Writing for stage and screen

My belief is that it's all about story and that's not shared by other writers necessarily. Story is the best vehicle to understand anything and that's what makes human beings unique. We make sense of the world by telling stories. I've become firmly of the belief that plotting and the narrative is primary and then anything else - style, tone, dialogue - comes second...

That was a brilliant experience. For the first time sitting at the back of an auditorium and having an audience respond to your work. It sounds superficial, but it's not. You're connecting some truth with people you've never met...

If aliens ever landed here, the one thing they really wouldn't understand is why thousands of people get in this dark room and pretend something is real when it's not in order to make sense of the world. I love that...
I will be brutal on myself and my script. Even if there's something that I think is beautiful, that I think is hilarious, if it's not working, it will go. I will kill it.'

James Graham, playwright and scriptwriter, whose This House was a smash success at the National Theatre in London and whose Coalition was on TV last week, in the Observer