Development hell for freelance writers

We all know the phrase 'development hell' as it applies to the film industry. But you'll be surprised who else besides studio executives and independent producers spends a lot of time there – freelance journalists.

Frankly, if we spent as much time writing as we did developing material, we'd produce more content that Facebook.

Movie projects are born when someone has a great idea. Maybe they have a script they've written and really believe in. Maybe there's a novel or comic strip they can see great visual potential in and own the rights to.

If they're also a mining magnate or dotcom billionaire, they're ten steps ahead of most movie people – they can use their own money to get their movie made exactly the way they want. But most studio execs, indie producers or filmmakers work tirelessly to bring their project to life, often with nothing but belief in the idea to sustain it, forever waiting for The Call.

They have ideas and wish lists for casting, they imagine scenes and occasionally visit locations they fancy. They play their favourite songs and imagine them on the soundtrack. They tell people about it when the opportunity strikes, figuring they never know when somebody who hears the idea will know (or be) somebody important who can get something done. It's a process of occasionally stoking the embers of an idea alive, and it can take years.

It seems easy because we only ever see the success stories – they're the ones that get made, after all. But when they get made, it starts with a phone call or email that sparks off a period of unalloyed productiveness bordering on manic frenzy, a near-panicky period of the fevered business of creation. If you score name actors, they'll have only a certain period of availability. The skies might open up on the day of your big exterior shot. The financier's stocks might take such a battering their accountant convinces them to abandon media investments and go into natural gas fracking.

Even if things go right, the stories we hear from tiny productions of only a few grand right up to those costing hundreds of millions is always the same – there's never enough money or time.

And when your movie's finished, the distributor has the right to completely change it and edit it (unless you're clever or powerful enough to have final cut written into your contract – good luck if you're just starting out). They might buy the finished product and then bury it with no publicity and advertising budget whatsoever after deciding it wasn't worth the investment after all. The executive you've been dealing might leave or get fired, his or her replacement not nearly as excited by your movie as their predecessor.

The process above will be familiar to anyone who's ever written a magazine, newspaper or website article on a freelance basis. It starts with a great idea you think a) is worth sharing with the world, and b) you want to make a living out of.

We're sometimes jealous of our professional colleagues on staff at newspapers, magazines or major websites because they have a platform to write virtually whatever they want (no matter how vacuous or unoriginal) and they can bring the resources of their employers to bear to make it happen.

And not just material resources, either. If you want to interview some important people for a story, which do you think will get you further past their gatekeepers – telling them you're writing for The New York Times/Wired/South China Morning Post/Gawker or saying you're working on an idea you hope to get published somewhere?

After you come up with the great idea for a story, you'll enter the same development period a movie goes through. You'll do research, work a little on the structure, take a lot of notes, maybe have a document dedicated to marketing the idea to prospective buyers.

In some cases you might even write the whole thing just to see where it takes you and have a finished product ready to sell (upside; if somebody buys it it's all ready. Downside; if nobody buys it you've done a whole lot of work for no financial recompense – always shaky ground when you work for yourself).

You might have the perfect outlet for it, one that buys a lot of your work and gives you the go ahead quickly. Or it might descend into your very own development hell, one that can last anything from weeks to years (the oldest 'live' ideas in my stock of stories are easily a decade old).

Something will emerge that will give you a new angle or more material to contribute. You'll make notes as new ideas about it pop into your head unbidden. You'll read and discover more about the topic, find new angles, hear or read the words of people in the field who have the potential to comment or contribute. It will morph, evolve and change with your own tastes and knowledge.

Then one day out of the blue when you pitch or even mention it, you'll get The Call – a commission. Like a movie that suddenly finds itself with financial backing, you'll have an investor, albeit one that pays you when it's all over rather than funding the project up front (that is, pays you after you call and email them a few more times and then go through their accounts payable lady who's only at work Monday and Tuesday. Oh, and she's at a dentists appointment at the moment, can you try her back tomorrow?)

The project will move into the most intensive period it will ever see as you scramble to bring it to fruition. The publication is like the film distributor or financier – they'll probably never give you enough time or money to do it the way you originally conceived, so you'll work day and night to get it done, alternately panicking and cutting corners.

