John Yorke: “What You Don’t Do Is David Copperfield II”

John Yorke discusses his new book on Screenwriting, offers invaluable advice to screenwriters, and reveals the secret of the Duff Duff moment.

By Sam Roads.

John Yorke has been at the forefront of British TV drama for over twenty years, as showrunner on popular soaps such as Eastenders and The Archers. He has also been behind dramas like the Emmy Award-winning time-travel cop show Life on Mars, spy drama MI-5 (Spooks in the UK), and Wolf Hall, starring Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies).

Through working with hundreds of writers, Yorke came to believe that current literature on screenwriting was overly focused on film. More significant yet, it only covered the ‘how’, without looking into the ‘why’. So Yorke’s new book, Into the Woods, seeks to address that lack.

We spoke with Yorke about his experiences as a showrunner (‘executive producer’ in the UK), his new book, and sought his advice for any aspiring screenwriter who wants their script to land on his table!

What do you look for in a script?

The lesson I was taught when I first started in the industry, was that if you pick up a script and start reading, and you don’t put it down until it is finished, then it is probably working. It sounds simplistic, but I think it is the ultimate test: when you start on page one and you’re on page 90 without a break, you’ve found something special.

Inevitably you’re also thinking about which markets you can sell it to, but I think that should always be a secondary question.

Was there a recent script where this happened to you?

It had already been comissioned, but I remember when I read Peter Straughan’s episodes of Wolf Hall, it was impossible to give a note. I just sat there thinking ‘this is perfect’, and it’s very rare to come across that. But I read all six episodes on a train journey, and couldn’t think of anything to say, except ‘well done’.

Life on Mars was very different, as it took 8 years to get on the screen, and Matthew Glenn did 35 drafts of the first episode. But the idea was so strong, that idea of how to revisit 1970s policing in a fresh way, and make it entertaining, but also have something to say about the nature of policing now. It was so rich, and so exciting, we just had to think about what was the best way to make it work.

I think your job as executive is to facilitate. Not to create, but to be a mirror. And on that show, it was to keep pushing until everything finally clicked into place.

So radically different experiences between Life on Mars and Wolf Hall?

That’s right, but underlying all of it is the fact that you can see the love there in both of them. With Peter’s script for Wolf Hall you know he clearly loved the source material, and every page had been crafted beautifully. Whereas with Matthew, who at the time had much less experience than Peter does now, the love was for this amazing idea, and working out how to tell it.

I work at lot with young writers, and a big part of my life has been develping new talent. So you really look for that spark, the embers you can blow on to create the fire.

What screenwriting advice do you have for us?

There are two very simple things.

If you, the writer, love it, then everyone else should love it too. You can tell when someone is writing for money, you can tell when someone is being cynical. It is the passion that is born of love whic is important, and however amateurish those first drafts may be, that passion comes through. Don’t write anything you don’t love!

The second thing is to just write every day. Understand that it is a craft skill, just like a musical instrument, where you have to practice your scales every day. If you continually write you’ll only get better. There is an assumption that because it is easy to get hold of a word processor and Final Draft, that this is enough to make you a writer, and that’s not true. You need to practice, and you will fail continually, a lot, while you’re working out what makes you good.

Do you think that failing like that is important?

Yeah, I think it’s great. I don’t know what it is like America, but the problem with the system in England, in the last ten or fifteen years, was that failure had become a price that was too heavy for a writer to pay. So basically you were given one chance, and if you failed you were never given a chance again, so you had a reputation for never being good.

I set up the Writers’ Academy for the BBC in England, specifically to get round this problem, so you would be able to fail and still be commissioned again. I think that provides a safety net, and that’s what a public broadcaster is for, to provide the opportunities that commercial commissioners find much harder to offer, for obvious reasons.

When you start, you are going to get it wrong. And while a good editor will teach you how to realise your craft and get it right, that’s quite a big investment in time and money.

What’s most likely to put you off a script or a potential project?

Anything written in green ink tends to make me nervous! [Laughs.]

I think it is a truism again, but you can always tell in the first few pages if someone can write. That ability to mask the exposition is incredibly important, and if you can’t do that then it is very unlikely that the script is going to improve. And the ability to dramatise change. You can immediately see if they have grasped the idea of showing rather than telling.

There’s an ancient quote from E.M. Forster, that the only thing that makes a good story is wanting to know what happens next. You see the truth of that in every script you read. Every sentence has to have the seeds of what happens next in it, and if you see a writer who’s got that, you say “thank heavens, they are worth pursuing.”

