‘The most important thing we do is write suspense — the audience must care what happens next.’
Ten Writing Tips from Mr Bates vs the Post Office screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes
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It is the story we’re all talking about this week.
For almost two decades, sub-postmasters have been fighting for recognition of, what as been described as, one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British history – 3,500 innocent people accused of theft by the Post Office due to defects in a newly installed Fujitsu computer system.
Seven hundred of them were found guilty of crimes — including 236 people who were sent to prison. Hundreds lost their livelihoods, their reputations, their homes, many have died without seeing their names cleared and, devastatingly, four took their own lives.
And yet, thanks to an excellent ITV drama series, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, not only is the British public demanding action and more compensation for these wrongly accused, but a petition demanding former Post Office CEO, Paula Vennells be stripped of her CBE has now reached almost million signatures.
But why are we all talking about this story all of a sudden when these poor people have been fighting to bring it to the public consciousness for so long? Because it captured the attention of one writer who has brilliantly brought it to life and into our living rooms – and this is the power of storytelling.
Gwyneth Hughes is a former journalist, documentary maker and screenwriter.
She started her career as a local newspaper reporter, as I did, and if there is one job that instills in you a nose for a good story, it is that one. Her list of documentaries and dramas is long and includes Five Days, Cherished, The Girl, Tom Jones and Vanity Fair. Hughes describes her style as ‘overwrought, emotional melodrama with a social-realistic core.’
‘What all these [dramas and documentaries] have in common is storytelling,’ said Hughes in a masterclass for the Royal Television Society. ‘The great thing about journalism as a starting point is that you meet a lot of people who you would never normally come across. It’s not a prerequisite for becoming a successful screenwriter; it’s just the way it happened for me. It means that I’ve been able to populate my dramas with a lot of different people – I’m not just mining my own, rather limited, experience of life.’
One thing I would like to add is that Hughes is now 70, and I only say this because I absolutely love to see women of that age at the top of their game producing incredible work, and anyone who has watched this four-part drama can see that she is doing exactly that. The script is tight, the action is pacy, and you veer from jump-off-the-sofa-in-indignance on behalf of those who have suffered to sobbing for them.
A few weeks ago when she was interviewed for The Telegraph, Hughes had this to say about this particular story: ‘Like all the best true stories, it’s genuinely unbelievable that this could happen. And, still, a lot of people don’t know about it. But they’re going to know about it now, because the fantastic thing about doing a drama is that people take notice.’
And taken notice they have, the Metropolitan Police are now investigating fraud allegations within the organisations responsible, and the government is under pressure to speed up and increase compensation payments to those affected.
It makes you wonder how many more scandals are taking place right under our noses at the moment thanks to big corp or even government cover ups and we can only hope for writers like Hughes to bring them into the light in the future. But I wanted to write this to remind you all of the power of words, and just what they can achieve if used as a force for good. And it seems that is what Hughes has always tried to do in her storytelling — it must be the journalist in her.
‘Writing about crime,’ said Hughes, ‘is a shortcut to big issues of right and wrong and truth and falsehood. The stakes are automatically very high – I struggle with stories where no one dies.’
But for now, I’ve scoured articles, interviews and talks to bring you the best ten writing tips according to Gwyneth Hughes, our celebrated writer of the moment.
On the difference between drama and documentary storytelling:
‘At the heart of it, it’s no different really, you’re still telling a story and you’re still trying to wrestle really intractable, difficult material into an oblong shiny screen in the corner of somebody’s room. It’s just about story so ... I do a lot of drama based on true stories, really big, enormous, difficult true stories where nothing obeys the rules of the fictional universe and everything is really difficult to tell, and [whether it’s] adaptations of 1000-page novels or stuff of my own that I made up from beginning to end… it doesn’t make as much difference as you might imagine, it’s still trying to work out how to mine this material for a story. The book exists, people’s real lives that I might be doing exist, but they don’t tell that story, you’ve got to, that’s where the skill comes of the storyteller, to work out what’s important and what order it should go in.’
On writers:
‘The most important thing we do is write suspense. It doesn’t matter if it’s a romantic comedy or a thriller… the audience must care what happens next.’
On being a screenwriter:
‘It takes a lot of time [to write a screenplay] and you have to be prepared to put up with everybody else’s ideas – if you don’t want to work in a team, write a novel.’
On writers’ block:
‘I don’t get writers’ block… it’s partly because, if you’re doing it for a living, then you’re writing for someone who is on the phone wondering where your script is. What you have is deadline issues… or knotty, specific plot problems.’
On writing what you know:
‘There’s this thing that people say, don’t write about what you don’t know, but I think the rule is: