When did you decide you wanted to be a screenwriter? 

I left school at 14, studied part-time at a secretarial college and then went to art college. I stayed for several years, doing painting, and ended up at the Royal College of Art, where I switched to film. I loved painting but was concerned about earning a living and didn’t want to teach. At the film school you had to write and make a film. Someone from the BBC saw mine and I went and became a script reader [for them]. After about a year I transferred to the serials department and created a show about nurses called Angels. I spent six months in hospitals dressed up as a nurse researching for it! 

I was at the BBC for three years or so. I didn’t like the civil service ambience and the fact you had to give respect to people who ran departments even if they didn’t earn it or deserve it.  But I loved the writers. They were drunk and they were late and often angry and I thought, “I’d like to be like them”. But I had no educational qualifications so I thought, “I’ve got to cash in the chips I’ve earned” – which was that I had created a soap opera – so I wrote to Coronation Street begging [for work]. It was difficult because first of all they didn’t have many women writers and, more significantly, I came from the south, but in the end I got on. It was a fantastic apprenticeship. I stayed for about three years. Then I knew that writing was what I wanted to do.  

Do you draw on your background in painting when writing a screenplay? 

Yes, because it’s a visual medium. Basically, you are writing pictures supported by dialogue and most of the time after you’ve done your own first draft, before you’ve delivered it, you go in and take dialogue out. You very rarely add it. I can write visual sequences that last four or five pages and there’s actually no dialogue. I don’t mean a montage, I mean telling a story in pictures.  

Is there a set writing process that you tend to follow? 

It varies depending on the project. If you’re doing a dramatisation of a book, you’ll read the book several times, make some notes, try to work out what the heart of it is and what you’re going to have to leave out. When you’re doing an original piece, which I tend to do more, you have to start from scratch. So you do a lot of walking around and processing, thinking about the story, thinking of the characters, of incidents. I often write them on a huge piece of wrapping paper – “She gets blown up by the bomber” or “He leaves her”, for example – and then number them, order them and start to grope towards the actual story. Sometimes it comes more easily than that, sometimes not. There’s an expression I often use to new writers: “Never confuse the activity of writing with writing”.  When people talk about sitting staring at a blank sheet of paper, that’s invariably because they haven’t done the thinking time.

Should you do all your thinking before you start writing? 

No, because then it’s like homework. If you think of it like a six-burner cooker, on one burner you put the characters, on another you put the plot, on another the theme and so on. When you’re thinking you have to get them all simmering and then you start writing. You don’t overwork it because then it will just go the way you expect. You have to allow your characters to live and breath and do unpredictable things 

Do you prefer writing for film or television and why? 

You have more control with television. It’s more author-led. In cinema, and particularly because the culture of cinema has been so influenced by America, the writer tends to be more of a hired gun and the auteurism of the director is supreme. It’s a fantastic, exciting thing to write for the cinema, but it’s frustrating when your work is rewritten. For me it’s a question of trying to combine the two. 

In Focus: Learning to write stories visually 

Take a bad film and a good film – in your own estimation, not anyone else’s – and apply this to both.

Watch the first 10 to 15 minutes, then switch it off and think: what do I know? What have I been told? What’s the agenda of the film? What’s at stake? Who are the characters? Do I care?

And do that every 15 minutes or half an hour until the end of the film. That way you start to see how the story has been processed and finessed and whether or not it has held your attention.

In a bad film you can think, “That’s why that failed” or “I already know that – why are they insulting my intelligence?” But a good film is thrilling and goes a way you weren’t expecting! 

Paula Milne: The Personal As Political runs from Thursday 12 September to Wednesday 3 October at BFI Southbank.

Main image, from White Heat, courtesy of the BBC. Second image, of Paula Milne, and third image, from The Politician's Wife, courtesy of BFI.

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