As an answer to that question – and hoping to help others on a similar journey – here’s an overview of how my writing partner Jon and I are currently developing an idea for television.

When I signed up with my agent three years ago, she explained that in all likelihood it would take about five years of solid continuous graft before there was even a possibility that I could give up my day job and survive on my screenwriting income.

My teenage friends and I dreamed about driving across the Sahara. We’d read articles about the Paris-Dakar rally, or (mis)adventures on Overland trucks from Cairo to Cape Town.

If you google “how to write a logline”, no doubt you’ll hit on various diagrams, paradigms and formulas which promise to be the miracle cure for that stonking screenwriting headache which plagues every writer.

As screenwriters, how can we persuade a teenage audience to switch off their quick hit, 15-second TikToks, and concentrate on one long-form movie or TV show?

That is what commissioners, producers, readers and development execs are all clamouring for: that truly authentic voice, newly discovered, blisteringly fresh, painfully honest.

For the last two years, I’ve been working with Sudanese writers remotely, helping them storyline their experiences of South Sudan’s conflict into radio drama.

Production often complains about writers: not because they don’t like writers, but because they feel writers speak and think in a different language.