An awful lot of storytelling isn’t really about making people understand – it’s about making people care.
People don’t really have a relationship with great writing or great production or great art direction or great direction. They just sort of admire it.
The trouble with a series as it gets older is it can feel like a tradition, and tradition is the enemy of suspense, and it’s the enemy of comedy. It’s the enemy of everything, really. So you have to shake it up.
My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare’s day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.
I never go online. The Internet stuff is bonkers. You must not look at it.
Witty and mean is easy – but fond and funny is hard.
When writing comedy, you have to have the confidence to believe that there is only one type of relationship in the world, and we are all having it, that all men behave in the same way and so do all women.
You’ll go out of business if you think people are stupid.
When you’re surrounded by friends and exes, there’s a whole lot of stuff that starts crawling out. But however serious and traumatic those experiences may be to the participant, to the onlooker they’re hilarious.
Writing for adults often means just increasing the swearing – but find an alternative to swearing and you’ve probably got a better line.
It’s been a long time since Sherlock Holmes jumped off that roof – it’s time to reveal the truth about what happened between him and the pavement.
Demons run when a good man goes to war.
If you take most men aside when their wives are pregnant, most men are pretty frightened and worried and faintly disgusted by the whole experience.
As we all know, it is the proper duty of every British subject to come to the aid of the TARDIS.
I think of myself as a writer with a sense of humour rather than a comedy writer. Happy to tell a story with lots of jokes in it – I wouldn’t know how to do jokes without the story.
The way you get your script to the right people is that you put it in an envelope. It’s easy. The difficult bit is writing something that is so good people will take a punt on a brand new writer.
The Doctor: Just had a fall. All the way down there, right to the library. Heck of a climb back up. Amelia: You’re soaking wet. The Doctor: I was in the swimming pool. Amelia: You said you were in the library. The Doctor: So was the swimming pool.
If you don’t expect to like someone and then you do, that’s an incredibly exciting moment.
I think training in comedy, as it were, a history writing comedy, is a powerful tool for anyone.
You can be as beautiful and charming as you’d like, but if you’re not terrific at acting, it will mean nothing on the screen.
Time travel is always more magical somehow when you go into the past. Traveling into the future is something you do, every day. You’re just not going to get very far. So, I rather like the past travel.