So there I am, the young unpublished writer in his 20s working on his novel, Such Lunatic Gods. What genre am I writing in? Science fiction, of course, because that’s what I like reading about. It’s a natural progression, obviously, because I’ve sold a few articles and short stories so it’s time for a full-length piece.

I finish it, send it off to publishers, and the rejection slips mount up. I try for an agent, however, and land one. Whoopee! He thinks I’m the greatest thing since sliced bread and promises an exciting future. I start working on the follow-up book. Yet time passes with nothing happening. I’m young, impatient, expecting results. But no publisher biting. I finish with the agent, resigned that I’m a failure and done with writing. Years pass.

I’m in a dead-end job one day listening to the radio. An ad comes on saying that the local commercial station, Radio Clyde seeks comedy writers for a planned new series, Six of the Best. I’m not a comedy writer and I’ve never written for radio, but the urge is still there. I dig out the typewriter. I write a sketch called The Curse of Hitler’s Moustache, and glory be, I’m selected to join one of the writing teams. That leads to publicity since I’m an oddity, an Indian Scotsman, and I get a phone call from a local Asian arts group asking would I be interested in writing a play for them? Never written for theatre before, but what the hell. The result was Citizen Singh which we took to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to great acclaim.

Then the producer of the earlier radio show asks if I’d do a radio play for him as he’d moved to the BBC. Hey, when did I become a dramatist? I’m a writer of science fiction novels. Seems not, because they tell me I’m really good at writing dialogue and was born to write scripts. I wrote Sick as a Parrot for Hamish Wilson.

More stage and radio plays follow. Siege Mentality, Cowboys & Indians, A MsSiah, the Flirt and These Magic Words. I become a local celebrity, appearing in newspapers, pontificating on radio and TV.

I get another agent, and this one specialises in TV sitcoms. He wangles two sitcom pilots with the BBC; Coconuts and Doc, which is very rewarding financially. But I know the big money lies in cinema and not TV, so I write a film script, Disciple, and it wins an award, the Scottish Screen/DNA Films First Draft Award.

So, I’m not rich and I’m not famous, but I am a writer and that’s all I ever set out to be. Not the kind of writer I expected to be, a novelist, but a dramatist. If I’d known this when I started I could have saved a lot of time, but I’d been blinkered by books. I’d thought that to be a writer I needed ink on paper, a book on a shelf. I’d been misled by my naivety into imagining there was only one kind of writer and prose was what they wrote.

But the likelihood is that dramatic writing will surpass prose in the future, if it has not already done so, as we become a more visual species who rely on seeing rather than reading. This shouldn’t deter you as you write your short story or novel, because it spells opportunity and that is a good thing.

You won’t know if you can do it till you try it, so the next time you begin, instead of typing in Chapter One, try Scene One.

Brief Bio = Gurmeet Mattu is an award-winning Scots-based comedy writer with works in prose, comic books, theatre, radio, TV, and cinema.