Good news, bad news.

One of my favourite writers on the subject of screenwriting is Bill Martell, he's a dedicated writer of action scripts and is the go-to guy if you want to learn how to make your action sequences worthwhile and memorable.

The following is all gleaned from his daily script tips and the applied to some prose writing I've been doing recently (in fact I've been writing stories almost exclusively for the past year - it's all part of a cunning plan).

So, I've been serialising a Steampunk story, set in 1874, on Google Plus (my social medium of choice), and it's been getting good feedback. The writing itself is a bit rough in places because I'm essentially publishing a first draft. I write it on a train on Friday afternoon, it gets read over by me and my alpha reader and published within 12 hours (usually less). Luckily, my first drafts aren't totally appalling.

The episode I wrote yesterday was an explosion of action after weeks of building the tension as the first three men in space, discover they aren't and board an apparently derelict spaceship, only to find evidence of fighting and finally someone alive who pulls a gun on them.

What happens next is the good news-bad news approach to action sequences, as delineated by Bill Martell. You can read what he has to say here: Reversals in Action Of course this uses movies as examples because, well, Bill is a screenwriter.

But this works perfectly in prose writing as well, it should it's about suspense and engagement.

The following is a description of the action good news-bad news. If you haven't read it then this will completely spoil it. You can read it here first.

Our protagonist has just thrown his helmet at the man who has his gun trained on the three crew, exploring the apparently derelict ship, to distract him.

Good news: He's distracted! And fires off a random shot.

Bad news: There's an explosion in the hull and the air starts rushing out into space.

Good news: The bad guy retreats, presumably to get his own spacesuit on.

Bad news: Protagonist's helmet is being pulled towards the ruptured hull.

Worse news: He's hanging in the air weightless, with no way of moving.

Good news (phew): The Captain deliberately bumps into him to push him to the wall.

Bad news: It's going to be a close thing but

Good news: He launches himself to get his helmet.

Bad news: He misses and comes up against the window.

Worse news: Our protagonist looks through the window and sees three men in spacesuits, and guns.

Good news: The Engineer grabs his helmet and blocks the escaping air with his body.

Better news: Protagonist gets his helmet.

Awful news: It's got a hole in it from the random gunshot!

Good-ish news: The engineer starts to remove his own helmet to give it to him.

Bad news: The engineer is shot by the men outside.

And that's it. This also illustrates the importance of stakes. We've been with the protagonist for a few weeks and, though he's a bit of a wimp, he's a decent guy in a strange situation. I knew this scene was coming so I spent the previous two episodes building up the engineer, because until he'd been something of a non-entity. And we needed to care more about him so that this scene had more impact.

I hope that's valuable.

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What's on the turntable? "Second sitting for the Last Supper" by 10cc from "The Original Soundtrack"

May you live in interesting times

Normally I'm very British about things but on this occasion I am going to forego the whole British reserve thing and just say:

I am excited.

Seriously I am very excited.

Why? Well, because the whole writing thing is really coming together, finally.

• My second novella Blood Sky at Night will be released in about two weeks.
• I'll be launching the free sample issue of The Lazarus Device comic book somewhere in that time.
• I'm planning a major non-fiction book related to my day job to be released in the summer.
• My serialised story Frozen Beauty continues to develop on the Voidships website.
• And, at long last, I have been commissioned to write a feature film script for real money. (To be delivered in eight weeks or so, and filmed this summer - they're on a deadline.)

Not that I can afford to give up the day job yet, but this is all just brilliant.

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What's on the turntable? "Hljómalind" by Sigur Ros from "Hvarf/Heim"

That Comic Book Thing

This time last year I decided that instead of writing a screenplay during ScriptFrenzy I would write a comic book script. After all I'm good at script writing and I have a very visual imagination, how hard can it be?

Very.

For the first year I failed at ScriptFrenzy. It was a technical win, you have to write 100 pages and I wrote 100 pages. But they were appalling. The story was intended as a sequel to my Rebel steampunk script featuring the same protagonist and supporting cast but moving on in time.

It was the worst story I'd written in a long time. Now it's easy to say it was a first draft, and that's true, but I write decent first drafts usually. (Not that's brilliant send it out first drafts, but they are usually coherent with good sequences and scenes, good clay for reshaping.)

The story might have turned out alright if I had been in the familiar territory of a screenplay but instead I was in a medium I believed I understood (having read my Eisner and Scott McCloud books). But theory is not practice.

There was another barrier to me realising I didn't know what I was doing: I had worked in print media, magazine production specifically, for many years so, of course, I knew all about printing stuff, didn't I? The first barrier to learning anything is thinking you know it already.

By the end of April (the month ScriptFrenzy takes place in) I was forced to acknowledge that when it came to writing comic books, despite everything I thought I knew, I was clueless.

Fast forward a few months to the London Screenwriters Festival, and a talk by awesome writer of scripts in many mediums: Tony Lee. Who in one hour covered the practicalities of writing for print comics. It was a revelation. You see my knowledge of the print industry was not worthless - I discovered it did have application in the subject but I needed someone who was familiar with the problems to join the dots and show me how to re-apply what I already knew to this new medium.

Consider this: A reveal in a print comic must be the first thing on a left hand page (otherwise a reader will see it before he reads his way to it). And this: you will typically have 22 pages to work with in an issue. That means your cliffhanger must appear on page 22 (it will be a left-hand page). You have no choice. And when Tony said these things, it all clicked together my existing knowledge of print and made perfect sense.

Comic books apply absolute restrictions with no wiggle room which means that unlike a novel or even a screenplay, you cannot wing it. You have to plan every sequence and scene to the very page it will appear on and make sure your reveals appear as the first thing on a left-hand page and your cliffhanger hits on page 22.

I think that's brilliant.

And the consequence of all that is I am converting an existing script to comic form. I have a professional illustrator lined up who loves the script (and, from her comments, sees what I see) so I'm putting together a few sample pages that she'll do some roughs for, just to see whether we're happy with each other's styles. And if that works we'll put together an issue.

But for ScriptFrenzy 2013 I have another feature script to write for the Voidships universe, new time period, new characters and hopefully awesome will ensue.

(And I'm also working on a Voidships novel.)

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What's on the turntable? Hergist Ridge by Mike Oldfield (often considered the poor relation to Tubular Bells being the follow-up but I love it just as much - and Ommadawn which came next.)

Energise!

I did go to the London Screenwriters Festival and it was good. Very good. I almost didn't go, I'm very glad I did.

But that's not what this blog is about.

It's about something screenwriters talk about in relation to scripts but something I have never seen defined: "Script energy".

This came to mind because of John August and Craig Mazin's podcast this week. You can listen here, the relevant bit is around 33 minutes - but why not listen to it all?

[Of course, it was a risk writing this before I finished listening to the podcast and, of course, they carried on and said much of what I wrote here, but less pedantically. But what the hell. I'll leave it, it was still my realisation, at the time.]

So "energy": Craig is talking about scenes ending with an energy that propels the viewer forward. But what is this energy? Just saying "your script lacks energy" or "this scene lacks energy" is unhelpful. Am I supposed to fry it with 20,000 volts? Okay, disingenuous, but still. What. Is. It?

So I applied some of the old mind power. And this is what I came up with, you may feel differently.

When talking about this energy we're actually talking about the viewer's reaction. It's not actually energy in the script, it's the energy the script generates in the viewer. I got a grip on it by looking at a scene which lacks energy (a metaphorical scene, not a real one):

Let's say someone watches this metaphorical scene, and at the end of it they sigh and say "so what?" The scene engenders nothing in the viewer, or rather it engenders boredom, disinterest. An emotional state of nothing much really. That scene has no energy.

A scene that brings about any emotional state reaction is a scene that has energy. But that's not all of it.

A scene could of itself be complete, it could start somewhere, cause an emotion and then complete. It still wouldn't have the energy we're really talking about because at the end of it there is no impetus to continue. The viewer could just stop and be satisfied. And we don't want that. (Want to know a reason why you get out of a scene as early as possible - that.)

What we want is the viewer to cry out "What happens next???!!!" They want to know, they must know what happens next. They cannot stop watching they have to know.

And, in my view, that is the energy, it's the desire to keep going, keep watching, keep listening, to stick with it because they have to know. (In horror it's a kind of negative: they have to know, but they really don't want to, but they have to...)

'Nuff said.

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What's on the turntable? "BWV 1004 Chaconne by Bach" by Steve Hackett from "Tribute to Bach"

Blown trumpets

A quick follow-up to the previous post, in case the statement about me writing fairly decent first drafts might have been poo-pooed. One of my first draft scripts received the following comments:

"The greatest contributor to this screenplay’s enjoyabilty is perhaps its well-written dialogue, descriptions, and action sequences."

and from a different reader:

"Almost every page of this screenplay contains a new visual delight.  The screen directions are clear and economical, painting word pictures of each scene without bogging the reader down in unnecessary details."

