I've had an idea

It might even be good.

Hands up who knows what the UK’s most watched TV program was last year? No, not the New Year fireworks display over the Thames (second place). Nor Adolescence, the drama about a boy drawn into the ‘manosphere’ who murders a classmate, that was deemed so prescient for our times that the Prime Minister recommended it in Parliament (third place). The correct answer is Celebrity Traitors with over 17 million viewers. Why am I telling you this? Because I think I’ve had one of my stupid ideas.

Long-term readers will know I do sometimes have daft ideas, such as the idea to write a children’s book with my children, when they were of an age to read such things. It was fun, but cost me a fortune and literally turned my hair grey trying to liaise with printers in China and warehouses in the States. Then there was the influencer box project of last year, which saw me frantically sanding pieces of driftwood to fashion into room key fobs for the fictional hotel in my last book. (And which we’re redoing now in Spanish, or rather Maria is – see below).

Literally ‘What the sea hides’. Pretty huh?

And if I have had another of my big stupid ideas, this one is definitely the biggest and stupidest to date.

But what is Celebrity Traitors, for those who don’t watch TV, and possibly also live in a windswept cave somewhere in the mountains with no WiFi? Celebrity Traitors is the celebrity version of the TV gameshow where contestants are put in a castle in the Scottish Highlands and divided up into either Faithfuls or Traitors. The Traitors have to lie about their status, pretending to be Faithfuls at all times, except at night when they get to ‘murder’ a real Faithful and kick them out the show. The Faithfuls have to work out who the Traitors are and kick them out the show at the round-table banishments. My mum told me to watch it, and while I sometimes nod along at her entertainment suggestions – because I’m a cool guy who’s more down-with-the-youf than hangin’-with-the-grannies – I did sit down to watch this one. And it had me hooked right away.

So much so that we started to play our own version, on family holidays (in our version we draw roles from a hat so that no one knows anyone’s status. The traitor has 24 hours to murder a faithful, by placing a special sticker on a person, or on something they eat or drink. The special sticker is kept in a prominent, public place, and taking it without being seen is a challenge in itself). The actual TV show has higher production values. It has an interesting history too. The British (and now US too) version of the show is based on a Dutch reality TV show of the same name – De Verraders (you didn’t think you’d be learning Dutch today did you?) but that in turn is based on a game called Mafia, invented by a Russian psychology researcher at Moscow State University in 1987. He’s recently complained that, though the show is clearly based on the mechanics of the game he designed, the BBC never credited his work. I also failed to credit him in our family holiday version, but I think I’ve rather got away with it.

This is from the UK version of the show. The US host is Alan Cumming

Fascinating as this is, you may be wondering what it has to do with you, or at least books and writing, and other stuff I usually talk about. We are, I promise, within spitting distance of the point. Just one more diversion to go.

A few years ago I wrote a book, in just one week. You may know it. I was left at home while Maria took the kids away to visit family. We didn’t have a dogsitter, so I got the job. I was a bit bored and lonely, if I’m honest, and my way to pass the week was to see if I could write a whole book in one week. I didn’t have a plan for what to write, I just dived in. It was quite a weird experience, creatively. And after five or six days (I can’t remember which) I had 20,000 words of a story with a beginning, middle and end. I sent it out to everyone on my newsletter for free, but also bunged it up on Amazon – and pretty much forgot about it.

But, over the subsequent years, I’ve often received emails from readers who tell me how much they like it. Sometimes they come in the form of ‘why don’t you turn this into a full novel?’ And sometimes it’s just a simple, I really enjoyed this book. These are very nice emails to get, but also slightly annoying, because my normal books take months or sometimes years to write, and there’s definitely some that are less popular than my book-in-a-week. What else? When I sent a questionnaire recently, I asked which of my books you’ve enjoyed the most. And to my surprise, the book-in-a-week did rather well. And then the final straw, a few weeks back our screen agent decided to acquire the rights to this book (again, leaving several full-length novels on the shelf).

I don’t really know how these two very different strands of thought have collided in my head. But that’s what seems to have happened. So here’s the big idea:

We’re going to take six bestselling authors and lock them in a luxury villa on the Cantabrian coast for one week. We’ll divide them into teams of two, and each team will have just seven days to think up, plot and write a 20,000-word novella. They won’t know in advance what they’re writing, nor who they’re writing with. They won’t even know what genre they’ll be writing in. And we’ll film everything. The teams working out how to work together. The creative arguments. The plot twists we casually drop on them at breakfast. The panic as each day’s deadline approaches.

