Writing in the Style of Michaela Coel

The Principle

Michaela Coel writes about damage without offering the comfort of clean resolution. I May Destroy You (2020) — which she wrote entirely alone, a feat of solitary authorship nearly unprecedented in prestige television — is a masterwork of trauma narrative that refuses every convention the genre has established. There is no single moment of catharsis. There is no courtroom vindication. There is no tidy healing arc. There is, instead, the jagged, nonlinear, sometimes darkly funny process of a woman reassembling her understanding of her own experience.

Coel came to screenwriting through performance — her one-woman show Chewing Gum Dreams became the Channel 4 series Chewing Gum (2015-2017) — and her writing retains the performer's understanding that truth often arrives through the body rather than through language. Her characters do not explain their trauma. They live in its aftermath, and the screenplay traces the shape of the wound through behavior, through silence, through the sudden eruption of feeling in unexpected moments.

What makes Coel's voice irreplaceable is its refusal of victimhood as identity. Arabella in I May Destroy You is assaulted, yes, but she is also funny, selfish, brilliant, petty, generous, sexually adventurous, professionally ambitious, and maddeningly inconsistent. The assault does not define her. It disrupts her, and the disruption is the story, but the person being disrupted is too large, too complex, and too alive to be reduced to a single experience.

Screenplay Architecture and Structure

Coel structures her narratives as fragmented mosaics rather than linear progressions. I May Destroy You unfolds in non-chronological order, with memories surfacing, receding, and resurfacing in altered form as Arabella's understanding of her assault evolves. The structure mimics the actual cognitive process of trauma — the way memory refuses to organize itself into narrative, the way understanding arrives in pieces rather than whole.

She embeds multiple storylines that mirror and complicate the central narrative without duplicating it. Terry's experience in Italy, Kwame's encounter with a man who removes his condom without consent — these are not subplots but parallel investigations of the same questions about consent, agency, and the gray areas that legal and social frameworks struggle to address.

Her act breaks are emotional rather than plot-driven. The story turns not on revelations or events but on shifts in the protagonist's relationship to her own experience. The moment when Arabella stops performing recovery and begins actually reckoning with what happened to her is a structural turning point that has nothing to do with conventional plot mechanics.

The finale of I May Destroy You offers multiple possible endings — revenge, reconciliation, fantasy — acknowledging that there is no single correct response to sexual violence and that the imagination's processing of trauma is as real as any external resolution.

Dialogue

Coel's dialogue is the dialogue of young Black British womanhood rendered with absolute specificity — the slang, the code-switching between professional and personal registers, the performative wit of social media culture, the vulnerability that breaks through when the performance drops.

She writes text messages, social media posts, and group chat exchanges as dialogue, understanding that for her characters, digital communication is not supplementary to real life but constitutive of it. The way Arabella drafts and redrafts a tweet is as revealing as any monologue.

Her characters talk about sex with a frankness that is neither titillating nor clinical but simply accurate. The vocabulary of consent — the negotiation, the ambiguity, the assumed permissions, the retroactive recognitions — is rendered as actual conversation rather than legal framework.

Humor in Coel's dialogue is a survival tool and a deflection mechanism. Her characters joke about their pain, and the joke is genuinely funny, and the fact that it is funny does not make the pain less real. The audience laughs and then catches themselves laughing, and that catch is part of the design.

Themes

Consent as a complex, ongoing negotiation rather than a binary state is Coel's most important contribution to contemporary storytelling. I May Destroy You examines consent across a spectrum — from violent assault to stealthing to the gray areas of intoxicated encounters — and refuses to rank these experiences in a hierarchy of legitimacy.

Black British womanhood is rendered in full cultural specificity — the particular pressures of being a Black woman in London's creative industries, the navigation of predominantly white spaces, the solidarity and friction within Black British communities, the particular way race and gender intersect in a British context that is not reducible to American frameworks.

Social media as a space of performance, community, and danger runs through Coel's work. Her characters construct public selves online that are both genuine expressions of identity and protective fictions, and the gap between the performed self and the experienced self is a site of both comedy and crisis.

The artist's relationship to their own pain — whether trauma can or should be transformed into content, whether the pressure to produce is itself a form of exploitation — gives I May Destroy You its meta-textual dimension.

Writing Specifications

1. Structure the narrative non-chronologically — let memories surface, recede, and return in altered form, mirroring the cognitive process of trauma rather than the conventions of linear storytelling.
2. Write the protagonist as a complete person first and a survivor second — establish their humor, ambition, flaws, desires, and contradictions with as much specificity as their experience of harm.
3. Embed parallel storylines that investigate the central theme from different angles — each supporting character should encounter their own version of the core question, complicating the audience's understanding rather than confirming it.
4. Write digital communication — texts, tweets, DMs, group chats — as full dramatic dialogue, with the same attention to subtext, performance, and vulnerability that traditional dialogue receives.
5. Render sex scenes with specificity and honesty — the negotiation, the awkwardness, the pleasure, and the power dynamics should all be visible on the page.
6. Deploy humor at moments of genuine pain — let the comedy be real comedy, not nervous deflection, and let the audience sit with the dissonance between laughter and grief.
7. Refuse clean resolution — do not provide a single cathartic moment that tidies the protagonist's experience; instead, offer multiple partial reckonings that accumulate without completing.
8. Write the specific cultural textures of the protagonist's community — the slang, the social rituals, the music, the food, the particular geography of their neighborhood — with ethnographic precision.
9. Include at least one scene where the protagonist attempts to narrate their experience to someone who cannot fully hear it — a friend, a counselor, a police officer — and dramatize the failure of communication as its own form of harm.
10. End with the protagonist in motion rather than at rest — not healed, not broken, but actively engaged in the ongoing, unfinishable work of living after the event that the narrative has circled.