Dave Cohen’s Build a Script course taught me how to do the pre-writing required to make the actual writing bit a lot easier. All that honing of the concept, the situation, the characters, developing plot ideas, writing an outline and then actually getting a script together and incorporating a couple of rounds of notes gave me a solid framework for how to put a sitcom together. There was lots in there that I can repeat as necessary, whether for the next episode of Fieldwork or for a new project altogether. (And why, yes, as it happens, I have started having a ridiculous number of ideas for sitcoms.) 

From Joel Morris’s book, Be Funny Or Die I learnt about the shape of a joke. What are its components? How do you fit them together? What pitfalls do I need to look out for? As with all things, it’s easier to see the shape of someone else’s jokes than to write them yourself, but understanding what you’re aiming for helps. 

And from my improv lessons with Seamus Allen I have learnt how to get out of my head and into the moment, as well as the importance of small talk and how to stop trying to be clever (because the cleverer you try to be, the harder you’ll fall on your arse.) Improv has without doubt freed up my writing brain, as well as improving my ability to think on my feet. 

So all was going very well until I got stuck again. Great. 

I do have, as you may be aware, a deep and intimate relationship with writer’s block. Often it just comes out of nowhere. There I am, happily pottering away, writing a thing, and then bam, no more words are available in my head. 

404 not found. 

++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.

Sometimes I can bull my way through it, sometimes the malaise just magically lifts. This time, I wrote a post about how important it is to focus on what’s directly in front of you rather than fretting about things that are far away in the distance and, just like that, my block was gone. 

My brain is weird. 

So I’m feeling quite excited about Fieldwork again. And, despite the intense workload in the run-up to Ada Lovelace Day on 8 October, I’m finding the time and energy to work on it. This is all helped by another course and another book. 

Jill Chamberlain’s The Nutshell Technique

The other day, a fellow writer mentioned script consultant Jill Chamberlain’s The Nutshell Technique to me and shared the PDF she provides on her website for analysing scripts. (See the main Word Count newsletter for more useful links, including a few explanatory videos.) 

I haven’t finished reading the book yet — see above note about Ada Lovelace Day — but I did spend a couple of evenings watching, rewatching and analysing the pilot of Ghosts US, an American sitcom that I think is significantly funnier than its British progenitor. 

Let me back up a bit. 

One of the problems I’ve been having with the Fieldwork pilot is it just feels all wrong. There are what I think might be funny bits in there, but it just doesn’t really hang together very well. And the ending’s rubbish. That’s fine. This is just how writing works. 

Now, I could throw it away and work on a different story, and at some point I probably will. But I don’t want to do that until I can say, confidently, that I understand what is wrong and why it can’t be saved. 

The Nutshell Technique is giving me some of those answers. 

Chamberlain has identified eight key story elements that need to be present for a story to work, and she present them all in a simple, single page graphic. More importantly, she talks about how these elements relate to one another. That’s something I really haven’t see anyone else really do in quite the same way. 

So, in order to get a bit of practice identifying these elements, I watched the Ghosts US pilot several times to see if I could fill in the Nutshell sheet for Sam/Jay and the ghosts, (in the pilot they act almost as a single entity). 

It’s a fascinating process and it’s really helping me to see how these elements connect with one another and what’s missing from my own script. 

One thing I did add myself, though, is a “But” section. In sitcoms, characters might seem to get what they want, but there’s always a catch at the end. So the Ghosts’ house is saved from the developers… but Sam and Jay intend to turn it into a BnB anyway. Sam gets the big house she wants… but it’s full of ghosts and she can see them.

Joel Morris’s Writers’ Room course

If I’ve learnt one thing over the last year, is that’s a good course moves my writing on far faster than muddling along on my own. So I was really excited to see Joel Morris spin up a new course for comedy writers, The Writers’ Room. Although based on his book, Be Funny Or Die, I’m learning a lot that I didn’t get from the book, and of course it’s great to be able to grill Joel directly. 

We’re two weeks into the five week course and the two key take aways for me so far are: 

1. Write for your tribe. Comedy is tribal and you can’t be all things to all people, so pick the group you’re writing for, the people who will have the ‘code book’ to understand your jokes, and write for them. I’m writing for a very specific group – ecologists, academics and adjacent groups – and it was rather nice to have someone say, “Yes, it’s fine to have a specific audience in mind”. It was very freeing.

2. You can’t be too obvious. Drama is all about concealing information and letting it out in dribs and drabs. Comedy is all about being really on the nose and letting the audience follow along in a delightful cloud of familiarity. As a drama writer, it’s really, really hard to let go of that urge to conceal and start being blatant. 

And this is where Joel’s and Jill’s work comes together very nicely. Analysing Ghosts US emphasised to me just how obvious ‘obvious’ is. 

The Ghosts literally start introducing themselves by name and, as with the UK version, they are all dressed stereotypically, telling us who they are the instant we lay eyes on them. They literally outline the world they inhabit, saying “We’re ghosts” and explain that they are trapped here, unable to move on to the afterlife. And Sam literally points out her own character flaw when she explains how her husband Jay views her: “He thinks I’m a little impulsive”. 

I was really quite surprised when I realised how very obvious the writers were being, because it doesn’t feel obvious. It doesn’t feel like you’re being slapped around the face with a blatant wet haddock. It just sort of slides by, part of the furniture, part of our expectations of how comedy works. 

I’m now itching to get back to Fieldwork, to be able to spend more time working out my own nutshells and figuring how how to make this thing properly hang together. Just another five weeks and I’ll be through ALD, have had my holiday in the US, and will be back at my desk, eager to thrash this thing into shape. 

It’s been a few weeks since I successfully finished my sitcom course. I now have a complete script on its second draft and whilst there are, of course, many drafts still to come, I’m very happy with the progress I’ve made. 

But as I get feedback on the script, I’m finding that there’s a tension building in the back of my head between what I’ve learnt from doing improv and what I’ve learnt about sitcom. Perhaps this is just a function of my inexperience as a comedy writer, but what I do when standing in front of 20 people and making them laugh is very different to the notes I’ve received about my sitcom and the advice I’ve had on how to write sitcoms in general. 

Improv is very much about getting out of your head and into the moment. The harder you try to be clever, the worse your performance is going to be — I’ve written before about how trying to be original, not fear, is the mind-killer.

The aim, instead, is to be natural, to let your subconscious do all the work. From coming up with what to say next, to understanding what the scene is about, to spotting an opportunity for a callback or twist, your subconscious has to be in charge. 

You have to allow yourself to respond instinctively to what your scene partner is saying and doing. You can’t plan ahead, you can’t think up clever lines to use later because you’ll end up trying shoehorn them in to places they don’t fit. Rather, you have to spend a lot of time playing with the mundane in order to create space for the hilarious to emerge. 

