In the last few blog posts, I’ve made mention of my new secret writing project. The time has come for the big reveal…
…But before I do, I’ve just to say, there is no particular reason why I chose to keep this one a secret or even when I chose to reveal it now. I guess I just wanted it to seem more exciting than it was.
Okay so now time for the, now not quite so big, reveal…
My current big writing project is working on an idea for a script for the, possible, Hollywood version of Doctor Who.
I first heard about this attempt (there have been many) to get the Doctor on to the big screen here, in mid November, just as my Nanowrimo story was running aground.
The bit about this story that particularly caught my eye was the idea that they would not be worrying about maintaining contiguity with the current or previous series and would be starting from scratch. In Hollywood terms this would be a reboot.
So in my head I started take away all of the non-essential parts of Doctor Who to arrive at the pure ‘essence’ of the series. The 4 elements which in the end I felt were core to the series are:-
- The mystery
- Time travel
- The TARDIS
- One central human companion
This to me is absolutely paramount to a good Doctor Who story. The central mystery is even in the title, Doctor Who? In fact one of my ideas has not even the Doctor him self knowing who or what he is in the first act.
Some of the best stories about the Doctor involve the mystery of just who the Doctor is and why he does what he does. One of the, many, things that the new series has done right is to restore the mystery that surounds it’s central character.
Obvious this really. While, perhaps surpassingly, most of the Doctor Who stories told to date, do not actually have time travel as a plot element to the story, the ability of the Doctor to travel in time is what gives the writer such a huge scope of stories to tell. Both of the story ideas I have will feature time travel as a major plot device.
Given that time travel is at the heart of the story, the TARDIS was vital as well. Not only that, but the TARDIS is the one constant though out all of the Doctor Who cannon. It was become truly iconic. I couldn’t do the stories without the TARDIS, no one can!
A human companion in central to almost every Doctor Who story, for a couple of very good reasons. Firstly it gives us the viewers (or readers) a character which we can relate to. The Doctor should always be the mysterious hero, we shouldn’t be able to ever fully relate to him, so we need someone to relate to and identify with. Secondly, it is through the exposition to this character that we, the audience, find out what is actually going on. A secondary use for the companion has, in the past, to get in to trouble and need rescuing by the Doctor. This is no longer as true as it was and I’m only using this plot device in one of my ideas. A single companion, in my opinion works far better any other number. I can only think of two times when more than one companion has worked well (Harry and Sarah in the mid 70′s and the current(-ish) Amy and Rory). Tradition also holds that more often than not the companion should be female and since I’m male I’ve have to say, I’ve followed this.
So that gave me basics I needed to start building a plot around and in fact I came up with 2 ideas, one of which was a new one and the second came from one of my many idea file’s. Now all I needed to do was start writing the script.
I’ve started this in rather an odd way. I tend to feel a lot happier writing novels, so rather than write the story as a script, the first draft I’ve written as a novel. This will, I know, give me far more material than I could ever fit in to a film, so I can then cut it down when I come to do the second draft as an actual script.
Writing a novel gives the writer much more control in the way the story is told, you have have characters internal dialogues and thoughts for example, so I have to be careful I don’t rely on this in the story, so to prevent this I’ve written the story in the current tense. This is very new and odd for me, since everything I can recall writing before I’ve done in the past tense.
So I’ve been working on the first draft of the first idea for a few weeks when I read this story on the BBC website.
<sigh>: Oh well, I was never thinking that my script would be the script that gets made. Also all writing is good practice for me, so once I have finished my entires for the Bristol Short Story Prize, I fully intend to return to both of my Doctor Who script ideas and finish the first drafts.
