A Spud By Any Other Name

By on May 21, 2012
This entry is filed under Miscellaneous Grumbles.

For those of you having trouble, I officially pronounce my name Nile Lennard.

Back in the twentieth century when I used to wander around Dublin on behalf of the BBC I had a meeting with a  lovely woman who at that time ran the Irish Film Centre*.  ‘O yes,’ she said when we met, ‘You’re the guy who doesn’t know how to pronounce his own name.’  I suppose I’d set myself up for that because I used to, and still do, pronounce my name differently depending on the circumstances.

When I grew up Niall was quite an exotic name – hard to believe, because there’s millions of the buggers now – and the most popular way of spelling it was Neil or even Neal.

For the record, the most famous Niall in Irish history was Niall of the Nine Hostages, supposedly the last Irish king to die a pagan.  (I’ve always regarded that factoid with a certain amount of smugness to which I am no way entitled.)  In the Irish language the son of Niall, if he were called Colm, would be Colm MacNeill (pronounced Neel), ie Colm son of Niall. More distant members of the tribe would be O’Neill.  So ‘Neil’ is the possessive form of the name ‘Niall’ and strictly speaking should not be used as a first name.

That said, in many parts of Ireland it is perfectly acceptable to pronounce Niall as Neel.  One Irish speaker I know of, the actor Niall Tobin, pronounces it this way, and since it’s his own name he’s entitled to.  But that is largely a matter of regional accent, which allows for wide variations in common words.  In Dublin, for example, the word for ‘black – ‘dubh’ – is pronounced  ‘dove’.  Up North the accepted pronunciation is ‘doov’.  This can and does cause confusion for people learning Irish but there is a lot of resistance to standardising the language because it would mean some Irish speakers accepting that their accent is inferior to another, and that’s not going to happen any time soon.

I care less about how my name is pronounced than how it is spelled, so when I speak on the phone I invariably say my name is ‘Ny-al Leonard’.  That way most people know my name is spelt with an ‘ia’  and not an ‘ei’.  In real life, I answer to Neel, Nile, and even Nail.

But if you meet a Niall – and, as I said above, there are millions of the buggers now – be sure to pronounce his name ‘Nile’…  and wait for him to come up with his own explanation of how that’s wrong and how you should really pronounce it.

Next week a guest posting from my good friend Aisling Walsh about the joys of having an really unpronounceable Irish name.

*Can’t remember her name now.  Funny, that.

 

Pecking Parties

By on March 6, 2012
This entry is filed under War Stories. | 1 Comment

I once worked on a long-running TV series that aged, as these shows are wont to do, from a sparky comedy drama to a bland rural soap.  In the early days I and the other writers on the team tried to keep the show funny and unpredictable and to subvert the expectations of the audience, but as time passed it got harder and harder to do anything original or challenging, and it wasn’t because we ran out of good storylines…

(Digression: I have never got round to keeping track of traffic to this website, but I suspect it has spiked recently, given my association with a new author whose romantic fiction trilogy has recently gone supernova in the USA with no advertising or input of any sort from PR people.  Want some hot gossip and insight?  You’ve come to the wrong place – this is my soapbox, and she has her own. In the manner of a crotchety professor whose lecture hall is full of the curious hoping to catch a glimpse of a celebrity student, I am now going to sit here and wait, drumming my fingers on the table, until all the rubberneckers have left.

OK, let’s carry on…

Hello?

*crickets*

O well.)

For the first series of this long-running show I came to a script meeting where there were three people sitting round the table – two producers and the script editor.  We had a laugh and kicked ideas around and I was allowed to be a bit subversive in my script and the series was a hit.

By Series Five I walked into a meeting room to find fourteen people round the table.  Those first two producers had become Executive Producers and moved upstairs.  In their place was the line producer they had hired, plus the show’s in-house script editor.  The other dozen were from the network: the Head of Drama was there, plus her assistants, plus her deputy, plus her deputy’s assistant, plus the Drama Department script editors – they had two, plus two trainees.  Does all that make fourteen?  Possibly some passerby had wandered in off the street – it would have been hard to tell.

In the course of the meeting the script editors tried to impress their bosses with their insights, the trainees tried to look smart and useful, the Deputy Head of Drama tried to be assertive because her boss was here, and the Head of Drama was contradicting everything the deputy said, presumably to show us all who was in charge.  And of course the ammunition they were using in this pecking party was the script I had been working on for months.

