Never give up, never surrender!

I almost had a Doctor Who story accepted once. 

Or, to be strictly accurate, I submitted a script to the BBC and the then producer, John Nathan-Turner, liked it enough to invite me to the production office to discuss it. This would have been in 1982.

I rocked up to BBC Television Centre during the studio filming for the fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) story Time Flight. A soundstage was set up to look like the barren rocky landscape of a prehistoric Earth with an incongruous aircraft landing wheel standing in it. If you don't recall the story, it involved The Master kidnapping Concorde and its crew and passengers. It was fun to watch the filming and to meet Peter, Janet Fielding, Sarah Sutton and the late Anthony Ainley.

Sadly, my story didn't quite fit the plans they had for the show at that time and most of the next season had already been commissioned. But it obviously stayed with John because, a couple of years later, I got a call out of the blue to go back for another meeting during the filming of Colin Baker's first series. I saw some of Vengeance on Varos being filmed and we discussed my story possibly being included in the next series.

Once again, events conspired against me. Colin's Doctor didn't seem to gel with the fans and the show was already suffering from reduced viewing figures. My story would have been expensive to make at a time of scything budget cuts and it was finally laid to rest. The one good thing to come from it is a long association with Colin who I still do charity events with today. He's recently suggested I re-write the story as a possible audio adventure or novel. I may just do that.

The main reason my story was shelved was because the special effects needed for several of the big scenes would have been expensive - these days it would be easy with CGI. However, the opportunity for people like me to write for Doctor Who has now gone forever. 

And all because of fear of litigation.
 

They say that there's no such thing as a truly original idea ... and there is some truth to that. The reason that you can't copyright an idea - only the application of an idea - is because no copyrighter can guarantee that the idea has never been thought of before. Just recently I was discussing this very issue with a friend who works at BBC Wales and they told me that, since the Doctor Who reboot, they've had to introduce a policy of strict non-reading for submitted Doctor Who scripts. Being such a popular show, the Beeb gets hundreds of submissions from would-be screenwriters every week. The problem is ... there are only so many ideas out there so if they turn a script down and then commission a script with a similar idea, the rejected author starts screaming 'Infamy! They've nicked my idea!' All of which means that none of the hundreds of packages received at BBC Wales gets opened any more. 

It's all very sad as the greatest Doctor Who story of all time may well be sitting, unread, in some recycling bin in Cardiff even as I write this. But that's the way it is. 

There are many examples throughout history where similar ideas have popped up at around the same time - one famous example is of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallis independently developing the theory of Evolution (and excellent beards). This is sometimes called 'Multiple Discovery' or, more grandly, as 'The Paradigm of Recombinant Conceptualisation '. It states that a number of similar events can happen simultaneously because 'the time is right' - they're the result of the influences that exist at the time, such as scientific discovery, world events, social behaviours and public attitudes etc. Sometimes the weight of evidence and influence simply reaches a kind of critical mass.

For example, sunspots were independently proposed by Thomas Harriot (1610), Johannes and David Fabricius (1611), Galileo Galilei (1612), Christoph Scheiner (1612) who all lived in different countries and had no contact with each other. Mysterious, eh? Maybe not so much when you consider that this was exactly around the time that Galileo and Kepler were perfecting the first decent telescopes. 

As mathematician Farkas Bolyai once wisely said, 'When the time is ripe for certain things, these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring.' 

Discussing this subject got me thinking about the several times in my writing career when I've come up with what I think is a good idea, only to be pipped at the post. 

I'd written a comic novel in the late 1990s called Apollo Wears a Vest which, without revealing too much of the plot, centred around the idea that the Gods of Olympus have fallen on hard times as no one believes in them any more. I sent the book out to a couple of publishers and elicited some mild interest but nothing more positive than that. I tried again in 2003 and, again, it sparked some interest but didn't result in a deal. And so, in 2007, I extensively re-wrote it and tried again ... only to be told that a similar book was due to be published shortly.  

Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips finds a motley crew of Olympians living together in considerable squalor in London, in a house they haven't maintained too well since they moved in back in 1665. With what little powers they have left they are like old royalty, full of themselves but barely scraping by. 

I bought the book and thoroughly enjoyed it. Marie hadn't written the same novel as me - in fact, our plots have almost nothing in common - but the central idea was just similar enough that I now had an unsaleable 120,000 word novel. The final nail in the coffin came when Hollywood bought the book and made a film of it starring Christopher Walken, Sharon Stone, Oliver Platt and a host of other stars. Sadly, for Marie, they made such a hash of it that it was never released in cinemas or on home media.

But that's life. 

And this wasn't the only time that something like this happened to me.

In 2003 I wrote a book about some people meeting up via the new-fangled social media site Friends Reunited. But they have a terrible shared secret and someone apparently knows what it is because, all of a sudden, they start getting bumped off one by one. One is a police officer and has to figure out who's responsible. I sent it off to an agent, quite pleased with it. The very next day I saw Ben Elton on Breakfast TV talking about his new novel Past Mortem ... which had almost exactly the same plot. 

And I won't mention my 'superhero living in suburbia' novel that I wrote five years before My Hero appeared on BBC1. Or my comedy murder mystery novel A Murder to Die For that the publishing industry told me was unsaleable as there was 'no public demand for comedy murder mystery'. So I brought it out via the hybrid publisher Unbound.

Richard Osman's first novel came out a year later.

I eventually brought out two more novels in the series (and Richard liked them).

The point of this ramble is to say ... don't give up. It's dispiriting when these things happen and, over the years, I've received enough rejection letters to wallpaper my lounge. But I've persisted and I've got to see 10 of my books published. 

Meanwhile, I've recycled some of the content of those 'failed' books into other books, and enough time has now elapsed for me to rewrite Apollo yet again and to try resubmitting.

And why not?

You don't get if you don't ask.

And you don't get to be a writer unless you take the knock-backs and then keep on writing.

Never give up, never surrender!

What do you mean 'Someone's already used that catchphrase?'