Actor and improvisor Jason Mantzoukas talks about how important it is to be able to sit with silence onstage and how delving into deeper and potentially unfunny emotions can result in some of the best improv. 

As Mantzoukas demonstrates, you do what is right for the scene, even if it means a detour into something uncomfortable or serious. 

Every improvisor is pulling from their own personal wellspring, their own knowledge and circumstances, their own hopes and fears. Being themselves and talking about their own quotidian experiences leads to a connection with each other and the audience that results in the creation of a space where humour can bloom. 

Much of the dialogue in improv is chit chat, it’s often a bit random, a bit fuzzy. And it has to be, because you need that space to work out what’s going on and how you’re going to respond. Repetition and callbacks are great when you can squeeze them in, but sometimes, just making a simple connection will do the trick. 

Now TV is a different medium and expectations are different. So on TV, we’re expected to be tighter. Less waffle. Get in late, get out early. All that. I get it. 

But I can’t help wondering if we are spending too much time thinking about the ‘rules’ of sitcom and not enough time learning about what’s actually funny. I’m particularly frustrated with the emphasis on big stakes. Do we really need to make everything primal? Are death, sex and survival the only things that people care about? 

Obviously fucking not. 

In an improv scene, stakes are often low, if they exist at all. Maybe there’s the risk of a broken finger, or a character’s trying not to vomit whilst frying eggs, or there’s a disagreement over gardening. 

Sometimes a scene will go big, as one character faces losing their job, or meets an estranged parent, or stares down death. But those scenes are not inherently funnier than the scenes with low or no stakes. It’s not about what’s at risk, it’s about how characters react and respond to one another, ie what they say and what they do. 

And, as Michael Cook suggested on BlueSky:

Aren't the stakes in improv transferred to the cast? Can they create an amusing scene/narrative in real time? Will they land this? We forgive the lack of an involving invented story because we're more interested in the real life story of the show. It's like sport!

I think that might be true to an extent, but even then, stakes are incredibly low. No one’s going to lose their life if a scene bombs (and bomb they do!). 

I’m thinking about this because the feedback I’ve had on my script is that the stakes aren’t high enough. My gut says that’s not true, but I hadn’t been able to figure out what the problem really is.

Then last week, after I’d written the first 700 words of this article, I posed the question on Bluesky and got some great responses (including the video of Jason Mantzoukas above, from Matthew Oliphant). 

Joel Morris, comedy writer and author of Be Funny Or Die, made the observation that:

It’s not about high stakes - that’s drama - but clear stakes. As long as the audience knows what the characters want, and what’s the worst thing that could happen to them, that clarity is enough.

Because clarity is the engine in comedy, and obscured motive is the engine in drama, you need high stakes in drama (death, crime, bombs) because characters might not state their values and aims. In comedy someone will say “if my mum sees me eating from tins, I’m dead” and those are your stakes. 

And suddenly, I can see where things have gone wrong with my script. And a lack of clarity is a much easier fix than having to ramp up the stakes in a way that feels artificial and forced. 

So if you’re struggling with feeling like your character’s stakes aren’t quite high enough, maybe look at them instead through a lens of clarity. And don’t be scared to be a bit on the nose. 

In S1E1 of Episodes, Beverly states the stakes on page 1 with her second line of dialogue, talking to her husband and TV co-writer, Sean: 

No. I’ve had it. I’m going home. You stay. Clearly, you’re flourishing here. 

Their marriage and writing partnership is at stake. 

In S1E1 on of Community, it’s there on page 7, when Jeff confesses to Duncan that his law degree is fake: 

DUNCAN
I thought you had a bachelor’s from Columbia.

JEFF
And now I have to get one from America. They must have noticed that the eagle in the seal was holding coffee branches. I’m dead in the water until I replace that degree.

And in S1E1 of Never Have I Ever, John McEnroe (yes, that John McEnroe) explicitly lays out the stakes for protagonist Devi on page 8: 

Can she [Devi] walk through the front door of her high school with enough confidence that no one will remember her as “the paralyzed Indian girl whose dad dropped dead at a school function”? It’s not likely, those things are pretty unforgettable. But with working legs comes a whole host of new possibilities. So, go get ‘em Devi.

Most of my past writing has been in the drama category, so I’m more used to withholding information and dribbling it out bit by bit, hint by hint, than coming straight out and saying, “This is what’s going on and this is why our protagonist is going to act the way she does”. The latter feels alien, but now I know that’s what I need to do, it shouldn’t be too hard to adapt. 

All I have to do is find the right nose and then boop it. Hard.

The first draft of the half hour TV sitcom pilot version of Fieldwork is complete and has been sent to Dave for feedback. I’m both eager to know what he thinks and hoping that he totally forgets to get back to me so that I can pretend that it’s the little slice of perfection that it feels like at the moment. 

Sometimes first drafts feel like an overgrown old garden with nettles and brambles everywhere that need to be hacked back before you can even think about planting some flowers. Rarely, they feel like the garden of a stately house, beautifully arranged with every bed weeded and every hedge trimmed. Of course, they stop feeling like that as soon as you start looking at them closely but for a while the illusion persists. 

I think this draft came up roses because of all the prep time I put in. Indeed, it took around 400 hours of work to get to the point where I could spend 8 hours 41 minutes actually writing the draft. 

I track all my hours so that I know how I’m splitting my time between projects. I am perhaps not quite as rigorous about how I categorise my time, so lots gets dumped in the ‘admin’ bucket, but this is roughly how it looks: 

• Admin: 120 hours. Mostly things like email, doing the ethics application, meetings with my collaborators, social media, general organisational stuff. 

• Pre-writing: 93 hours. Character development, developing the situation, relationship planning, plots, treatments, outlines. Includes the course with Dave. 

• Interviews: 50 hours. Arranging, carrying out and analysing interviews with ecologists. 

• Training: 37 hours. Doing courses, reading books, attending webinars, etc.

• Conferences: 12 hours. This was this year’s Big Comedy Conference. I didn’t count last year’s for some reason. 

• Newsletter: 10 hours. Writing newsletters and promoting them on social media.

• Research: 9 hours. Reading up on stuff.

• Funding: 1 hour. This’ll become a much bigger number in due course.

That comes to 332 hours, but I know there was quite a bit of watching TV and reading books specifically for this project which haven’t made it in to the stats, largely because I still can’t quite bring myself to note any of that down as ‘work’. The 40 or more hours I spent at improv class isn’t in the stats either, even though I only started doing it to help with my writing. Nor was the day at last year’s Big Comedy Conference.

When everything is added up, it’s more like 400 hours, or about 57 seven-hour days, of preparation work in order to write for 8 hours and 41 minutes. Obviously, there will be a lot more time spent on writing and rewriting. I’ll have to take Dave’s feedback into account, write second, third, fourth versions, as well as turn it into a short film and podcast version.

