Stage To Radio

Award-winning writer, Nick Stafford reckons that freelance writer/storytellers have to put themselves about and in the nicest possible way, hustle. In his view, writers have to be flexible and make themselves eligible to be commissioned in as many mediums as possible. But this doesn't mean that a writer has to be cynical or mercenary, rather that they do what they must in order to tell their stories ...

I've had work commissioned for theatre, radio, tv drama, tv film, feature film, and I’ve written my first novel. I've received bursaries and fellowships and commercial money. I've learned to be constantly on the lookout for story ideas and for the right people who might want to pay me to write them. If you do that for long enough it becomes second nature.

You might think that this sounds too mercenary but unless you're paid tens of thousands to write movies that actually get made, the reality is that you 're going to have to learn to hustle if you're going to thrive.

A scene from Katherine Desouza performed at Birmingham Rep. © Robert Day/Birmingham Rep

Be proactive

Simultaneously, you look out for stories and you decide the best medium in which to tell them. You identify commissioners in the various mediums, study the work that they produce, and try to match yourself up. This doesn't mean that you should hassle anyone. This means that you do your homework about who's doing what and whether what you want to create is anything that might be to their taste. And while all this is going on you need to protect that part of you that's creating the stories that you want to tell/sell. You need a thick skin.

Get some mentors. If you're going to master several mediums, try to befriend a friendly mentor for each. Show them your work before you show it to a commissioner. Commissioners only read a script for the first time once. If they don’t take to it, or, worse, you haven’t prepared it thoroughly, they will never change their opinion in your favour.

Where I started

I started writing professionally for theatre. This was an accident, because when I imagined myself 'being a writer' in my early years it was as a novelist, because I liked novels. I went to drama school, where I learned about plays and got to write and perform a one-man show. When I left college I developed this into a play with several characters and it became a new story. My then girlfriend was in a theatre company and she gave it to them (yes, that is called nepotism). They staged a reading and then commissioned me and I stayed writing with them for over a year; (nepotism is good sometimes – if it means matching up kindred spirits).

Then there were other companies and other plays. Sometimes - in a way that I've found unique to theatre - a company would commission me and they didn't want to know anything. Theatre companies of a certain size are able to do this because they have several commissions running simultaneously. The sums of money involved are very modest - about 2k upfront. The company will develop numerous plays and wait to see which, if any, they will mount productions of. This process is undertaken in good faith on both sides. The playwright intends to write and deliver a cracker and the theatre intends to produce it.

I like this approach. You know that they're interested in your voice rather than a product and there's no rush, there's plenty of time and space in which you can create. It doesn't pay the bills, though. Not unless you live in a shared squat like I did. The total for a stage play is about £6k, paid in stages. It's only if your play strikes it lucky that you'll make plenty from royalties; 7% or so of the box office.

My latest play, Katherine Desouza commissioned by Birmingham Rep, (my fourth play there), took about 20 months and 9 drafts from initial chat to first night.

Juggle projects

During the time that I was writing the Birmingham play I was writing a novel (on a Arts Council of England grant for which I had to submit an excerpt and synopsis), and another commissioned play - an adaptation someone had asked me to do but for very little upfront money. I was also doing one or two days a week as a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow, running tutorials, and I was working as a postal tutor for the Open College of the Arts, and I still wouldn't have been able to do more than scrape by financially had my partner not been in a popular TV series!

No wonder I drink!

Adaptations are great because you don't have to think up the story! But, you normally get paid less - because, er, you don't have to think up the story.

But, be warned... I was once commissioned to adapt a noir novel into a screenplay. I included the scene where the anti-hero murders a prostitute, puts her head in a bag, and wanders around, wondering how to dispose of it. The commissioner didn’t like this in the screenplay:

Me: But it's in the book.
Him: It can't be in the movie.
Me: You never said.
Him: The hero can't wander about with a women's head in a bag.
Me: Is there anything else that's in the book that can't be in the movie? ... Can you let me know before I re-write ... Hello?

On top of those projects I made a pitch to TV drama (rejected), BBC radio drama (rejected), the Film Council (rejected), a stranger on a bus (rejected), a TV independent (pending), a theatre (pending), and agent for my novel (pending).

There's no substitute for practice

If you really want to be able to move between storytelling mediums then you have to do some studying of each medium and write in each medium to prove to yourself and others that you can do it. By this means you'll create more opportunities for getting paid but it also means that you'll learn more techniques of storytelling. I worked some muscles I never knew I had when I wrote three-hour radio adaptations of Birdsong (Sebastian Faulkes) and A Thousand Acres (Jane Smiley).

On radio

I got my first break in radio drama because a theatre director I'd worked with became a BBC radio drama producer. I didn't have any formal lessons in the medium but she steered me. I won a Sony Gold Award for best original script, which now feels like beginner's luck because I haven't been able to get anything commissioned for a while. Look at the Writer’s Guild website for details of commission fees.

A scene from Katherine Desouza performed at Birmingham Rep. © Robert Day/Birmingham Rep

This is another good reason for working in several mediums. The commissioners you work with change jobs, or worse, you have a row, or worse, you go out of fashion. But if you go out of fashion in one medium, you may well be in fashion in another, whilst you wait to become fashionable again in the first/third/medium. Also, you might get fed up of a medium.

How I started in screenwriting

My first break in screenwriting was a commission for a BBC single drama that hasn't been made. A script editor scouted a stage play of mine and approached me and I came up with an idea for tv film screenplay. (That script editor is now one of the heads of drama and I still pitch to her).

There's an entire industry around the art of screenwriting to do with "how to" structure / pitch / analyse / sell / perfect. You could spend the rest of your life following advice links on the Web. Just Google "How to write a screenplay".

Screenwriting appears to be the storytelling medium that many people - who wouldn't tackle a novel or play - think that they can succeed in. I've been commissioned to write four screenplays and none of them were any easier than anything I' ve written in any other medium.

Commissioners of a screenplay intend to make a movie based on it costing millions of somebody's pounds or dollars. The money person will want the commissioning person to be able to tell them what they're going to get if they risk their money, so you're going to have to be able to tell the commissioner what they're going to be able to tell the money person, before they've paid you and before you've written it.

Even if it's a screenplay based on a novel everyone will want to know your "take" and to make sure you know who the audience.

The financial rewards are potentially great. It's the chasing-the-pot-of-gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow-medium.

The latest screenplay that I've been trying to write was an original idea. I went along to a residential Performing Arts Lab to try it out, wrote some scenes that were performed by actors, and it all got very exciting. But the feeling wouldn't go away that I felt that I couldn't get to the bottom of these characters and their story in a screenplay.

Ultimately, write what you need

So I've written the novel. Now I need to get it published and I've a sneaky hope that when it is, someone will buy the rights to adapt it into a screenplay, or a radio play, or a tv drama ...

So work at your stories, and seek out the commissioners you'd like to work with, and approach them, as a creative partner. If you and a commissioner are creatively fired up then the project has real staying power. Hustle, but don't hassle. Hustle in the nicest possible way.