Working for Free part two

Thank you to the lovely Gillian for sending me this link. It's a flowchart designed by Jessica Hische and addresses all the bullshit reasons that cheapskate tossers would be employers throw at you, in order to persuade you to turn your brain inside out for free.

Writing for free - don't do it!

So here's the skinny. I hear about this new website which says they will pay its writers £20 an hour. Yes I know - it does sound like bollocks doesn't it? But the idea of a regular gig sounds nice so I send off some writing samples and forget about it. A few weeks later I receive an email. It tells me that they've had such a fantastic response they can't make up their minds! And so would I mind writing not one but two travel articles because it's going to be some sort of travel website. That way they can decide who they really want.

And what do they get? They get a whole load of free work is what they get.

Now I know it's difficult when you're starting out as a writer, but I feel I've paid my dues and if someone doesn't like the way I write, when I've supplied them with a few samples, then fair do. But I don't think it's arrogant to assume - hey I know I can write and I've written professionally so if you expect me to write two free articles then you can stick it.

I have an issue with any company expecting free work anyway. And it's often got nothing to do with their financial situation - everyone in the world wants your services as cheaply as possible. If you go to the NUJ site, they have a section where writers anonymously post how much they've been paid for writing in some very prestigious newspapers and magazines. The sheer shitness of some rates will amaze you! There is also a very good section on copyright. I am deeply embarrassed to admit that when I recently had a new commission from Radio 4 I didn't actually know about streaming rights (where the writer is paid extra for their play to be available as a download or on iPlayer). I didn't know! The average writer in the UK makes about £10K a year which is crap. So we should be paid properly. Remember how the entire Hollywood industry ground to a total halt when the writers went on strike a couple of years ago? They were accused of being greedy just for wanting a bigger slice of the downloading and internet rights. It's not greed to be properly paid for your efforts and if you accept a rubbish rate, you're driving down the price for everyone else.

Abridging and Actors

In my last post about abridging I wrote about the business of cutting a full length book down to five or ten episodes, each episode ending on a cliffhanger, and a good mix of prose and dialogue. Otherwise the poor actor is spouting And then . . . and then . . . and then, or (even worse) ‘So what did he say?’ ‘I don’t know’ ‘But surely you heard something?’ ‘No I didn’t’. A bad abridgement is like a plateful of gristly stew – hard for the listener to swallow and the poor actor choking on the words.
Of course like anything taking some skill, a real professional makes it look easy. Properly read, it’s like the actor is reading to one person – you. It turned out that Michael Maloney did the reading and he was astonishingly good. He made it sound so easy. There are several points of view in the book, and the central character is a woman. There are also many scenes where a whole host of police types have chewy conversations about murder. The actor has to subtly delineate between each voice but not in a silly high pitched way. A cock up costs studio time so the more seamless the reading, then the more the producer can get done in one take.
Michael Maloney does a lot of audio books and clearly he puts in some welly before he gets to the studio. He was brilliant and the whole book – all 22,500 words was in the can in one day. I also got to hear about a certain pop star whose management decided that pop star’s autobiography would sell much better if she read it herself! Oh what a good idea. Because how hard can it be to read a book eh? Especially one that you’ve ghosted written yourself – every word.
By the end of the first day, there were teeth marks in the recording booth from the sound engineer biting the table in frustration. The Producer resigned. It took six weeks to record twenty thousand words. Six weeks. Any profit that might have been made was swallowed up in the amount of studio time it took to record the book.
It’s not just pop stars with no experience of reading. Ever. Probably. It’s also about actors who show up, thinking it’s just reading a book. It’s not. It’s your brain working on about five different levels, elegantly pitching the line, eyes and brain scanning ahead for a bump in the road – pace, pause, knowing when to stop, knowing when a natural break occurs. All this going on at the same time. Getting the emphasis right. Subtle delineation between voices. We hear so much mockery of actors – some of it deserved – you know, actors blithering on about their political opinions – or the state of the world, that sometimes I forget there are some cracking actors out there who deserve every penny they get because they show up, on time, prepared, and they get on with it and do a brilliant job.