What steps should an unknown writer take, in order to help ensure that their script ends up in your in tray?

One of the obvious short cuts is that life is much easier if you have an agent, and life is much easier if you have a reputable agent! Because it is a short cut into the producer’s in tray. I’ve just received a script from a top agent this afternoon. I know I’ll read it straight away, and the chances are it’ll be good.

Having said that, English writer Debbie Horsefield said, and I think brilliantly, “there is no conspiracy to keep good writing off the TV.” And if you are good, I do honestly believe that you will be found, and you will get there. You just have to be persistent; you have to use nepotism, you have to use contacts, you have to use anything you can to get it under someone’s nose. But once you’ve done that, if your script is good, then even if that isn’t made, someone somewhere will think “there’s a talent here, I can use that.” Because everybody wants good writers; there aren’t enough of them to go round.

Why do TV dramas have a limited life span?

Ah, well that’s a very good question! It depends on the kind of drama it is, the kind of format it is. But fundamentally I would argue that all narrative has to have a beginning, a middle, and also an end.

There are two types of story. There are series stories like Columbo or C.S.I., where the regular characters don’t change. Although repetition is important to their success, they eventually die through repetition as well, because after a while you start to think “I don’t believe that will happen to you again, and you wouldn’t feel the same way about it as you do.” They just become implausable over time.

When we were doing Life on Mars, John Simm, who played one of the leads, kept saying “I’ve said this to him last week, I said I’m from somewhere else and things were different!” But that’s the nature of a series, you have to repeat yourself every week. And over time, that repetition stagnates, and the audience will get bored.

In the second type of story, serials, characters change, so you go from Mr Chips to Scarface, but once they get to Scarface they have to end. The problem is (a new problem for audiences recently in television), that we’ve fallen back in love with the serial. We tell stories like Broadchurch, The Affair and The Returned, for example, and it feels at the end of the first season that they should end. House of Cards, I’d argue too, should end. But they don’t end because of course the broadcaster wants more. And so you have this problem that you go into a second season where the story engine has really run aground, and the character has already gone through change, complete change, and then you’re asking them to do it again.

I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that with brilliant shows like The Returned and The Affair, you feel the end of season one should be the end, but somehow they’ve twisted it so they can start again. It feels slightly frustrating, you’ve lost that beautiful joy that you used to have.

By contrast, consider the British House of Cards, where there were three series of six hours, and that was it. Or even something gorgeous and brilliant like The Singing Detective, which is six hours long, then the story ends. What you don’t do is David Copperfield 2!

But I understand that if you are running a company, you have to pay people’s wages, and if you get blessed with a hit you can understand them doing it. I think it is an interesting new problem, come back with the return of the serial form, which again has grown out of cable and catch-up TV.

In your book, you talk about the importance of Duff Duff moments at the end of every scene. Can you elaborate?

[Note: The closing theme music of long-running UK soap, Eastenders, which was played after the final twist of each episode, begins with a series of heavy drum beats, known to actors as the Duff Duffs.]

I realised this concept years and years ago, when I ran Eastenders. I was working with Life on Mars co-creator Ashley Pharoah at the time, and I started to realise that every script I gave notes on, the notes were largely “can we lose the last 2 or 3 lines of the scene?” I didn’t know why I was doing it at the time, it just felt better. But if you heard those drums at the end of every scene, you were coming out on the turning point, on the subversion of expectation, and that gave enormous narrative drive.

It is incredibly powerful. Aaron Sorkin used it in The West Wing, and Jimmy McGovern in Britain uses it a lot. And if you can’t work out where the moment is, just work out where the music will go ‘Duff Duff Duff.’

Tell us about the Kuleshov Effect.

The Kuleshov effect was discovered by Lev Kuleshov, a contemporary of Eisenstein, in the very early years of cinema. He did this experiment where he took a shot of a man in close-up, and then cut it in turn to a girl in a coffin, a pretty girl, and a bowl of soup. The audience’s reaction? How well the actor conveyed grief, how well the actor conveyed love, how well the actor conveyed hunger. And Kuleshov made the brilliant observation that the audience automatically creates a chain of cause and effect, between what goes first and what goes afterwards.