But, of course, the reason why this script will never win any prizes as it stands, because it is a first draft: "sometimes plot elements are unexplained or become confusing" and "your plot is too rambling and lacks cohesion – plot elements crop up, seem important, and then are discarded". From the same two readers - but essentially saying the same thing.

The details may be fine, but the big picture is flawed.

Doesn't matter how good a first draft you write: It's not finished. Writing is rewriting.

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What's on the turntable? Nowt

First draft is the best

Yeah right.

As was stated recently by my blogger good buddy Kid in the Front Row: it's great how independent movies can be made nowadays with no interference from the big studios through the use of crowdfunding.

But there's one major problem with that: No quality control.

I have been generous with my funding of projects on Kickstarter and IndieGoGo - I want to do some major crowdfunding in the future and I have a "what goes around comes around" attitude. As you give so shall you receive and all that.

This has had one unfortunate result. My name is now attached to a product which suffers from a script that clearly has had zero quality control. Honestly, I have the greatest admiration for someone getting off their backside and actually making something. But please put the work in with the script first, it's the most important part.

(On the positive side I've also helped produce some very good stuff as well.)

But if you want proof positive? I have two scripts as quarter-finalists in Philip Gladwin's Screenwriting Goldmine competition. Now I'm not saying this as a boast because I submitted four (or was it five?) scripts in a fit of crazy overspending. (This makes me only 20% as good as those who put in one script and got it through.)

Of those scripts the two that got through were the ones that had received a massive amount of feedback. I'm mean, seriously, a lot - over a two year period in both cases. The others had had minimal or none. First drafts.

Now I know I don't write totally crap first drafts, they're reasonable and they're readable. But they aren't great. Screenwriting is hard work, all art is 5% creativity and 95% hard slog.

There are those who will tell you that buying feedback from script readers is useless because they'll always tell you that more work needs to be done. Or they don't know what they're talking about. Or some other excuse.

It's bollocks. The only people who will say this are those not willing to put in the work needed to make their scripts great.  I have had a script reader tell me that a script is as good as it can get - until a director gets his hands on it, of course. And that is one of the scripts that got through and I haven't touched it since he told me.

If you're serious about being a screenwriter you need professional feedback. And you need to trust these guys and gals, because they know what they're talking about.

Are there any caveats? Yes, anyone can set themselves up as a reader - but I have yet to find one who was a fraud and I've used quite a lot of different ones. It is possible to come across one who doesn't quite have the same sensibilities as you. This does not mean they don't know what they're talking about but if you don't get on, it's not going to work so well. But that's just life.

If you can get two reports on the same draft that's good, but three is better. And rotate them, and try to get someone new on a draft because if a reader's seen it before their attitudes to the previous version will still be sitting there (though I know they try hard to read each draft as if they've never seen it before).

So what's the take-away? Scripts always need work. Get feedback so you know what to work on.

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What's on the turntable? "The Light Dies Down on Broadway" by Genesis from "A Lamb Lies Down on Broadway"

Is that a good idea?

Do you listen to the John August/Craig Mazin podcast? You don't? Oh my, you should. The inside skinny (which is deeper than just "the skinny") on writing things, with particular reference to the Hollywood experience by two people who really know what they're talking about. Go here.

Anyway the interesting question of the week this time around was "Which script should I write next?" to which, in essence, the answer was: The one you'd love to see. The one you'd pay money to go and see.

Which is cool. It decided me on my next TV script (something which would be appointment TV for me) and just this evening, while watching the not-very-good Mummy 3, I had an idea. Just a concept really but, though I say so myself, it is awesome.

Scott at Go into the Story is keen to encourage writers to think of idea after idea (spend time each day just generating ideas), and learn to judge what are the excellent ones - anything less than excellent isn't worth working on. I admit I don't do that, at least not the way he suggests, but I do have ideas constantly. (I'll drive down the road, see someone standing by a wall - and invent a story idea as to why they're there based on the way they look, how they hold themselves and their emotional tone.)

Are you having enough ideas?

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What's on the turntable? "Wicked Windows" by Jethro Tull from "J-Tull Dot Com"

Compete this!

I know, that's very poor English.

I have been so busy doing the producer thing, and worrying about producer stuff, that between that and the day job I've had very little time to do anything useful in the writing department.