And when that’s done, there’ll be more research to do so that I can develop more episodes, write more scripts, pay a script editor to help me refine them, produce, cast and then record the podcast, and then do promotion.

How much prep time is enough?

Although it sounds like a lot, I don’t think that 400 hours is an inordinate amount of time on prep — it’s probably less than I spent prepping my shelved pandemic novel. I spent two years doing background research for that, and most of that was a waste of time because by the time I really got into writing, the science and our experience of pandemics had changed so much. And I didn’t do nearly enough pre-writing, so the actually writing process was much, much harder. It was the same with Tag, my urban fantasy. I’d be spending less time rewriting that if I’d spent more time doing proper pre-writing!

So I think the balance here is pretty good. 400 hours sounds like a lot, but I’m so happy with the quality of the first draft I produced that I’ll certainly do the same depth of prep for my next project (though, I hope, without the ethics application).

I’m not saying that E1 of Fieldwork is some amazing potential BAFTA winner or anything, but I am delighted with it as a first draft and I do think it’s got legs. One of my collaborators has already read it, and her response was “It's great. Soooo painful haha”, so I know I’ve hit at least some of the right notes. From here on in, it’s about refining it, making it funnier, and finding a way to take this project on to the next stage. 

Prep and pre-writing as an argument for Universal Basic Income

If ever there was an argument for easier access to grants that fund creative work, and for Universal Basic Income (UBI), this is it. The pressure on writers to just churn stuff out has never been greater. Some self-published authors, particularly in the romance genre, are scheduling just two months to prep and write a book because that’s what their readers demand. If those authors had UBI, they’d be able to take things at their own pace, instead of feeling that they’ll lose momentum and thus income if they don’t produce a several books per year.

I’ve been lucky that my time on Fieldwork has been funded by a bit of leftover grant money from the International Collaboration on Mycorrhizal Ecological Traits, which was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (Grant Number: NE/S008543/1). I wouldn’t have been able to do it otherwise.

I suggested the idea of writing a sitcom as a piece of outreach work to my colleagues back in June 2022, and I started working on it properly in November 2022. Over the last 18 months, I’ve averaged 22 hours a month, which is about an hour per business day. I could happily have done more but, even with funding, I’ve had to do other work alongside it and sometimes those projects have had to take priority. Much as I’d love to, I can’t devote even half my time to writing.

I will soon start searching for other sources of money to keep the project going. The next phase will stop being about my time and start being about hiring in expertise and talent so that we can make this podcast a reality. That would be much easier to do if we had UBI.

Ultimately, though, if we want a rich and varied cultural landscape, we need to find a way to support writers and other creatives to do the kind of deep work I’ve been able to do, thanks to NERC. Without that money, Fieldwork would still just be an idea.

Without further funding, it’ll stay just a script. 

One of the problems with writing anything based on real life is managing the transitions from research to pre-writing to writing. Back in 2015, I had a ‘high concept’ (ie very simple) idea for a book about a global pandemic, exacerbated by government corruption and ineptitude, that would result in an unimaginable death toll. It would be narrated by a young journalist, disgraced and ejected from the London media world after breaking a controversial political story, who finds herself back in South Wales and desperately trying to resuscitate her career. An eco-friendly housing development would hold the key to her long-term survival. 

Unfortunately for me, I spent two years reading everything I could about the Spanish Flu, bird flu, vaccine development and manufacturing, PPE and all that. I didn’t start writing until 2017, so I was just coming up to the finishing line when Covid hit, making pretty much everything I’d written obsolete. Had I started writing in 2015 instead and researched what I needed as I went a long, I’d have likely finished it long before the pandemic made it the world’s least publishable manuscript. 

My problem back then was that disaster lit was a new genre for me and I was unsure if I had the chops. It was easier to keep researching than to start the challenging task of writing and finding out the hard way whether I was any good at that kind of fiction. Worse, I didn’t have a framework for doing ‘pre-writing’ — the world building, plot and character development work that needs to be in place before you start actually writing the story. 

I finished the novel in April 2021, but after a brief and halfhearted attempt at sending it round the agents, some of whom gave me the fastest rejections ever seen in the literary world, I put it to one side and moved on. 

I did, however, learn my lesson, which is not to spend too much time doing research. Rather than wasting two years trying to learn everything I could about why pandemics happen, where these diseases come from and how we (used to) prepare for them, I should have just done a bare minimum of research to get my imagination going and then filled in the details as I went along. 

In comparison, Fieldwork shot off the starting blocks like Usain Bolt, once we got ethics clearance. I started organising the background research last May and had finished it by the end of August, when I switched focus to get Ada Lovelace Day sorted. 

And since picking Fieldwork back up in January, I’ve been focused on learning about comedy and pre-writing: going back over the interview transcripts to pick out the interesting bits of science, reading books, writing random chunks of dialogue, and working on characters and relationships.  

I’m now two weeks into Dave’s course and rapidly heading through the preparatory work towards the actual writing bit. Week 1 focused on explaining the basic idea, Week 2 on fleshing that out a bit and answering questions about the ‘sit’ (situation), the relationship between the two main characters, and some plot ideas. Next week is a deeper dive into character, then story, then we get into the actual script writing.

I can’t recommend Dave’s course highly enough. It’s really great fun to be getting into the nitty gritty of the sitcom, and Dave’s feedback is perceptive and invaluable. Plus, it’s given me both a great framework within which to work and a deadline, both of which hugely improve the likelihood that I’ll have a first draft done by mid-June.  

Book review: Be Funny Or Die

I was so excited to get a copy of ’s guide to comedy, Be Funny Or Die: How Comedy Works and Why It Matters in March. I’ve read a lot of books about comedy recently and Joel’s book is not just brilliant, it’s unlike anything else out there. 

Where your bog standard book about comedy provides advice on how to write a joke or the structure of a sitcom, Joel tackles the very nature and purpose of laughter and comedic behaviour. Drawing from the work of experts like Prof Sophie Scott (who gave a hilarious talk about laughter at one of the earliest Ada Lovelace Day Live events, back in 2013) and Prof G Neil Martin amongst many, many others, Joel looks at the social purpose of laughter, how it bonds or divides us, and how it make us feel safe even when, perhaps, we aren’t. 

My key takeaway from the book was that you can’t write comedy if you don’t know what a joke is for, and you can’t write good comedy if you don’t understand how jokes can go bad, when they’re used to inflame and divide rather than sooth and unite.

This philosophical approach allows the reader to think about comedy at a subatomic level, placing it into the context of human social interactions and connections. Understanding how we use laughter as social glue to indicate that we’re not a threat, or that we aren’t in a threatening situation, (or that we recognise a threat but are frantically pretending everything is just fine, thank you kindly, hahaha), allows us to better manipulate our comedy narratives and stick them together in exactly the right places. 