It is something that Daniel Kahneman talks about in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, where he calls it the law of associative coherence. And it is a wonderful gift to screenwriters, because if you put something followed by something else, the audience automatically assumes that one leads to the other. Normally they should, but what is brilliant about that is that you can subvert it, so you can lie to the audience beautifully.

Agatha Christie did it all the time; she puts two consecutive things together which imply a conclusion, but that conclusion is false. And when you take a second look you realise that of course, they never said that, you just assumed it.

So a classic example would be police investigating a house fire where a mother and three children were killed, and she was recently undergoing a custody battle. Immediately, your brain goes “oh, it was the husband.” So if you’re the writer, you play up the idea of the husband much more, and then you reveal that it was either the wife or one of the children.

It’s a very simple way of creating a twist, in fact a very simple way of creating a Duff Duff moment. Particularly because in great screenwriting you never say the connections, you are always inferring everything.

In your book, you say, and I quote, “Storytelling can be seen as a codification of the method by which we learn.” Can you explain that?

One of the reaons I wrote the book was that with all the screenwriting books I’ve read, and that includes Robert McKee and Syd Field and Christopher Vogler, for all the good that was in them, they never any point do they say ‘why.’ They say how, and that there has to be an incident on page 12 or whatever, but they never every say why. And if you’ve been trained in academia, as I was, you know that’s unacceptable. Without the why you won’t pass your exam; you have to prove it.

So really it came from the question of where dramatic structure comes from.

I’m not the first person to say that it is based on dialectics, or that it is thesis, antithesis, synthesis. I think it was Nigel Heagley who said it first, in the 1940s. But fundamentally, that is the premise by which human beings assimilate knowledge: I exist, I perceive the outside world, I change. It is three acts, isn’t it?

A child exists, touches a gas fire, learns never to touch a gas fire again. The process by which we assimilate knowledge teaches us to change, and drama is just a dramatisation of that process. So law-abiding Walter White is thrown into a world of crystal meth dealers and through the lessons he takes away from that, becomes Scarface. Starts as Mr Chips, ends up as Scarface. Or Joy, in Inside Out, thinks she knows everything, then she’s thrown outside her home into the world of chaos and is trapped outside the door with sadness, and learns that sadness is incredibly important.

There are two writers we’d like to hear your views on. The first is Blake Snyder. He exhorts writers to write what producers want, but your advice earlier was to write exactly what you love.

I have quite a bit of time for Blake Snyder, becase his book is amusing, and he stopped the whole study of screenwriting being so po-faced. And I agree that if you want to get stuff made, you have to write what producers want.

But producers don’t always know what they want!

So, surprise them. Make them love your thing, and then give them what they want. I think there needs to be a balance, a trade off between the two points of view. If you really write what you love, and it is good, and it is nearly but not quite the kind of thing that producers make, then maybe the producers will think that they should be doing that. Otherwise, if you just write what you think producers want, you’ll just repeat old stuff.

The second writer is graphic novelist Alan Moore, who, to paraphrase, advised writers to “write whatever you find is the hardest thing to write. Whatever you find most difficult, is what your next project should be.” Any thoughts on that idea?

I think that’s really intersting, and in some ways it’s smart, as long as you can still write it, as long as you don’t get stuck on page 12 and bang your head against the wall for nine months!

I teach a variation on this. I tell them to find the thing they most abhore politically, then create a character they love who expresses that point of view. And students in particular are quite resistent to that to begin with. But what is interesting is that when you can get them to do it, it becomes incredibly liberating. Suddenly they’re given license to explore their own unconscious, and you get powerful stuff that way.

That is the test of the great writer, that ability to go into minds that you don’t approve of, and love them. And I think that is a version of what Alan Moore is saying.

Finally, what three TV scripts would you recommend to an aspiring screenwriter?

The Singing Detective, definitely, which I still think is the finest work of television ever produced. And a classic illustration of ‘don’t write what the producers want,’ as it would never have been written in that case.

Then Das Boot, the German submarine TV show, which I think is a masterpiece of how to write action about something in a confined space.

And the third one is the British TV series of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, with the original script by Arthur Hopcraft, and starring Alec Guiness. It’s beautiful, and incidentally was a huge influence on Peter Straughan when he was writing Wolf Hall. He wanted to move at that pace, and the length of time between takes is a great luxury, very rare to see on television now.

For more information about John’s book and courses, check out his website:

http://www.johnyorkestory.com/

And before you go, why not listen to a lecture by John Yorke about some of the ideas found in his book.