Hi Charlie,
I signed up to the Writers Bureau correspondence course in 1996 and they have been a great help in honing the craft. The wonderful thing about WB is there is no cut-off point for graduation, so if you have a full and busy life, the assignments can be done when you have time. You read the module, do the assignment, post it off, and get it back marked by a published writer. My tutor is a lady called Margot Raneri. The idea of the course, after a while, is to turn each assignment into a piece that can be submitted to magazine/newspaper publishers. When I joined, the deal was that if you didn't earn back the subscription cost by the time you had completed the course, they would give you a full refund. I earned the money back in a relatively short period of time (I think it's somewhere in the region of £300.00 to join nowadays). Since I'm always working on a project of some sort, I still haven't got to the end of the course! Margot must be wondering where I've gone.
On how I thought up Anne Droyd, I'm afraid I was being very cold and calculating at the time (again it was in 1996). I had seen script writer Dennis Potter's final interview, recorded just weeks before his death, and in that he lamented the state of British television and how "pappy soaps and mini series" dominated the drama output. He said if he were a new writer pitching a one-off play for television today they would show him the door.
I took this to heart and realised that if I was going to succeed in that climate, I would have to conjure up something marketable and formulaic. So I started thinking of all the things I had loved in my own childhood that were like that. The starting point for Anne was The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, The Famous Five, Grange Hill and elements of Doctor Who. I also fondly recalled children's TV drama that had been adapted from popular books, such as Stig of the Dump, Chocky, Aliens in the Family and The Tripods.
Four children and one of them is an android was the initial idea. I chose to make one of the girls the droid because traditionally it tended to be a boy, and I gave her a marketable name. Originally I was going to spell the surname Dreud so that it reflected the German spelling of names like Freud, but then changed it to Droyd so that children brousing their local bookshop would get it straight away.
For a full account of Anne's creation, go to the Files section of the site, and to see early drafts and covers, go to Photos.
By the way, Charlie, my copy of Baffling Unoriginal arrived in the post the other day. I'll let you know what I think of it once I've had chance to read it.
Best,
Will.
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