But Joel doesn’t stop with the subatomic fundamentals, he also zooms out to the atomic, to a new Rule of Three. 

You might have heard of the Rule of Three already, the idea that we inherently like groups of three things, because that’s “the smallest number that humans perceive as a set”. That might be three examples, three repetitions, or the comedic triad of Set-up, Anticipation and Punchline. That latter rule is often invoked to explain what makes a joke funny, but Joel provides lots of examples that break that rule by using only two of those three — in these cases, set-up and punchline — including: 

Clowns’ divorce: custardy battle.  — Simon Munnery

I’m not addicted to cocaine. I just like the way it smells. — Richard Pryor 

Instead, he suggests, we should look at comedy the same way we look at music, as a matter of “pattern and rhythm”. We all know that comedy is rhythm, or timing, but it isn’t just timing. We are pattern-seeking creatures, constantly looking for patterns to match and constantly surprised when the pattern we think we’ve found turns out to be something else. 

These are the atoms of comedy, the new Rule of Three: Construct, Confirm and Confound. (There’s also Confuse, but we don’t want that, that’s like dark matter and makes a joke implode in an unpleasant way.)

• Construct: Create the pattern. 

• Confirm: Repeat the pattern. 

• Confound: Break the pattern. 

Now we have the atoms, we can create molecules, more commonly called ‘jokes’. Joel explains that there are many ways you can link together your Three Cs, and quite often you don’t even need all three of them to get a laugh. Sometimes, Construct and Confirm will do the job or, as in the two examples above, Construct and Confound. 

Be Funny Or Die doesn’t go into the synthesis of compounds — which in this now rather tortured analogy would be sitcoms, comedic novels, comedy films etc. But once you understand the building blocks of comedy, all the other books about those things become a lot more useful. 

If you’re just starting out as a comedy writer, or you’re just curious about what makes something funny and why we’re hardwired to laugh and make others laugh, then start with Be Funny Or Die. It’ll make everything else make sense. If you’re a seasoned pro, then it’ll give you a new appreciation for the importance of comedy in human society and a deeper understanding of what it is that you’re doing for a job. 

Now, I don’t rate books, but if I did, Be Funny Or Die would be like the solar system 1SWASP J093010.78+533859.5 — it’s got five stars. 

Saturday saw the Big Comedy Conference take place in London with a slew of industry professionals taking the stage to share their accumulated knowledge and experience. I went last year for the first time, so this second go round made for an interesting comparison. 

The atmosphere was much less chirpy, for one, and the financial challenges of putting on an event of this size in the current economic climate were made obvious by the single stream of speakers with no break-out rooms and the more modest catering. I don’t blame the organisers for that at all – time are tough and they have to cut their pattern to their cloth – but the event felt smaller and less optimistic. 

I can understand that loss of optimism too, though. Comedy is in decline in the UK. Last November, Ofcom released a report in which it “explicitly labelled scripted comedy to be ‘at risk’ as a genre” for the sixth year in a row. One of the speakers confirmed that spending on comedy has been cut, with the number of comedies being commissioned dropping by half. 

Last year, we were told that the way to get your comedy made is to find a producer whose work you love and approach them. You can’t approach broadcasters directly – most of the commissioners on stage said they were either part of very small team or working solo and they don’t accept unsolicited scripts.

So how do you get the attention of a producer? Twice, we’ve been advised to record a table read and send them over a link. That does make sense – it’s easier and quicker to click a link and listen for a few minutes than it is to read a script. 

But that doesn’t seem to be how things actually work. I spoke to someone who had tried sending the recording of her table read to the very same producer who’d given that advice . Yet she still met a brick wall of “We don’t accept unsolicited scripts”. 

There was further conflicting advice about agents. This year, we were told to get an agent, whereas last year we were told that agents aren’t necessary and you’ll only get one once you’re established anyway. 

It’s Catch 22. Commissioners say that they only accept submissions from production companies. Production companies don’t take unsolicited submissions, preferring work to come via agents. Unlike literary agents, TV agents don’t take unsolicited submissions either. The whole industry is Kafkaesque. 

I chatted to one very well established writer and even he can’t get stuff made, despite decades of experience and all the contacts you could possibly want within the industry. 

So what does this mean for Fieldwork? 

The original plan was to write a short film script, then look for some funding to get it made. Which isn’t a bad plan, but I’m not sure that it’s still the best plan. I am not a film producer and nor do I particularly want to become one, so I’d have to find a producer to work with. I’m not going to rule that out, but perhaps it’s not the best place to start. 

I’ve signed up for Dave Cohen’s Build a Sitcom course, so by the summer I will have a half-hour sitcom pilot script written, which I will then cut down to a 10 minute short film. Having a sitcom pilot will give me some more options: I’ll be able to submit it to the BBC’s open call in the autumn (I’ve missed this year’s BAFTA Rocliffe comedy competition deadline), on the off chance. But with hardly any comedy being made now, that off chance is tiny.

What became clear to me on Saturday is that there really aren’t many opportunities for comedy writers at the moment. One’s chances might be improved if one became a writer-performer, but as much as I love doing improv, I’m not about to start trying to develop a career as a stand-up comedian (despite having done it before) in order to write. Honestly, that’s like becoming a worm farmer in order to go fishing. 

Where I do see an opportunity – and I can thank ’s Lovecraft Investigations and Tom Craine and Henry Parker’s ReincarNathan for demonstrating this to me – is in audio. Whether that’s BBC Radio or a podcast doesn’t really matter, although one requires me to get commissioned and the other I can do myself (ish). 

The podcast route seems the most feasible in terms of getting this story out in to the world (and, perhaps, catching a commissioner’s eye). Being less expensive, it also seems like something with the potential for a bit of crowdfunding to cover the costs. 

I know a lot more about the TV industry and the process of getting a sitcom out into the world now than I did two years ago when Thorunn, Pen and I started talking about this project. So it makes sense to adjust our plan in the light of all that new information. An adaptation for audio could potentially be an intermediate step ahead of making the short film, or it could become our final destination, and either of those outcomes would be fine for us. 

Having been fretting about the idea of making a short film for a while now, I feel much more excited about developing a podcast. It feels much more doable and much less stressful. The lesson here is that creative projects like this take time to develop, and as they do, the wider commercial landscape changes. We have to stay abreast of those changes and adapt our plan to fit reality. 

Last month, I shared my plan for 2024 and I’m happy to say, as February draws to a close, that I’ve largely stuck to it. 