Which, for a writer, is not a good thing.

However I have come across four competitions recently which I thought "why not" so here they are for your information because you might want to do them too (if you haven't already heard about them and entered).

If you don't read the Go Into The Story blog by Scott Myers then ... you should. It's possibly the most abundant and useful screenwriting blog on the web (John August notwithstanding). Well Scott is running a free-to-enter thing called The Quest based on his screenwriting course which he's essentially giving away free to four winners, with some lovely development extras.

Now I would say "lucky" winners, but luck has nothing to do with it. You have to sell him your feature film concept with a killer logline. If "Scott The Producer" likes your logline you get the development deal. The development deal being that Scott will help you turn that killer logline into a killer script. But as I say, no luck involved, you better deliver a totally awesome logline that is awesomer than the other thousand-odd he's going to get.

Okay from the awesome but incredibly hard to win, to the competition-with-excellent-odds:

50 Kisses : write a 2 minute script, get chosen as one of the 50 winners, it gets made and packaged with the other winners into a "feature" that already has distribution. But that's the point: it's free to enter and there are fifty winners. Them's great odds. You'll find all the rules here.

About 18 months ago Little Brother ran a screenwriting opportunity. At that time they didn't even have a website but make no mistake, Little Brother isn't an insignificant player. This time around they do have a web site which is here. The prize is a little bit of cash (£1000) but far more importantly the opportunity to develop your TV idea through to treatment stage. You do need to have some professional credit for this - but not too much :-) I'm not even sure I qualify but it's another free-to-enter.

And finally: Screenwriting Goldmine, I know, sounds crassly commercial but it's run by Philip Gladwin and he's based in Hove in Sussex. Anyway Philip has set up a competition, it's not free to enter but £24 (early bird) is not too bad.

The one prize I really like is this one:

Individual, one-to-one coffee meeting with one of the following: Independent Producer Matt Bouch, OR Steve Matthews (Producer, Octagon Films), OR Fraser Robinson (Director of Scripted Development at NBC Universal), OR Ben Stoll (Head of Development, Channel 4 Drama). You choose the meeting that YOU think is best suited to your writing. 

And the judges are pretty awesome too.

Right, that's it from me for now. I'll try not to leave it so long until next time.

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What's on the turntable? "Levon" by Elton John from "Madman across the Water"

The Ice Furnace

Hallo peeps.

I've been ultra busy with writing stuff, production stuff, work stuff, family stuff, so I've decided to do something else as well.

It's ScriptFrenzy time again!

This is that awesome time of year when you are provided, free, gratis and for nothing, with a built-in deadline to get your feature script written in just 30 days.

I've done it every year of its existence which means I have five feature scripts I might not otherwise have had.

This year I am writing The Ice Furnace which is a sequel to the film script I wrote last year (and thus part of the collaborative transmedia Voidships project) but I'm doing it as a graphic novel instead - and I even have an artist who will (hopefully) get the some of the first chapter on paper before the end of April. Pretty graphics, yay!

Anyway, thought I'd just keep you up-to-date on what's happening.

Do ScriptFrenzy - you know it makes sense - what are you going to write?

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What's on the turntable? [at work so nuffink]

Celtx forever

Hello peeps. It's been a while since my last major onslaught in this here locale.

As you may, or may not, know I write scripts using Celtx. It's a lovely bit of kit, and free. It's been around for years and is looked after by a friendly bunch of Canadians (is that a tautology?) so is totally solid as a product.

But I'm not trying to sell you Celtx. Well, perhaps I am because I can't see why anyone would want to spend any money on a screenwriting program when they don't have to.

Except there was a reason - but it's just been eliminated.

There was one, and only one, reason to use Final Draft to my mind, and that was if I was suddenly recognised as a great scriptwriter and had to work with organisations too hide-bound and bureaucratic to think that they could use anything else, I'd have to switch.

Because there's no practical way of converting from Celtx to FD and back again.

Or, at least there wasn't.

Enter, stage right, John August screenwriter and tech-savvy person with clout in the industry.

Last week he launched Fountain. All Fountain is is a way of writing scripts using just a text processor (you could use NotePad on Windows). You have to follow a certain style but if you do then it can be understood by another computer program and converted into a PDF or FDX (Final Draft's latest format).

I thought this was jolly good. Though I'd still prefer to use something that formats on screen.

