Gwyneth Hughes interview

After two high profile true-life dramas for ITV (Cherished and Mysterious Creatures) Gywneth Hughes is one of the hottest TV drama writers around. Her new five part serial for BBC and HBO, Five Days, which starts in the UK on 23 January, looks set to confirm her status. I spoke to her earlier this week about Five Days and how her background as a documentary maker has informed her writing.

Can you describe your approach to writing an original story? Do you plot it all out first?

I don’t plot it out at all. I’m not sure how unusual that is but I do very little storylining. I have an idea about the story and an almost musical sense of what key it’s in and what the emotional temperature will be. But when I wrote the first episode of Five Days I had no idea what would happen in the subsequent four. I can do storylining – I had to when I wrote on The Bill – but I invariably throw it out once I start writing so there’s not much point. Stephen King talks about writing being almost like archaeology, where it feels as though you’re excavating a story that already exists, and that’s how it seems to me.

Five Days: written by Gwyneth Hughes, directed by Otto Bathurst and Simon Curtis.