Transcripts

I finished reading through and annotating all the interview transcripts, many of which I’d not looked at since I did the interviews. It was a good reminder of what this project is all about — translating those experiences into a cohesive and, hopefully, funny story. 

Reading

I’ve also finished reading three of the books I’d hoped to get through: 

Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, Keith Johnstone 

Originally published in 1971, this book really show its age via some very dated language and concepts. If you can set that aside, though, there are some useful insights into improv and storytelling in general. I wrote about one, the idea that creativity is about radical acceptance of your first ideas, over on Why Aren’t I Writing?, and will not doubt pull out some more to consider in depth. But I wouldn’t recommend this book if you’re not into improv, not least because the final chapter on Masks and Trance (and he doesn’t mean Faithless or Paul Oakenfold) is utterly, utterly batshit. 

The Complete Comedy Writer: Make your sitcom, stand-up, screenplay, sketches and stories 62% funnier, Dave Cohen 

Published more recently, in 2022, this is a much better book! Cohen gets deep in the weeds of sitcoms, explaining the form in detail and providing a framework for thinking about comedy writing. Lots of actionable advice — I took so many notes that half the book is now orange. It does get a little repetitive, but I’ll forgive that because everything he repeats is important and needs hammering into my brain. 

Build A Script: Writing Comedy For The British Market, Dave Cohen 

This book is based on the course I’ll be doing in April, so this is the written equivalent of doing a recce. I have a good idea of what will be asked of me over the eight weeks of the course and am now looking forward to it even more. 

Characters

Sitcom characters are often stereotypes — heightened versions of aspects of ourselves — so I’ve been working on a collection of character ideas that I can develop over coming weeks. I’ve yet to do a full character development worksheet for any of them, but I am starting to get hints of what drives a couple of them, what their intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are, what their goals are. I have a lot, lot more work to do on this though. 

Writing

I was really taken by this post by about screenwriter David Milch’s writing habits, and particularly the assignment he gives his students to write nothing but dialogue between two voices for at least 20 minutes a day. I did that for a few days, based on the events described in one of the interviews, and ended up with 23 pages of dialogue!

Sitcom writer James Cary explains on that “Each scene of your sitcom is like a sketch. It’s somewhere between ten seconds and four minutes long with one or two simple ideas at the heart of it. And each scene, like a good sketch, should have some kind of punchline at the end.” 

So I read through my dialogue and marked up the exposition, the joke set-ups and punchlines, and any callbacks (ie references to earlier set-ups or jokes) to see how well my stream of consciousness was doing in terms of funny. I was quite surprised to see that I had 29 jokes in 23 pages, although I’m not going to make promises on the quality of those jokes. 

My next task is to cut down the dialogue to the very bare minimum and turn it into scenes with descriptions, action and all the other furniture that makes a script a script. And then do it again with two different characters and another situation. 

Tech

I have also started using Plottr, an app that is designed to help with managing character descriptions, locations, plots, etc. It is so far pretty easy to use — I’ve just plunged in and started putting together character descriptions and a brief timeline for the vignette I’m working on. 

I’m not yet sure if it’s going to be helpful, or if it’s just another form of yak shaving. I don’t think I’ll find out until I start using it in anger, which will happen as I get deeper into this project. 

What’s next?

March will be more of the same: More character development, more dialogue, more jokes, more reading. And perhaps more playing with Plottr and seeing whether it really is useful or not. 

Subscribe now

In May last year, I broke down the process of writing Fieldwork into four stages: 

1. Background research 

2. Comedy research

3. Script development

4. Funding for production

I’ve largely completed Stage 1. Last year, I did ten interviews and picked up a few anecdotes via our online form. I’d have liked to have done more interviews, but I got some really great stuff out of the conversations I did have, so I feel content with that. (Unless you’re an ecologist who would like to talk to me, in which case please get in touch!). 

This year is therefore going to be devoted to Stages 2 and 3 and, in a somewhat unprecedented move, I’m planning the first chunk of the year month by month. That plan was in large part prompted by advice from comedian Dave Cohen, who said in a recent newsletter: 

If I’m entering that BBC Writersroom competition in Q4 I’ll want a good third draft or so by the end of Q3. Have had some kind of professional feedback and be working on rewrites after that. In which case I’ll want to have completed the first draft by the end of Q2. That gives me Q1 to thoroughly work on the idea, Q2 to write it.

To help me keep to my schedule, I’ve signed up to Dave’s From Zero to First Draft in 8 Weeks course, which starts on 19 April and walks participants through the development and writing of a pilot half-hour sitcom or comedy drama. Although the aim for this project was to produce a script for a 10-15 minute short film, I’m not going to look a gift half-hour script in the mouth! 

Working with someone as experienced as Dave will also help me to produce the best work I can, the first step of which is to produce something terrible. I’ll be happy to do that, though, because I’ll know that Dave will pull me up on anything that’s not good enough and make me work harder. 

I’m pretty bad at writing without deadlines, so having both the BBC Writersroom open call deadline on the horizon and having to prep/write stuff on a weekly basis from April to June will be a huge help. To support that process, I’ve had a think about what my timetable will have to be: 

• January: Read through existing transcripts; do some more background reading and research on comedy. 

• February: Continue reading; begin character work; write two vignettes to test out how those characters respond to plot. 

• March: Continue character work; write two more vignettes. 

• April: Begin Dave’s course; work on basics of the idea; develop themes and hone basics. 

• May: Develop characters further; outline plot ideas; outline script.

• June: Write pilot; incorporate feedback; refine pilot. 

• July: Write short film based on pilot; refine pilot; submit both to colleagues as final deliverable on iCOMET project. Discuss ways to take project forward. 

• August to December: Continue refining pilot; submit to BBC Writers room; continue to explore funding opportunities and open script calls. Assess opportunities to turn into radio play or podcast. 

I’m also going to commit to writing at least one post here a month to update you all on my progress. 

In addition to all of that, or in support of it perhaps, I have amassed a fairly large reading list that I’d like to get through, including:

• Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, Keith Johnstone

• Improvise: Scene from the Inside Out, Mick Napier

• Improvisation for the Theater, Viola Spolin

• Ready Steady, Joke!: Why Hard Times are the Best Times to Build Your Writing, Dave Cohen

• The Complete Comedy Writer: Make your sitcom, stand-up, screenplay, sketches and stories 62% funnier, Dave Cohen

• Build A Script: Writing Comedy For The British Market, Dave Cohen

• The Serious Guide to Joke Writing: How To Say Something Funny About Anything, Sally Holloway

• Creating Comedy Narratives for Stage and Screen, Chris Head

• What Are You Laughing At?: A Comprehensive Guide to the Comedic Event, Dan O'Shannon

And along with all that, I’m continuing my improv lessons, which have turned out to be ridiculous amounts of fun. I can feel them already loosing up the nuts and bolts in my brain and helping me to develop my comedic instincts. Before Christmas I had an absolute cracker of a scene about having never been to visit Santa Claus in his grotto, so I’m starting to believe that I might actually be quite good at it. Wednesday evenings have definitely become the highlight of my week!