Inevitably, among fifteen people not everyone will agree.  In those circumstances any lines or any exchange that are in any way controversial or cause the discussion to drag on are simply cut, because everybody is on a schedule, and there are two more scripts to fillet after this one.  The inevitable result of all this is a dull, lifeless screenplay that has the audience wondering what happened to that sparky unpredictable show they used to enjoy, and is there anything else on?

This is why writers and producers who have any clout at all try to keep their writing teams tight and well-focused and avoid taking ‘helpful’ notes from every exec who sees a draft of the script.  A writer’s distinctive voice can bring new life and freshness to the most familiar and well-worn storyline, and the committees that accumulate on long-running shows are the most efficient method that could be devised of strangling that voice.   (Don’t even get mestarted on focus groups.)

Writers who work to order on TV shows or movies are often paid well, but sometimes I think only half of that is for their talent – the other half is for the amount of crap they have to put up with*.

*Minus a small percentage for knowing not to end a sentence with a preposition.

**Well done to those movie buffs who know where I sourced the title of this blog instalment.  Answer next time I post. 

Notes on the Bleeding Obvious

By on December 14, 2011
This entry is filed under Notes from the Coalface.

Those of you who subscribe to this site might have been surprised to receive an email claiming this was a new posting.  Clearly it isn’t – that was a technical glitch to do with the date. but hey, welcome back!  In fact this posting has particular relevance in the light of recent events – more details in the News & Announcements section… when I get round to announcing them. 

This year I took part in NaNoWriMo, a worldwide event where participants spend the month of November writing a short novel (50,000 words, the same length asBrave New World ) in thirty days, at 1,667 words a day.  I’m pleased to say I stayed the course.  In fact as a professional writer I thought I should aim for a total of 60,000 words, and ended up writing 70,000. I don’t know if the finished product is any good or not – it’s too early to say – but the point was not to be brilliant, the point was to have written a novel.

My friends and family will attest that I have been loudly promising a novel for a very long time.  But something would always come up – a TV episode to write, or a series bible to develop – or I’d decide the novel’s idea wasn’t quite focused in my mind, or there were too many narrative problems that needed to be solved before I could begin.

What amazed and appalled me when I started writing was that none of these problems actually existed.  I mean, yes, all stories have problems and holes in the plot that need to be addressed, and it’s good – though apparently not essential – to have a clear idea of where you are going.  But having to knock out 2,000 words a day forced me to confront the narrative problems and solve them by whatever means came to hand, and it was through the graft of writing the story that I worked out what the central idea was.

I’ve been writing screenplays for a long time, and I found it intensely annoying to learn something I should have known years ago – that there is no point in putting off the challenge.  That wonderful idea you have is not going to get better rattling around in your head.  Either someone else is going to have the same idea, write it up and sell it, or they won’t, and the idea will simply grow old and stale and end up as an anecdote you tell in a pub.  That might get you a pint if you’re lucky, but it won’t win you an Oscar or an Emmy, or even a TV Quick People’s Choice Award nomination.*

If you have an idea, sit down and write it.  Don’t procrastinate in the hope the story will somehow find its way to the page with no effort on your part.  Get stuck in and tell it, and resign yourself to the fact it will always look rougher on the page than it did in your head.  Sure, there are rules to screenwriting – keep the story moving, avoid holes, don’t resolve conflict with coincidence – but if you can’t see a way round them, ignore them or break them.  Just get the story written and worry about that shit later.

And finish it. Work your way through the middle and get to the end.  Even a pathetic ending where everyone dies from food poisoning is better than no ending at all.  A rubbish script with an ending is a script, but a cracking script with no ending is still merely an idea. A bad first draft can be revised and reworked and polished into something better; a brilliant idea is worth less than the paper it isn’t written down on.

I know, I know, I’m stating the bleeding obvious.  But I’m not the only writer who puts projects off in the hope that… what? Our wonderful stories will somehow tell themselves?

National Novel Writing Month is finished for this year, but in April 2012 the equivalent event for screenwriters will take place: 100 pages of screenplay in 30 days.

See you at Script Frenzy.

*Wire In The Blood 2007.  We didn’t win, but I got a decent dinner out of it.

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