But this week John released the killer Highland which is an application that can convert between FDX, Fountain and PDFs. Yup. John has an application that can take a PDF and turn them into Fountain, and from Fountain you can go to FDX (or PDF).

Which means I no longer need to think about changing to FD.

All that's needed now is for the Celtx team to modify their text importer to recognise Fountain and we're set.

Some people are bound to whine about potential script theft being made easier. Well John does have something to say about that in the blog. I'm not going to discuss it since I agree with him completely.

But what it means for me is that I can go on using Celtx forever.

And that makes me happy.

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What's on the turntable? Unfortunately nothing but recently I have mostly been listening to Nathalie Nordnes.

Brilliant

It has to be.

Over the past few weeks I've been swapping my writer's hat with my producer's hat for our web series WINTER. And I've talked to people about it, trying to encourage them to join our merry little band of pre-production heroes. (The AD and composer from MONSTERS are on-board and we have two CGI peeps so far.)

And over that time something's started to nag me.

Back in the 1980s the concept of "desktop publishing" was born. The completely new idea that a person could, with a personal computer, design and print leaflets, brochures, magazines, letterheads and a myriad other printed paper products. Hooray! Democratisation of print processes. No more slaves to the designer.

What happens: Crap designs. Everywhere. Graphic design takes training, to do it well requires talent.

And now the Internet and affordable cameras have meant the democratisation of movie-making. Yayyy!

What happens? Crap web series.

Of course there are some good ones, but these are mostly produced by professionals. Because every element of film production takes training and the ability to do it well needs talent.

I'll say here and now that I believe the main problem with web series is the writer-director. Because if they are the same person there's no objective view. "I've written this, I think it's great, I'm going to make it." And they do, and it's not great at all. Maybe it could have been great if it had received proper development.

And then there's WINTER. I wrote it. I'm not directing it but I am producing it. This is very different because producers have to be able to sell. Sell themselves, sell the project. To be able to do that you really have to believe in it.

So, do I believe in WINTER? Yes. Do I think it's ready to really sell to someone. Well, no. You see, right now it's good. Script-wise it's certainly better than 99% of the web series floating about.

But it's not brilliant - not yet. It's nearly brilliant. It needs that extra fillip to push it into brilliant.

It might seem strange, ego-centric or whatever, that I should describe something I wrote as nearly brilliant. But it's a matter of viewpoint. Right now I'm not wearing the writer's hat, I'm wearing the producer's hat. And the producer says "This is pretty damn good - now let's make it brilliant."

Because it has to be.

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What's on the turntable? Nowt.

Over on the Voidships channel

There's a new entry on my Voidships blog about how I came to write Winter so it's a blog that probably also belongs here 'cos it's about writing.

I have an entry for the Red Planet prize which I'm just sprucing up - how's yours?

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What's on the turntable? Something by Tangerine Dream

The Mystery of Suspense with a side-order of Sex

Writing 101.

The concept called Dramatic Irony sounds complicated. It isn't.

It's when the audience knows something one or more of the important characters in a story doesn't know. As in Hitchcock's bomb under the table[1], if the audience doesn't know it's there and it explodes, that's a surprise. If the audience does know it's there and it doesn't explode... the fact the audience knows is dramatic irony, the effect it causes is suspense. Though it only causes suspense if it's got consequences, the bigger the consequences the better the suspense.

Bombs generally have consequences.

Suspense is a very good thing, it keeps the audience on the edge of their seat. It enforces their participation and without audience participation a story is worthless.

Mystery is the opposite of suspense, being just something the audience - and one or more important characters also doesn't know. Hopefully the audience wants to know, but they don't and the story hinges on it, then it fails.

I'm getting interested in this stuff because I've nearly finished Winter and I'm heading into the "let's analyse the story scene by scene using screenwriting tools and see how we can make it better" stage.

In Winter I'm reasonably happy with the suspense factor - even though it's based on a mystery. The audience knows that the protagonist has a major secret, it's a mystery although it's almost certainly something bad (good things are seldom any use). The audience also knows that this secret is going to make something bad happen to one of the other characters. Eventually.

And I wrote my first sex scene which was an interesting experience. It only occupies half a page (this is a script after all) but it does the job it needs to do.

But what's even more interesting was how to get the two characters from strangers to making love in 30 pages. For that I did some research and found the 12 Steps to Intimacy[2] which, like all things, are guidelines rather than rules.