Subscribe now

It’s been a while since I last wrote about Fieldwork, the short film script I’m writing for the i-COMET project, largely because over the summer I was either interviewing ecologists or checking their transcriptions, which isn’t very newsworthy. Then, once mid-August arrived, I was almost wholly focused this year’s Ada Lovelace Day Live event at the Royal Institution. 

But now it’s time to dive back in.

Back in May, I came up with a four part plan for how this project was going to shake out, and I’ve largely been focused on Part 1, background research. Talking to ecologists turned out to be a delightful experience, always the highlight of my week. I’m going back over the transcripts now and highlighting the sciency bits that catch my eye, or sections that feel funny to me or that seem to illustrate some aspect of character. 

I have to admit, I’ve been feeling a bit apprehensive about starting the actual writing, because this whole project doesn’t fit in with my normal creative process. Usually, I start with an idea for a person who’s dealing with a particular scenario and then I explore what might happen through plot logic: if this happens, then that results; and through character: this person would do this sort of thing. 

But with Fieldwork, what came first was the context: ecologists working in the field; and the genre: comedy. My brain has been noodling over this for the last several months, despite the fact that I was focused on other things, and building up quite a head of anxiety over whether I can actually write in this way. I haven’t written comedy for, er, quite a long time, so the question of whether I can still be funny has also been weighing on me. 

To get over this, I’ve decided that my brain needs a bit of creative shakubuku – “a swift, spiritual kick to the head that alters your reality forever”. 

So, to that end, I’ve started improv classes. There is a weekly class held not far from me and last Wednesday I went to my first one. It was huge amounts of fun, but I can also see how it has the potential to rewire my neurones a little, get me back into a mode of more spontaneous thinking, and help me re-find my funny. 

Improv (though they seem to have shortened it further to ‘impro’!) is predicated on saying the first thing that comes into your head and not worrying about whether it is good or bad. Even in my first session, once I started to feel the flow, it stopped feeling stressful and started to be a lot of fun. It’s like opening a direct conduit between your subconscious and your mouth, giving your brain a huge playground to just throw stuff up and see what happens. It’s about being open to possibility and responding instinctually to what the people around you are saying and doing. And, most importantly, it’s about refusing to be self-judgemental. 

That’s the perfect mindset for playing about with character ideas, plot snippets and humour, and it’s the antithesis of how writers often think. 

I remember once being told to throw away the first solution that comes into your head when you hit a problem with your plot or character. Throw away the second one too. The logic is that these are the obvious solutions, and you want to dig deeper to find the surprising solution. But if you take that too much to heart, it becomes crippling as your brain refuses to come up with a first solution at all, for fear of it being crap. 

Where writing is rewriting, improv is blurting out all your first thoughts without any opportunity to rethink. And that is, in my opinion, also the first step on the road to comedy. 

Subscribe now

I’m just over a month into the background research for Fieldwork and have already carried out half a dozen interviews with ecologists in a wide variety of disciplines. We’ve talked about everything, from the challenges of surveying plants in highland bogs, to working out which exact tree the bats are roosting in, to the problem of water in your waders. 

Already, I’m seeing a few common themes: Keys getting lost/left behind and wellies getting stuck/lost in soggy ground being two that have come up more than once. Ecologists also have to be good at jury-rigging equipment, either because what they need hasn’t been invented yet or because the commercially available equipment is too expensive. There’s a lot of ingenuity involved, but also a lot of learning that battery packs can lie when they say they’re full, as can GPS when it says that the track is passable.

If I had to sum up my conversations, it would be with the phrase ‘easier said than done’. You may happily promise to sample 100 locations, but actually doing so can be a challenge. And, equally, sometimes a more modest dozen locations might not be enough for you to find your target species at all, even if you know it has to be there somewhere.

I’m also struck by just how slapstick a lot of fieldwork fails are, particularly the whole getting stuck in bogs/mud/quicksand bit. I can’t help wondering how future archaeologists are going to interpret a lone pair of wellies, perfectly preserved in the peat. 

A lot of the comedies I love the most – Sex Education, Ted Lasso, The Good Place, Schitt’s Creek – are predominantly character driven, so it’s going to be an interesting challenge to work out how to combine that with authentically slapstick ecology. 

I’m still looking for ecologists to interview, so if you’d like to chat to me you can either email me to set up a time, or pick a time via Calendly. These conversations have rapidly turned into my favourite time of the week, so if you’d like to have a relaxed, informal chat about your experiences in the field, please get in touch! 

(Or, if you’d prefer, you can complete as much or as little of our survey as you please.)

Subscribe now

I thought I’d go through the rough project plan for Fieldwork so that you can see what’s involved and the sort of things I’m going to write about. 

To some extent, this newsletter is as much about me working out how all the pieces of the jigsaw fit together in my own head as it is about updating you on my progress. It’s also about documenting the process and my learning, so that I can come back to check my notes and maybe even see how far I’ve progressed. 

I expect to be working on these four aspects of the project, probably simultaneously: 

1. Background research 

2. Comedy research

3. Script development

4. Funding for production

Subscribe now

Part 1: Background research

I want Fieldwork to be based on reality – particularly real science and real fieldwork experiences. Scientists in TV comedy and drama often end up as caricatures: tweedy, obsessive and lacking in social skills. I know a lot of scientists and none of them are like that. And I have to ask, how are we going to encourage children to take science seriously if we’re portraying scientists so poorly? 

The science itself in TV is generally ignored, trivialised or misrepresented, probably because it sci-comms is hard and there are fewer TV writers with experience in sci-comms or science than we need. Thus, it gets reduced to scribbles on a white board in the background which, even if full of in-jokes for physicists (looking at you, Big Bang Theory), doesn’t do much to explain how science actually happens or why it’s important.

So I’m going to be talking to as many ecologists as I can and asking them questions about their work. I want to know what they are studying and why, where they go when they’re doing fieldwork, where they stay and what it’s like, and in particular I want to know about #fieldworkfails, those times when things didn’t go to plan. I’ve already heard about keys getting locked in cars during a thunderstorm, close encounters with bears, and the importance of choosing your tent location carefully. If you’d like to add to that list, find out how here!

Ecology is a good choice in terms of explaining how science happens and why it’s important. Many ecologists are working with species or habitats where the basics are easy to explain, and they’re doing it because they want to better manage that species or habitat, because their work will help us to grow more and better food with fewer chemical inputs, or because they want to understand the impact of climate change.