Resources you were counting on will fall through because they're not available until it's too late to use them. More recent developments might have rendered your original thesis outdated or useless. You'll have to kill countless darlings because of time, availability and other constraints but you'll probably also find new ways of doing it better.

Luck, talent and tenacity will see you turn it in before the deadline, and it's then out of your hands. Just like passing it off to a distributor who might bury it, decide to release it next year or re-edit it to get a PG-13 rating, the publication who's paid you for content now owns it, and they can do whatever they like with it.

By the time it reaches an audience an often-indeterminate time later (a process you'll likely have little to no involvement with) it might have been through the hands of an overzealous subeditor who's completely changed the subtext. They might spell your name wrong in the byline. If it's in print it might get chopped carelessly and bloodily in half because of a late ad booking, losing so much content it doesn't even make sense anymore.

Of course, we (aspiring producers and freelance journalists) all toil under such conditions because there's always a chance of being one of the lucky few. Your small indie movie might really catch on, build slowly because of great buzz and end up conquering the cinematic world. Films from Slumdog Millionaire to Beasts of the Southern Wild have done just that.

In the same way, your story might appear in its entirety the way you intended, with your prose intact and the resources you fought so hard to gather in time – interviews and comments by prominent people, images and video clips - present and well-displayed. It might similarly catch on, spread out far and wide throughout the social media universe and make (or maintain) your name.

But whatever your experience of the final result, next time you hear that a movie studio or production company is looking for a development executive, go right ahead and call them. You're well qualified.

Lad mags, porn and objectification

I understand and sympathise with the Lose the Lad Mag movement and the people who support it, but their efforts are misdirected.

Any man will tell you how tempting the lure of naked or half-clothed women is because of lad mags, internet porn and the average billboard. Emotionally and physiologically, we know they appeal to our deeper, reptile brains.

But intellectually, most educated men in the western world know the poses, the big hair, the clothes painstakingly crafted to look like they're falling off and all the digital manipulation that goes on after the picture is taken is a carefully constructed artifice, presenting a cypher no real woman could possibly represent.

Consider the reason we have such trouble staying clear of sugary, salty and fatty foods. In nature (unaided by human ingenuity, that is), deep fried chicken, ice cream and crackers slathered with cream cheese are as rare as eternally teenaged, 36-24-36-shaped women who are constantly sexually receptive and have blemishless skin, gravity defying breasts, heavy lidded eyes and a sultry pout.

But photography, printing, Photoshop, mass-produced corn starch and the refining of sugar have let us surround ourselves with everything that gives us our drives but which nature provides only scarcely. From the genes on up we know how bad it is for us but it just... tastes... so... good.

The image presented by lad mags, porn and their economic cousins are similarly an oversupply of a very rare quality we're programmed to spend our lives seeking but were supposed to find very rarely – surviving instead on real food and real sex appeal.

The objectification path

Here's what the anti-porn and anti-lad mag crowd have right. Whether it's the hardcore kind anyone can find online or the (almost innocent, by comparison) coquettish looks and colour-corrected breasts staring out of lad mags, porn across the whole spectrum provides a big step towards letting men objectify and dehumanise women. A big step, but not the first one.

That first step is as much a part of nature as breathing and sleeping, something that goes back to our grunting, hairy, stone-tool beginnings. It's a woman looking at a powerful, socially worthy man and imagining babies with him. It's a man looking at a young, fertile woman and imagining sex with her.

Of course that's a very simplistic generalisation, but as both visual and sexual creatures our first interaction with a member of the opposite sex in our natural state is to look at them. The factor that restricted further objectification used to be that – long before you could move on to sex with them – you had to navigate the delicate social process that preceded it, whether it was offering her food with soft, assuring vocalisations or taking her to the movies.

Going through that process meant you had to get to know and accept the whole person, which by its very nature removes any trace of objectification. As human society has become more complicated, that process of familiarizing ourselves with potential mates sometimes convinces us they weren't worth pursuing in the first place, no matter how visually attractive we first found them.

