Interview with Winter's End writer Will Griffin...

Writer Will Griffin
1 - How did Winter's End first come about? How/where did the story and ultimately the script come from?

The head of ITV West had seen The Christmas Eve Snowfall, which I’d written and Paul had directed, and asked us to make another short to make up a double bill so both films could be broadcast in a half hour slot. So we started throwing ideas around. Paul wanted to set it during the war, and he also came up with the dance in the village hall. I wanted to do something about the grief process, and I’d been watching a lot of Twilight Zone so I liked the idea of a mysterious stranger turning up out of nowhere to deliver a life lesson. We bounced stuff back and forth, which was fun but also kind of frustrating because we both had our own ideas about where the story should go, what the tone should be. But we met in the middle, and once we had the outline in place I slapped in the dialogue and the details, and a few tweaks later we were done.  

2 - Do you have an approach to writing?  Long thought processes, notes, outlines, characters?  

I like to think a lot – too much, because I’m easily distracted and I don’t write as much as I should. It’s so much easier to watch a movie or buy stuff on eBay than it is to sit down and write. But anyway, I like ideas to stew in my brain for a long time before I get anything down on paper. I get really vivid visuals that way, I get almost trance-like at times. Then I bash out whatever’s been swimming around in my head, in short bursts like bullet points. Then I think some more, and eventually crack on with the hard part, which is fleshing it all out. I don’t do too many notes because I find the part of the process between the initial ideas and the completed thing pretty tortuous, so I like to be surprised as much as possible, to ease the pain.

3 - How do you deal with exposition in your stories?  What do you find is the best way to get information across?

I hate exposition. Next to dialogue it’s the thing I struggle with most, and it’s a difficult part of the story to get across without grinding the whole thing to a halt for an info-dump segment. You have to hide this stuff in a funny moment, or a character bit, or dress it up somehow so it doesn’t come off as a lump of information. It’s like a Kinder egg, so you have a crappy little nugget hidden inside something tasty. Basically, watch how it’s done in Back To The Future and anything written by Joss Whedon, and that’s how you do it.  

4 - Did the time constraints for TV of 10 minutes help or hinder you in any way?

I guess it helped when it came to the discipline of the plot, in the same way that a limited word count in a short story helps, because there just isn’t time to go off on tangents. But I like tangents, so it was kind of a pain in the ass in a way. Making the characters three-dimensional in such a short space of time was the hardest part, but I was really happy with the way it turned out, and I learned from it. Having to lose dialogue when we were shooting wasn’t as hard as I thought it’d be, even though some of my favourite lines had to go due to time constraints – it was actually pretty interesting to see how the practical process of bringing words on paper to life affects the script.  

5 - How do you know when to release information throughout the story? What about character's actions and choosing the best time for the audience to be privy to certain info?

That’s one of those things that isn’t governed by rules, at least for me. It’s something that I discover organically when the story’s going down on paper – sometimes the characters and plot tell you where they’re going, sometimes you tell them. It’s give and take. Hopefully it works out by the time you get to the end. That probably sounds pretentious, but that’s how it is for me anyway.

6 - Dialogue.  How much and what to say?  Thoughts?  

That’s kind of the same thing. I like to keep it fairly tight, but you don’t want to sacrifice nice little character tics for the sake of expediency, unless you’re really limited by time. I suppose the notes you want to hit are: keep your characters distinct from one another, give them individual voices. Don’t have them blurt out plot points when you can talk around that stuff and reveal it more carefully, don’t verbalise everything.

  7 - How to you polish?  Rewrite? Adjust?  Time scales?  Do you write fast or slow?  Do you just try to get something down on paper then rework it or do you try to get it near perfect as it goes down?

I always used to work sentence by sentence, polishing as I went, which was a really agonising process and made my stuff pretty stilted in retrospect. I didn’t like the idea of rushing through something in rough and then going back over and over it, revising and improving. Now, though, that’s how I do it. It just makes sense – it’s so much more of an incentive to open Word and have parts of a story, bits of dialogue, even chunks that say “PUT THE BIG TWIST HERE” when I have no idea what that twist is. Because I’m good at finding excuses to fiddle, working quickly really appeals to me. Plus it’s a great way to stumble across ideas you didn’t know you had, it takes the story in unexpected directions.  

8 - Any "rules" you like to keep at the back of your head, governing how you might write things?  Start scenes as late as possible, etc.

Not really – there are guidelines that are sensible to follow, but if you cram your ideas into a pre-set framework you’re only going to end up with formula. It depends what kind of thing you’re writing. A low-key character piece is going to be paced and structured differently to a slasher flick. If you’re David Koepp then you’re going to follow a different pattern than if you’re Charlie Kaufman. I go by – if it feels right to me, then great. If it clicks in my head, then I’m happy.

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