The way that a lot of ecology fieldwork is done makes it great for comedy: You’re out at a field station or camping somewhere and away from day-to-day life. Plus you’re doing things that can easily go sideways and you don’t have much time or many resources to fix the things that do go wrong. It’s just begging to become a sitcom. 

This all sounds very much like I planned it this way, but Fieldwork is a part of an existing project that I’ve been working on with Prof Thorunn Helgason, Dr Pen Holland and Prof Bala Chaudhary since 2019, the International Collaboration on Mycorrhizal Ecological Traits. Our original plan was to run a workshop for about 20 international ecologists at the University of York in order to develop a design for an easy-to-build mycorrhizal spore trap, and for me to do some basic training around mentoring, which was my contribution to the project (not being an ecologist, ’n all). Unfortunately for us, our workshop was due to start the week after the first Covid travel bans came into force. Oops. We had to cancel with just a few days notice. 

So Fieldwork is, in essence, our way of finishing off this project with a flourish. And I feel very lucky that the subject is ecology and not, say, nuclear physics.

Part 2: Comedy research

Back when it was “the new Rock ’n Roll”, I performed at open mic stand-up gigs, some of which actually went very well, even though the performance aspect of it terrified me. I’ve written novellas, a full-length novel, a feature film script and a six-part TV series, have trained as a TV script editor, and have a wealth of journalistic experience having written for The Guardian, Forbes, Melody Maker and a bunch of other newspapers and magazines.

What I’m doing now is building on what I already know about writing by adding the specifics of comedy. Although there are similarities between genres, there are also some aspects that are really very different, so rather than dive in and wonder why it’s not working, I’m investing my time in learning as much as I can about the form. Specifically, I’m reading everything I can about: 

1. Sitcom structure

2. Plot

3. Character

I find this all absolutely fascinating. I’ve always loved deconstructing everything I’ve watched or read (and thankfully have a husband who enjoys these conversations too), so I’m in my element. 

Part 3: Script development 

This is the hard bit. But also the fun bit. And the painful bit. 

I’ll be writing a script that’s between 10 and 15 minutes long, so that’s between 10 and 15 pages, as usually a page of script equals about a minute of screen time. Within those pages, I need to set the scene and have perhaps two cycles of the main character trying to fix a problem but accidentally making it worse before the final resolution. And I need to cram in as many jokes as possible. 

Easy. 

😱

Once I’ve got a draft that’s as good as I can make it, I’ll work with a comedy script editor to hone it further before organising a table read to see how the jokes land when actual actors say them out loud. What works on the page doesn’t always work when spoken, so there will likely be rewrites at this stage. 

Part 4: Funding for production

The funding we have doesn’t cover actually filming the script, so whilst all of the above is going on, I need to find a way to pay for filming. This might involve applying for grants or running a crowdfunding campaign, as well as developing the paid tier here on Substack so that I can put more of my time into Fieldwork itself. 

To do all that, I’ll have to learn about film production and budgeting. I have been involved in a short film production before (and somewhere on the internet you can see me ‘acting’ in one, and no, I’m not going to link to it), but things have changed a lot since then. Much more can be done much more cheaply these days, but I have an abiding belief that people should be paid for their time, so that’s going to be the cornerstone of my fundraising. I don’t believe in asking people to work for free or “for exposure”, especially not during a financial crush, so raising enough money to pay crew and actors is a hill I am willing to die on. 

The future

This project won’t stop once the short has been filmed. My plan then is to develop a script for the pilot of a half-hour ongoing sitcom and see what I can do to get it in front of producers. Because I really believe that this is a great concept and that it’s a show that could be hugely entertaining and successful. 

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and this is mine. I hope you will join me to see what kind of countryside we pass through. Just make sure you pitch your tent inside the electric fence, in case of moose. 

Give a gift subscription

The funniest things happen when you’re out the middle of a field – or bog, jungle, desert, wood, moor, alpine meadow, etc., etc. – trying your best to do science. Sometimes, the science doesn’t want to be done and your equipment stops working. Sometimes your target species doesn’t play ball. Sometimes the weather intervenes. Sometimes, you just have a giant brainfart that derails everything. Rarely does everything go exactly to plan. 

Fieldwork can be a deeply enjoyable and satisfying experience, even when things go awry. It’s also essential from a scientific point of view, providing opportunities to study organisms in their natural habitat and expanding our understanding of how to conserve species and combat climate change.

The Fieldwork short film project aims to not just capture some of the hilarity of fieldwork, but to communicate the importance of ecology as a career and the essential scientific role that fieldwork plays. 

I’m looking for ecologists who’ve worked in the field and would be up for having a chat about their experiences – the good, the bad, the funny and, in particular, the scientific. I’d love to know what you’re studying and why it’s important, as well as where you go to do fieldwork and where you stay. And, of course, I’d love to know about the times things went amusingly wrong, and why. 

If you’d like to take part in this project then you can either email me to arrange a time to talk, or book an interview via Calendly. Or you can fill in as much or as little of our survey as you’d like. 

What’s all this about, then? 

Fieldwork is a short comedy film project that aims to both to entertain and to increase awareness of ecology as a subject and as a career path. I am interviewing ecologists to develop a clearer understanding of how fieldwork really works, the scientific questions that you’re finding answers to, and the challenges you face along the way.

Although my first output is a short film script, I will also be looking at other opportunities to develop the concept in other media.

Fieldwork is part of the International Collaboration on Mycorrhizal Ecological Traits, organised by the University of York, University of Edinburgh, Dartmouth College and Ada Lovelace Day. It is funded by the National Environment Research Council (NERC), Grant Number: NE/S008543/1. Click for full participant information, including consent and privacy policies.

It is a creative writing project which will explore the perspectives and experiences of ecologists working in the field and use them to inform the development of a comedy drama. Our aims are both to entertain and to increase awareness of ecology as a subject and as a career path. 

The first output will be a short film script, but we may also use data collected to inform blog posts, social media posts, a TV pilot script and treatment, a novel, and other creative works. 

We are collecting the experiences of ecologists in the field and will use the combined, fictionalised versions of these events as the basis for some scenes. Submitting your experience is not a guarantee that it will be used in any of our outputs, and we reserve the right not to use any part of any particular submission.  

We are particularly keen to hear from people who live and work in the UK, and anyone who belongs to an underserved or minority community, such as women, people of colour, people from a low-income background, immigrants, disabled people, LGBT+ people, and/or people who are the first in their immediate family to study or work in STEM. 

Participants can take part via an online survey or a Zoom interview.

This project is funded by the National Environmental Research Council, Grant number: NE/S008543/1. 

Consent

Taking part in this research study is entirely voluntary; it is up to you to decide whether to take part. By choosing to take part in an interview or completing our survey, you are giving consent for the storage of the data you provide. 