Porn (and the technology that enables it, from cave paintings to computers) has always been about taking that step away. As porn says to its consumer; 'here's a stand-in for a real woman; just a body part in some cases, and she's the perfect mate – as receptive as she is attractive. There's no social groundwork to lay to win her over and she doesn't care how fat your are or your social status'.

That means when a man looks at a naked girl in a lad mag or a porn video, he is absolutely objectifying and dehumanizing her. The reason that can be harmful is because as any psychologist will tell you, men who dehumanise women are more likely to harbour a whole spectrum of detrimental intent – from holding negative or sexist attitudes to rape.

Often in sexual assault a woman is reduced to a vagina, a set of breasts, a body, maybe even a stand-in for someone else her attacker really wants to hurt – from his suffocating mother to hatred about his own 'impure' desires. In some ways it's the ultimate in objectification because her heart, mind and the rest of her humanity aren't even considered to exist as she suffers for the object her attacker has made her.

And when internet porn, suggestive billboards, multi-million dollar advertising campaigns for jeans and fragrances, lad mags and beauty sections in womens' magazines also exist, we don't just have the opportunity to objectify women, we're encouraged to.

Looking too closely

So if objectification is the problem, lad mags are certainly responsible. Problem is – as the above paragraph suggests – they're just one head of the hydra. The hearts of those who want to ban them are in the right place, they're just targeting too slender a locus of the whole issue.

But they're easy targets. Stopping online porn is probably impossible at this point, so the next likely offender on the scale is porn in print, produced by highly visible businesses in our own legal jurisdictions against whom we can lobby and protest. It's an effort to show society that objectifying women is not okay, and a worthy one.

But where's the line? Do we ban womens' underwear in department store catalogues? High school dance dresses? Make-up? Do we forbid women from showing an inch of skin like the extreme elements of Islam do, restricting their freedom altogether instead of objectifying them?

There's actually only one place the line can be drawn, only one potential preventative measure to stop the objectification from hurting women as individuals. Broad-strokes institutional measures and blanket bans isn't it.

The line rests with every individual man who might be tempted by a lad mag or porn site and might enjoy himself using them, but who can turn off the computer or close the magazine and go back to his life where women are his family members, co-workers, bosses, children, lovers or friends. He might fantasise about some of women in his life, but it's impossible for him to objectify them by virtue of the fact that he knows them as people, not body parts or fantasy figures.

A well-adjusted man knows a woman in a magazine seemingly begging him for sex is a carefully constructed and empty symbol, and he probably knows very well he's objectifying the real woman who forms its basis by being a consumer of it. It doesn't mean he's going to go out and rape the next woman he sees.

Of course, we have to acknowledge that there are men who will do that, and porn/lad mags/department store catalogues aren't helping – they're making it worse. But it's also why our target to combat the objectification of women can't be one slender facet of its propagation like lad mags (or jeans billboards, or the catwalk model industry), and neither can it be about top-down blocks or bans imposed upon them.

The answer; there's no simple answer

What should we do as a society? That's far less clear – it's probably got a lot to do with healthy sexual education in childhood, exposing young boys to representations of strong women in their lives, breaking the cycle of domestic violence, punishing and judging rapists instead of their victims and making feminism a conversation for (and about) everyone.

Boys are going to grow up seeing naked girls in magazines. They're going to see a consumer culture that places a woman's physical attractiveness as her most important value. They're going to see women in porn videos who say yes to anal sex every time and let their partners ejaculate on their faces, and they're going to think all women do that (girls are going to see that and think so too). Those ships might have well and truly sailed.

The answer is to use information and education to promote the kind of respect well-adjusted men grow up with, and use it early when objectification starts to take effect.

A lot of people die in car crashes. But instead of banning cars, we try to influence behaviour in individuals and change culture – make drink driving something to be ashamed of, educate drivers about road fatigue, etc.

I know – cars provide far more benefit than detriment to society so in cold statistical terms. The same can't be said about lad mags, which merely contribute to a publishing company's bottom line and as critics claim, might do more harm than good socially.

But the point is that banning lad mags is both looking at the problem too narrowly and enforcing top-down measures that will just enhance the effectiveness of every other potential trigger out there. The solution is to be found much farther back in the objectification pathway. It's far more complicated and nuanced than blanket bans, and it should be preventative instead of reactionary.