley — had someone write some fanfic. She had commented previously on the fanfic of her work, and so this established a pattern that Marion Zimmer Bradley reads her fanfic, and she’d written something that was similar to this, and so on and so forth. It dragged on, I don’t think anyone successfully sued anyone else, but it’s her life was made hell for a long time. It seems like it’s a meteor-strike rarity that this would actually happen.
GL: Yes, I think so. In fact, it’s one of the things I always tell beginning writers. I don’t know how many people here are beginning writers or just starting off, but don’t be so frightened about people stealing your ideas, because the thing that people want is you — your ability to write and your skill at constantly bringing up this new material. If someone took away the idea of a wizard school, they’re not going to make millions of dollars like J. K. Rowling.
CD: Well, there were lots of people who wrote wizard school stories before J. K. Rowling did.
GL: Yes, exactly.
CD: Well, in fact, lots of people have tried to sue her and vice versa, right? Lots of people have, after J. K. Rowling came along, written more wizard school stories. So, everybody’s worried about this stuff, but it just seems like it’s a rarity. I wonder if there isn’t something to just going on Twitter and saying-,
GL: Well, you know, it’s just that this is untested ground. I mean, we both know about Twitter Joke Trial, the guy who was going to meet his girlfriend and he wrote a Tweet that said something like — ‘The airport has been closed again. If it happens again, I’m going to blow the place sky-high’. He’s got a criminal record now, you know? He has lost two jobs because of it, and he was just the first person to find out that that kind of hyperbole could get you arrested. So, I don’t want to be the first person to lose all the revenue from The IT Crowd to someone because of a tweet.
CD: So, we’re coming to the end here, and the last thing I wanted to ask you about is, are there insoluble boulders in this slurry of interesting things that you can do? Things that are, on the one hand, absolutely engaging and absorb lots of your time, but, on the other hand, completely unproductive, and that you’ve never figured out a way to make them productive?
GL: Yes, computer games. Computer games aren’t productive. They’re like a trance-state, like dreaming. Except dreaming actually could give you a storyline, but computer games can’t give you anything.
CD: You could go and develop computer games, right?
GL: Yes, yes. but not as a writer. No. I’m playing Dead Space 2 at the moment. That’s, like, four hours a night just in a complete trance, and when I wake up — I know about half the audience are just disgusted with me now — but last night it took me about two hours to cross a room that was about this big. [gestures with arms]
CD: Having just had hip surgery, I can empathise. Well, we’re going to be the first speakers to finish one minute ahead of schedule.
GL: Okay. Lovely. (Applause). Thank you.
CD: Thanks!
