Est. 2016Northern Spain
GREGG DUNNETT
Spring 2026 · Dispatches
Nº 03 · The Experiment · In development

The Write-
Off.

The most ambitious side project yet.

We're trying to make a TV show. It might not work. Here's what it is and why we're doing it anyway.

For the full pitch, the format, the authors, and the campaign, the show has its own site at thewriteoffshow.co.uk →

01 — The idea, more or less in one breath

Eight bestselling authors come to a villa on the Cantabrian coast of Spain. They're split into four teams of two — most of them strangers — and handed professional book covers for stories that don't exist yet. Then they get exactly one week to write them. Every day brings a new deadline; every night a secret panel of editors rates the day's work and hands down the verdict over breakfast. One team won't make it to the end of the week. When the final deadline hits, the four finished stories are published together as a single book — and this is where you come in: you read them, and you vote on the winner. A big silly trophy and mucho kudos for the winning pair.

The whole thing is filmed and edited into a TV series. Which is the ambitious part — see below.

02 — Where this came from

A few years ago I was at home for a week on my own, dogsitting. María had taken the kids to Spain. I was bored and a bit lonely and — another side project — decided to see if I could write a book in a week. The experience was… weird. Very intense, an idea that just seemed to appear from nowhere. The result was Killing Kind — a 20,000-word thriller that ended up being the free book I use to grow my newsletter. People still email me about it, and recently we signed a deal for the screen rights.

It all got me thinking. It's clearly possible to write a book in one week that people actually like. What could we do with that thought? The idea was obvious — do it again, but bigger, and with cameras.

There's a famous precedent for the idea. In the summer of 1816, the poet Lord Byron rented a villa on Lake Geneva and invited some friends. The weather was terrible — a volcano had filled the atmosphere with dust, and it became known as the year without a summer — and they ended up stuck inside for days. To pass the time, Byron suggested they each write a ghost story. Two of them, Percy Shelley and Byron himself, gave up (quitters). Mary Shelley, though, she wrote Frankenstein.

The point isn't that we're going to produce Frankenstein. The point is that interesting things sometimes happen when you put writers somewhere together with a constraint and a deadline.

03 — Why I'm making it

Like a lot of people, I quite like watching shows like The Traitors, or Bake Off, or Taskmaster. Sometimes even Love Island — though I'd never admit to that in public. But sometimes they feel a bit empty and soulless. I also like learning stuff — it's one of the things I've enjoyed the most about nearly fifteen years of writing novels, coming to understand how stories work, and how much I have yet to learn.

I'm hoping this show can combine all that. Stories have form, shape, rules, textures, tropes and beats. Any author who's become a bestseller will know this either consciously or by feel. I think readers will be interested to learn about them, to see inside the process. And if we can put it all together — the fun of watching a reality show combined with that little thrill of learning something interesting — I think we could have something really special.

I also think there's something a bit wrong with the current situation on social media where book influencers can earn more for holding up a book on screen for thirty seconds than the person who spent a year writing it. I wonder if we can help change that.

04 — What it isn't

This isn't a reality show built around screaming rows. It's lighter than that — closer in spirit to Bake Off or Taskmaster than to Big Brother, with the warmth and the absurd British humour you'd hope for from putting eight writers in a villa together. It might be quite niche — readers and writers will probably love it more than the general TV audience would. Which is exactly what we have to disprove: TV only commissions shows when someone can show them the audience already exists. So that's what we're doing — gathering readers, one name at a time. The goal is 100,000 of them before we sit down with the commissioners: a big round number, but a crowd that size is impossible to ignore.

05 — Will this actually happen?

This is, by some distance, the most ambitious thing I've ever tried to make. It's also expensive, complicated, and depends on a lot of moving parts coming together at roughly the right time — including persuading the people who commission television that a show about books can work. (We think it can. We just have to prove it.)

It might not work.

But it might. And the main reason we're trying is that it's fun. A creative adventure that might or might not come together but is worth attempting either way.

If you'd like to be part of how it comes together, add your name at thewriteoffshow.co.uk — it's free, it takes about twenty seconds, and every name makes the case a little harder to ignore.

If it doesn't work, I'll just keep on writing books…

Either way — thanks for being curious enough to read this far.

★ The show's own site

The full pitch lives over here.

The format week-by-week, the mystery authors, the campaign to prove readers would watch — plus a Book Club to keep you going while TV makes its mind up.

thewriteoffshow.co.uk Visit the WriteOff site →