Oooh - posh face cream!

After my last post’s transgression into something approaching intellectual rigour – you’ll be pleased to hear I’m back at my usual level of blogdom today. I bought some face cream! Only it’s not just any old face cream – it’s Clinique Superdefense (the skin care industry pays no heed to grammar or spelling) SP25. According to the folded up leaflet in 159 languages, it ‘arms skin to fight the visible effect of emotional stress’. As long as you ‘partner Superdefense with Super Rescue Antioxidant Night Cream.’ So moisturiser by the Ministry of Defence. Except that would mean my night time slap removal and wash routine would end up costing me upwards of fifty quid! So this stuff is going to be ‘partnered’ with Boots face wash and like it.
‘That’ll be £34.90’ said the lady at the counter with rusty streaks down her face and demon eyebrows. I smiled and tried to look as though I do this kind of thing ie pay mad sums for a product where the main ingredient is water, every day.

Yeah but you bought it. Yes I did. Well doesn't it look like it works? All shiny and gleamy and sciencey?! And with the full expectation of looking younger than The Girl who just turned seven, I’ll keep you posted.

The Subtle Art of Abridgement

I’ve written about this before but it seems that abridging a book is a bit like ghost-writing – a subtle, almost Machiavellian art form, of finding the absolute plot – the core of a book and getting rid of everything that is not utterly essential to the forward movement of that plot.
If your average book is 80,000 words, then an abridger’s job is to squeeze it down to about 10,000 words. So if it’s being done on Radio 4, that means 2,500 words per 15 minutes. I’ve just abridged a book by Hassan Nekker for BBC7 or 4Extra as it’s about to known. It’s called Woman with Birthmark, and is the jolly tale of a man who is found shot. Twice above the belt and twice in the balls. The police can’t find anyone who has a motive for this crime. Although the lover of one of the police team is convinced the shot in the balls means the killer is a woman. A few weeks later another supposedly blameless citizen is found murdered in exactly the same way. Could there be a serial killer on the loose?
Five half hour episodes, each at about 4,500 words.
So how, I hear you yawn, do you abridge a book from 80,000 to 22,500 (4,500 per episode x 5 - each episode is half an hour.) Well firstly I read the book a couple of times. Especially if it’s a crime novel the plot tends to be quite complicated, and if it’s a good crime novel it will be intricate and the solving of the crime will be down to many little links. This makes the job of abridging harder because if you pull a thread, to reduce the word count, it can end up with the whole plot collapsing like a pack of cards. Suppose the plot is advanced because a character earlier in the book remembers something vital, but you’ve already cut the chapter where that character first appears because it’s part of a conversation that doesn’t contribute anything to the plot. That’s what I mean. Do you put in a bit of that earlier conversation and cut something else? If so does that now have a knock on effect? ( It’s considered bad form to add your own words to the abridgement if it can possibly be avoided).
So I go through the book and cut extraneous romance and subplot. I then divide what’s left into five episodes and try to make sure each episode ends with a cliff-hanger moment. Then I start to do the serious cutting. It’s important that you don’t end up with this happens then this then this then this, an endless series of happenings, or great swathes of prose followed by great swathes of dialogue. Light and shade. Remember the tone of the book.
I then manage to get each episode down to 4,500 words as my producer asked. My producer then rings and says each episode read out loud comes in at 27 minutes so could I add another 150 words to each episode. I agree, then put down the phone and curse my producer before going back to the full manuscript and adding in 150 words, very carefully.
Anyway it’s done. It’s a subtle art because I have to keep the essence of the story and I think the essence of the tone too. And in this case, it’s mordant Danish humour and occasional flashes of black wit.
And no it’s not very well paid. Nothing you do on radio usually is. But it’s nice to hear an actor read out the words and know that you decided which words he or she should speak.
Woman with Birthmark is on BBC7 from May 7th