RTD Spills the Beans

The BBC Writer's Room has interviewed Doctor Who fanatic, Russell T Davies.The interview covers 7 pages, so it's very long. I have included a few questions below

In your book The Writer's Tale, you say that writer's block for you means not having any ideas at all. Has that ever happened to you?
I imagine writer's block to be like an empty head, and it is a thing that terrifies you your whole life, actually. Journalists always say "Do you ever think you'll run out of ideas?" and you go "Shut up, don't even say that." It's like saying Candyman three times, you just don't even want anyone to say it. You do get enormously stuck trying to get it out of your head in the right order, in the right way, with the right words. There's a lot of times when I'm not writing, when my sister would probably say "Oh he's got writer's block", but it's not what I think writer's block is. It's not that you've got nothing, it's like you've got too much, so it won't take the right shape or it won't behave. So sometimes all of that gangs up on you, and stops you, and actually a break is probably the best thing to do. I think if writers' blocks are the same, just go away and have a couple of days off and eventually it sorts itself out.

How much do you plan what you write?
It's sort of half-planned and half-improvised. I'm in a really lucky position because being an executive producer, I'm there all the time. So I think about it all day and every day. I've got every option going through my head all day, every day. But in the end the story tells itself to you. You sort of look at them and you think well Rose Tyler loves being with the Doctor, and it's just common sense, there's no other ending, she's never going to choose to leave. I'm never going to kill her, so you've got to invent two parallel universes and split them up, and it's got to be that big. You know she can't be injured or lost or something like that, she's got to be safe with her parents, and you literally end up inventing a whole parallel world in order to solve a plot problem.

Are there any writers from the old Doctor Who series who are a great influence on you?
Robert Holmes, he was the greatest old Doctor Who writer. And it's a tragedy really, because he was a genre writer and when the history of drama is written he won't even be a footnote, apart from among Doctor Who fans. He was a brilliant writer. If you don't know your Doctor Who there's a story called The Talons of Weng Chiang, and the first episode of that, every line is perfect, every line is funny, or dark... There's not a word wasted. It's a masterpiece of writing, and good for Doctor Who fans keeping his memory alive, because he's dead now. If he'd been alive we'd have signed him up straight away, he was an absolute genius.

Read the full interview here.

View Paul Cornell's interview here.
View Chris Chibnall's interview here.

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