The picture above is taken from David J Howe's The Target Book, where it has the caption:
When writing his novelisations, Malcolm Hulke would draw up a chart to aid him in the writing process. Reproduced here is his chart for the writing of Doctor Who and the Sea Devils [sic]. The vertical axis to the left shows the number of pages into the book from 0 to 150. Across the chart, it is split into six blocks, each corresponding to an episode of the television script. Up the middle can be seen the chapters in the book, with titles marked in (note that chapter 5 was originally called ‘The Submarine’ before this title was used for chapter 7 instead). The straight diagonal line therefore shows the ideal book. The upper triangle is ‘write tighter – speed up action’ while the lower triangle is ‘spread out, slow it down’. The darker irregular diagonal line was the path that Hulke took when writing the novel. The peaks and troughs of the writing can be seen, with the exciting, fast paced sequences rising quicker than the more paced scenes. It is, however, unclear what the horizontal axis at the top represents. It is not time as each episode was 25 minutes in duration and this shows each episode as containing 45 ‘units’.
My first question is whether the scripts for each episode were 45 pages long. My second question is why Howe finds the second half of chapter 2, a collection of conversations between Trenchard, the Master and the Doctor, quite so 'exciting' and 'fast-paced' (though I must concede it's one of my favourite bits of the book too). I'm guessing that the 'straight diagonal line' isn't 'the ideal book' but actually the perfect one-to-one fitting of the script into the novelisation, with the bits where the line goes flat being TV sections that he's largely excised and the spikes being sections largely created new for the book. That would mean that any time he finds himself above the 'straight diagonal line' he's actually giving himself the instruction to 'write tighter - speed up action' in order to not go over his page count, something he quite dramatically does from about halfway through Part Four until halfway through Part Six. Not a fan of Part Five was Hulke. Anyway, I love it and, just in case I've come across as a bit rude, I am profoundly grateful to David J Howe for exposing me to it.
Click here for inklings about the actual novelisation.
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