Katie Hims

Quite Regularly I Feel Completely Desperate

For Katie Hims, writing radio plays for a living is a bit like going to story telling school. Radio helps you develop essential narrative skills – particularly for character and structure – which translates well in other mediums. Tell us more Katie.

If you want to make enough money from radio drama then you have to tell a lot of stories in any one year. . . .Quite regularly I feel completely desperate, I’ve got nothing to say and someone is saying on the end of the phone “where’s the script?” This demand for a script coupled with this desperation in me is what somehow produces the results.

Radio has given me the confidence that I can tell stories and tell them ( more or less) on time and in a less pressured environment than television might offer. .

FIND OUT WHAT YOU WANT TO WRITE
As a general rule there’s more ownership for the writer in radio. In tv there’s a whole team developing and script editing the work. With a radio play it’s just you and the producer/director. This means you can get on with it without having to include five different opinions in the next draft.

Writing your own original stuff for radio gives you the space to develop a voice, to get to know the territory of your work and the kind of themes that interest you. This is rarely possible for writers new to television.

If you do move on to tv and you’ve done a fair bit of radio you should have a clearer sense of your own identity and be more confident about fighting your corner when it comes to development.

SOMETHING USEFUL FROM FORSTER
The novelist EM Forster once said “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?” He couldn’t know what he was going to write until he’d written it. It’s always difficult being asked to pin things down. As writers we don’t want to know every detail of what we‘re about to work on or we’d never muster the energy and curiosity to write it.

Writing for television, the greatest challenge is the number of treatments required before it’s commissioned – if, in fact, it’s ever bought. Radio ideas have to be sold to a commissioner but they’re generally sold on the strength of a one page outline rather than on a series of treatments. This gives you much more freedom in terms of developing the story as you are actually writing it.

STORIES IN THE BANK
Having written thirty hours of material, I’ve a bank of ideas and characters that may well find another life beyond radio. I don’t mean that these stories will transfer in their entirety but I’ve already stolen elements of radio plays from myself to use in my television work. . .

My radio play, Cops and Robbers was about a woman who falls in love at first sight with a man who comes in to the dry cleaners where she works. The man is knocked over by a car as he leaves and she later discovers that he is a desperate criminal. The police don’t believe that the woman she didn’t know him - because she’s so clearly devastated by the accident.

When I wrote my first episode of Casualty I took the beginning of the radio play as the beginning of my first episode. In Casualty the woman lied that she was actually his girlfriend in order to travel in the ambulance and so the lie snowballed from there.

So actually some of the idea is also stolen from the Sandra Bullock film While You Were Sleeping... Hopefully Sandra won’t be reading this.

YOU DON’T GET LOOKS IN RADIO
When I was trying to learn French and German at school I could only improve one language at a time. Whenever I was getting better at French I seemed to be getting worse at German. Now I’m like that with the languages of radio and tv.

When I started writing television I felt that my radio language had to be unlearned. My characters in Casualty still say too much – even when I think I am being very economical. In television you can often achieve more in a look than a whole conversation and you don’t get looks in radio.

Radio is sound and atmosphere and language. It can create powerful images but they’re images formed from words and built in the listeners head. Radio is a much slower medium. In the television that I’ve written for so far, you need more plot, more narrative twists and turns, everything needs to move faster. The eye take things in very quickly and get bored more easily.

BEGINNER’S LUCK
As an experienced radio writer I can easily slip out of televisual mode.

When I wrote my first episode of Casualty, I’d some strong images that were very useful; eg a man covered in blue paint, a woman in a wedding dress etc. But I think this may have been beginner’s luck because in later episodes I’ve found myself staring at one dull scene after another thinking – there’s no visual storytelling in here whatsoever – no wonder I’m having to work like crazy on the dialogue – because the dialogue is having to do all the work.

TOP TIPS FOR ANYONE WHO FANCIES WRITING A RADIO PLAY

1. Do yourself a favour

My first radio play, The Earthquake Girl, was produced by Kate Rowland in Manchester nearly ten years ago.

The Earthquake Girl had three different worlds, a library, a Victorian novel, and a series of telephone calls between the heroine and her sister-in-law. Each world had a very specific acoustic and so I could move from one scene to another without having to explain that time had moved or the scene was new.

It’s a massive help to think about your acoustics early on – whatever they are. You need to know how you’re going to get from one scene to another. Otherwise you’re going to spend time worrying about it when you should be on to telling the story.

2. Sound Effects shouldn’t be maths homework!

When I wrote the first draft of The Earthquake Girl I put in a lot of sound effects figuring if this is a radio play, I’ll need lots of them. The producer said the draft was fine but why so many sound effects?

You don’t need to clutter a play up. Sound should be used in the same way that words are – because the sounds are right, because they are sounds or acoustics that you love.

Don’t worry about being boring. Don’t think that you can’t have the sea because the sound of the sea in radio is a cliché. If you write a fantastic play full of the sea who’ll care that they have heard the sea on radio before? And you will have written something that you wanted to write which is the only way any piece of work gets to be any good anyway.

If you’ve got characters who stay in a living room for the whole time there are still plenty of ways to use sound. Sometimes it helps not to be too literal. Whenever my heroine in The Earthquake Girl was writing her novel it would be raining. Of course it couldn’t always be raining when she wrote but that didn’t really matter as it was only a play .

3. Think of an Actor

When trying to find an idea for radio it’s often worth thinking about an actor’s voice that you love. This voice could inspire you to write something specific and if you’re in luck, there is always the possibility that this actor will be up for doing it – unless you have chosen someone a bit too flash like Tom Cruise . . .but why would you choose him?

4. Mistakes:

• Too many characters introduced too quickly so an audience can’t follow who’s speaking.

• Big long scenes with lots of characters are a problem for me because I find them difficult to sustain and I don’t think they make the most of the medium. One of the great things about radio is the way you can break a story up into short bursts and long scenes and then narrative moments

• Long monologues with chunky and sometimes clunky exposition written to fill plot holes. Internal monologue and narration are one of the great tools of radio but they can be addictive and they shouldn’t be used to solve structural problems.

• Music is another element of a radio play that should be used like words and sound – because it adds something to the drama – not because you don’t know how to end a scene or bridge the gap between one scene and another.

Yet there are no strict rules – despite the above, I’ve cheated my way through almost all of my plays.

5. Ditch the Rules

You should never think “oh they won’t do this on radio” and “I should come up with something cosier or more mainstream or more conventional”. Amazing, bold, beautiful, wild, radical plays are regularly produced by BBC Radio Four. The plays of Gill Adams, Sebastian Baczkiewicz, Lucy Catherine Debbie Tucker Green, Lee Hall, Georgia Fitch are evidence of this. Writing for radio is a brilliant opportunity to say what you want to say and invent the kind of worlds that would be such a struggle to sell in television.

Relevant Links:

Katie Hims Radio Plays
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/suttonelms/khims.html

BBC Radio Arts & Drama
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/

BBC Writers Room
http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/

Casualty
http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/casualty/

Cops & Robbers
http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/programme/DA+00140_3

Richard Imison Awards
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/suttonelms/imison.html

Society of Authors
http://societyofauthors.net/soa/page_id_sub.php4?pid=85&
par_nm=Subsidiary+Groups&parentid=14

E.M. Forster
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/forster.htm

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