I’ve talked a lot about The Traitors, but really it’s more like ‘Bake Off’, but for books – skilled storytellers forced to work under pressure in a way that lets you see the process. But unlike that show, where you just get to watch the judges scoffing the cakes at the end, in this one you get to be the judge.

At the end of the week the three novellas will get bundled together as a single volume. Readers/viewers then buy the book, read all three stories, and vote for the winner. The show asks a question — which team wrote the best story? — and the only way to answer it is to read the book. The whole thing is a real competition, with one simple rule: Best story wins.

We’re calling it: The WriteOff. Maria and I came up with the idea when driving down to Sevilla for a self-publishing conference. It was an eight-hour drive, so we had enough of the details worked out to ask a few fellow authors if they liked the idea. We thought they wouldn’t, and the idea would die right there. But actually they were intrigued. I think, like me, they found the idea of just writing, just seeing what comes out was interesting creatively. And the thought of being forced to write with someone they didn’t know – but who was also an experienced novelist – was interesting to them. And then the thought of being on an actual TV show – but on it doing something you were good at – that was appealing too.

So when we drove back from Sevilla (another eight hours) we had a potential cast lined up already. Quite serious authors. Between them they’ve sold well over five million books. So we started looking into the other aspects of the idea. Where would we host them? Who would film it? How much would all this cost?

And I must admit, at every step I confidently expected something to come up that rendered this a fun idea in theory, but not in practice. Yet at every stage that’s not what’s happened. We’ve actually been able to develop the idea into something that feels like a serious project, that just might work. So much so that I’m telling you about it – the very first time the idea has gone properly out into the world.

Cantabria seems a suitably inspiring location to film the show

I’m not going to go into too much detail here about how the show could work. I will later, if it passes the final test. Because we’ve discovered that launching an actual TV show is quite expensive (who knew?) And we don’t have any idea what real people – you, at least – actually think of it. So we’re going to test that by running a Kickstarter campaign.

The idea is both to raise at least some of the funds to pay for the show, but equally important, to get a sense of whether people actually like the sound of it, and might want to watch it. When you back a Kickstarter you get rewards. In our case it will be the book that the show produces – the three stories written by each team. So if a lot of people back it, we’ll get a sense they’d like to watch. If they don’t, we’ll know that too. Basically our thinking is: If enough people back it, we make the show. If not, the whole thing quietly disappears and I go back to writing books in the normal way, like a sensible person.

I’ll have a lot more to say about all of this in the coming weeks – the cast, the villa, the production company we’ve teamed up with, why I think this might genuinely work. For now I just wanted to tell you it’s happening, because you lot were here when I wrote the original book in a week, and it feels right that you should be the first to know.

I’d genuinely love to know what you think. I’ve been too close to this idea for a few weeks now, which is always dangerous. Do you get it? Would you watch it? Would you back a Kickstarter if the reward was the book produced by the show? Or does the whole thing sound like watching six people typing (similar to my last big TV idea: Celebrity Watching Paint Dry?)

I should add that I don’t expect, nor plan, for this to replace my writing. I’m pretty sure my fondness for these odd side-quests feeds back into the books I write, giving me experiences I wouldn’t otherwise have had, as well as adding to the grey-hair count. Plus I’ve still got two books in the pipeline coming out this year (more news on that soon), and I’m writing another at the moment. But I’m very keen to know if you ‘get’ the idea, or if this has just left you baffled. If this is ever to get out of the idea stage and actually become a real TV show, it’s going to need a bit of help from folk like you.

So let’s hear it! Good idea, bad idea? Totally crazy or just might work? Reply to this email or comment below. And I’ll be back in touch soon.

Gregg

P.S. You might be wondering what my book-in-a-week was - it’s on Amazon as Killing Kind. I subsequently did a second book-in-a-week (more dogsitting) which is also available as Falling From Grace. As it happens, the screen agent took both.

P.P.S. You might also – if you're better read than I am – know these two books aren't the first, nor most famous, to be written very quickly. In 1816, eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley was stuck indoors at a villa on Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and a man called Polidori, after a volcano in Indonesia had ruined the European summer. To pass the time, Byron proposed they each write a ghost story. Mary Shelley's became Frankenstein. Polidori's became The Vampyre, the first vampire story in English. (Byron and Percy both gave up - quitters). So the format – bored writers, stuck in a villa, daring each other to produce something under pressure – isn't exactly new. We're just turning the cameras on.