For survey responses

If you wish to withdraw your consent to use your data, you may do so at any time up until submitting the survey, without having to give a reason. Contact details will not be associated with survey data so retraction after this stage will not be possible. If you require any additional information, you may email your questions at any time to Suw Charman-Anderson. 

For interviews

You will be given a copy of your interview transcript and will be able to give granular consent to individual sections of your narrative. If you wish to withdraw your consent to use your data, you may do so at any time up until submitting the transcript, without having to give a reason. After this, your narrative will be separated from your contact details and retraction will not be possible. If you require any additional information, you may email your questions at any time to Suw Charman-Anderson.

Please do not share experiences that might be seen as libellous or defamatory to another party, or where another party might be easily identified. We will not use any information that we judge to be potentially categorised as such.

You will not be identified with or identifiable from any specific parts of the outputs at any time. You will be given the opportunity to choose to be credited, i.e. to be included in a list of contributors, either under your name or a pseudonym. 

You may contact the University of York’s Biology Ethics Committee (biol-ethics@york.ac.uk) if you have concerns about data privacy or processing, or other ethical issues. If you are still dissatisfied, please contact the University’s Acting Data Protection Officer at dataprotection@york.ac.uk. 

If you are unhappy with the way in which the University has handled your personal data, you have a right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office. For information on reporting a concern to the Information Commissioner’s Office, see www.ico.org.uk/concerns.  

Privacy Notice

The information you provide will be used by the Fieldwork research team in order to inform creative works about the role of ecologists and fieldwork in broader scientific endeavours.

The University processes personal data for research purposes under Article 6 (1) (e) of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) which allows: Processing necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest.

Special category data is processed under Article 9 (2) (j): Processing is necessary for archiving purposes in the public interest, or scientific and historical research purposes or statistical purposes

Research will only be undertaken where ethical approval has been obtained, where there is a clear public interest and where appropriate safeguards have been put in place to protect data. In line with ethical expectations and in order to comply with common law duty of confidentiality, we will seek your consent to participate where appropriate. This consent will not, however, be our legal basis for processing your data under the GDPR. 

 Your survey data will be shared with the Fieldwork research team:

• Dr Pen Holland, Department of Biology, University of York, pen.holland@york.ac.uk 

• Professor Thorunn Helgason, Department of Biology, University of Edinburgh, thorunn.helgason@ed.ac.uk 

• Suw Charman-Anderson, Ada Lovelace Day and Visiting Associate, University of York, suw.charman-anderson@york.ac.uk

Your data will not be shared with any other external bodies, agencies or service providers, and will not be transferred internationally or to any areas outside of the EEA, except within the research group detailed above.

Individuals’ data will not be subject to any automated decision making or any type of automated profiling.

General University of York Privacy Notice

This general privacy notice is for any individual who provides personal data or special category data to the University of York. It should be read in conjunction with project-specific information. 

For the purposes of this privacy notice, University of York is the Data Controller as defined in the General Data Protection Regulation. We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office and our entry can be found here. Our registration number is: Z4855807.  

How do we keep your data secure?

The University takes information security extremely seriously and has implemented appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect personal data and special category data. Access to information is restricted on a need-to-know basis and security arrangements are regularly reviewed to ensure their continued suitability. For further information see, https://www.york.ac.uk/it-services/security/.   

How do we transfer your data safely internationally?

In certain circumstances, it is necessary to transfer your Personal Data (including Special Category Data) outside the European Economic Area. In respect of such transfers, the University will comply with our obligations under Data Protection Law and ensure an adequate level of protection for all transferred data. 

How long will we keep your data?

The University will retain your data in line with legal requirements or where there is a business need. Retention timeframes will be determined in line with the University’s Records Retention Schedule.   

What rights do you have in relation to your data?

Under the General Data Protection Regulation, you have a right of access to your data, a right to rectification, erasure (in certain circumstances), restriction, objection or portability (in certain circumstances). You also have a right to withdraw consent. For all other requests, see https://www.york.ac.uk/records-management/generaldataprotectionregulation/individualsrights/.  

Questions or concerns

If you have any questions about this privacy notice or concerns about how your data is being processed, please contact the University’s Data Protection Officer at dataprotection@york.ac.uk. 

Right to complain

If you are unhappy with the way in which the University has handled your personal data, you have a right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office. For information on reporting a concern to the Information Commissioner’s Office, see www.ico.org.uk/concerns. 

If you’ve ever been on a science field trip, you’ll know that, in amongst the experiments and data gathering, things can go hilariously wrong. The longer you spend in the field, the more likely you are to have had animals carry off your equipment, experienced unexpected malfunctions, or seen creatures other than your target species appearing in your camera traps. 

We are collecting examples of #fieldworkfails from ecologists, particularly in the UK, and listening to their experiences of working in the field to inform the development of a comedy drama. The first output will be a short film script, but we may also use data collected as the basis for other outputs, including this newsletter. 

Our aims are both to entertain and to increase awareness of ecology as a subject and as a career path. Television and film can have a powerful effect on people’s perceptions of a subject. The X-Files inspired a generation of women to become interested in science, technology, engineering and maths with what is now known as The Scully Effect. Bones encouraged women into science, as has Black Panther’s Shuri. 

Can we do the same for ecology? 

I’m an ecologist! Can I take part?

Yes, you can!

If you have a short anecdote, you can share that with us via our Google form. There are several questions, so feel free to answer as many or as few as you like.

If you’d prefer to have a chat with me, then you can book an interview at a time convenient for you via my Calendly. I’ll send you all our participant information ahead of the call so that you can give informed consent.

If you have any questions, just drop me a line and I’ll be happy to discuss the project with you.

What will this newsletter cover?

I’m going to be chronicling the entire process of writing and making the Fieldwork short film. I’ll talk about my background research, possibly sharing some snippets from my interviewees, and exploring life in a field station.

I’ll also be sharing my journey into the world of comedy writing, delving into the complexities (or simplicities) of character, structure and joke writing. I dabbled in stand-up comedy many years ago, so this isn’t entirely new to me, and I’m very excited by the idea of re-finding my funny.

If you’re interested in comedy writing, then this newsletter is very definitely for you.

How will this newsletter work?

If you are already subscribed to Word Count, you have been automatically subscribed to Fieldwork, but if you’d rather not receive these emails, just change your settings. Equally, if you only want to receive Fieldwork emails, you can unsubscribe from the other sections in those same settings.

I won’t be publishing on a set schedule – news will arrive when it arrives, though I suspect there’ll be more news in the beginning as I get everything set up.

Subscribe now

Fieldwork is part of the International Collaboration on Mycorrhizal Ecological Traits, organised by the University of York, University of Edinburgh, Dartmouth College and Ada Lovelace Day. It is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), Grant Number: NE/S008543/1.