It didn't help the film get made but did make me feel just a little less at the mercy of other people's

It didn't help the film get made, but did make me feel just a little less at the mercy of other people's apparently random decisions.We held our breath as the head of drama at Channel 4 read it. "This one's not for us"; "More an Eighties idea than a real Nineties one" ; "Good luck with placing this elsewhere"; and my favourite, beautifully crafted to damn with the faintest of praise, "This script has some merits..." I wore the T-shirt to meetings and everyone got a good laugh out of it until I pointed to one of their own phrases. The BBC wanted it, then they didn't, then they did again, as successive purges swept the drama department of commissioning editors.After a couple of years of this, I printed up a T-shirt of choice phrases from the rejection letters piling up on my desk. Along the way, I was lucky enough to come across Stephen Garret, a producer with what was then a small production company who seemed smitten with the script. I was completely crushed.There were many such meetings over the next six years, though none that attained such a benchmark of thoughtlessness and arrogance - and even the least interested producer pays for his own drink. He dropped me off at a Tube station in his big Alfa and I never heard from him again No reasons given, no phone calls returned.

The script, said the producer, was the best thing he had read in six months He was interested I glowed. Finally, I travelled up to London as a Writer, capital letter and all. I remember everything about it - right down to the fact that I ended up buying the drinks - because it was my first grown-up meeting. Just a pile of paper.I handed it in to my agent, who was effusive and then .. nothing A producer rang up, wanting to meet me in a pub after work.

It was, after all, the only physical proof of six months' graft until the film got made And that was how it was to remain for many years. I was secretly more proud of the sheer bulk of paper than anything else, and would pick it up and weigh it satisfyingly in my hand every time I passed it on the desk. Yet by the time I got to "the end", Among Giants was more than 160 pages long - at least 40 pages (and therefore as a film 40 minutes) too long. Five films later, I am still waiting for it to happen again.When I began the process, my biggest fear was running out of material in 30 pages. This, I thought, is the real thing, what writing is all about. By the time they had stopped dictating to me, I was exhausted and had "written" 15 pages without conscious thought It is the nearest to pure writing I have experienced. I appeared to be nothing more than a conduit for their conversations.

Gradually, I realised it was the people surviving and even thriving in the midst of these ruins who were the real giants.One day as I was writing, the characters began talking to each other. I wrote one scene to be shot on the top of a gasometer and a love scene that takes place in the middle of a disused cooling tower, its cascades of water becoming a modern, industrial Eden. I began to write scenes that were almost impossible to shoot (yet somehow were shot) which put the landscape at the heart of the film. To me, Sheffield had just such resonances: instead of Roman palaces, there were cooling towers, gasometers, electricity pylons - monoliths bearing testament to an industrial age that had crumbled, leaving nothing but its rusting archaeology and the people living in its huge shadows.And are these structures ugly? Are electricity pylons, designed by Gilbert Scott - whose other works include Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral and Battersea Power Station - really just bird-killers, as my godmother so trenchantly called them? To me, the stride of a pylon across the moors resonates as much about the spirit of an industrial age as a Georgian house reflects the refinement and order of its era. On a trip to Jordan, I visited Petra, where Bedouin tribes were camping out in the remains of vast Roman and Nabataean palaces cut into the rock.