Have you written your first sex scene yet? How was it for you?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Themes_and_plot_devices_in_the_films_of_Alfred_Hitchcock

[2] http://terryodell.blogspot.com/2010/03/12-steps-to-intimacy.html

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What's on the turntable? "Spare Some Love" by Renaissance from "Prologue"

When I say "Oh dear"...

I realise my empty last posting needs some explanation. I mean I could delete it but where would the fun be in that?

Fun? Not feeling very fun-ny today I must admit. This is not because anything bad is happening in my life, it isn't. Just had a bad night a combination of the weather suddenly turning hot and humid (just for a couple of hours), people just down the way having friends round and making just enough noise to prevent sleep, cats deciding to take objection to other cats, and our dog taking exception to the cats taking exception to each other.

Very sad. So I'm tired, hence the unfunny feeling.

The "Oh dear" was because I was going to make a comment about how I had completely failed to make any further posting about the London Screenwriters Festival. But the inter-tubes in the place I'm staying decided to behave badly and that was as far as I got. Except I managed to post it.

Not very exciting at all.

London Screenwriters Festival

I went to others of the sessions of course, nothing truly major stuck in my mind. Ellin Stein's session on editing down scripts was interesting enough; and the one on a new way of analysing scripts was passingly interesting, though the speaker was primarily selling his products - and his clientele is directors rather than writers.

I can sum up what he said: The key moments of a script are when a character perceives something different in their environment.

I think, on the whole, it's a valid tool for directors, is it a valid tool for writers? No idea. I'll have to try it out.

I had a go at the Pitch Factor on Saturday evening. It was fun and I was rubbish - but considering I wrote the pitch on the back a cigarette packet half a  minute before speaking that comes as no surprise. (I'm lying professionally here. It was a note pad, and I wrote it half an hour before.)

I also had a Speed Pitch session booked, which was also a bit poo. But I was similarly unprepared. No surprise there then.

I went to the Writing Fantastical TV session which had a good panel and the overwhelming advice was - smuggle it in. Of course, as I read elsewhere, it's ludicrous if TV commissioners say "oh that last SF TV series really bombed we won't do any more of those". After all, do they, when a cop show bombs, say "We won't do any more cop shows?" No, they don't.

There was also the Writing for Comics, another good panel and something I knew nothing about, so I was suitably enlightened. Interesting.

And, of course, I met new people and generally had a good time. So I'll no doubt do it again.

Family Drama

So, the Boy has been doing exams (his school push them through early GCSEs) so it's been a bit a stressful time for him. But he has come out the other side safely.

For the drama exam (part of English Language) they had to write their own 5min script based on Saving Private Ryan. Scripts is something we know something about so he got the job in his groups. (Actually it makes no sense, this is a drama exam so he gets nothing for the writing - surely they should just give them a script?)

Anyway, without going into detail, there was much to-ing and fro-ing with this script. He wasn't sure what to do, so we discussed conflict in scenes. His first version barely made 90 seconds. Then he got something sorted that was long enough. Then he found that his part was too short so had to add a completely new sequence into the scene, but we discussed what could be done and came up with something he liked and he wrote it.

I'm currently working away from home during the week so the Teacher (okay, that's potentially confusing - when I say "the Teacher" I mean my wife, not his schoolteacher) helped him clean up the spelling and grammar. And then she wanted to put some additional instructions into the action lines and the Boy says "No, mum, you can't do that, that's director stuff."

There humour. (For the sake of completeness, yes, I know, in stage work the writer is god, so "director stuff" would be fine - but that wouldn't be funny.)

Anyway it all went off well and he got the equivalent of an A grade for the drama part - I'd have given him the same for the writing, but I'm a bit biased.

Winter Blog

I am also instigating yet another blog - just a sucker for punishment - this one is specifically about writing the web series Winter which is going very nicely and I have some observations to make (well, I think they're interesting - others may differ.)

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What's on the turntable? "The Third Hoorah" by Jethro Tull from "Warchild"

London Screenwriters' Festival 2011 - prelude

So much to say, so little time.

I am going to LSF'11, this week. I got onto the speed pitching on Sunday, and miracle of miracles I also got the Advanced Mentoring session (which is going to start with Dragon's Den-style pitching and cross-examination from the floor) with Gub Neal on Friday. This is all good.

I know pitching is a very scary thing, and people will tell you it's all down to preparation. I don;t think that's right really, of course it helps to be prepared - and I'm not going in unprepared. But there is something vastly more important: emotion.

You could be apathetic, imagine what response that would get. You could be tearful. You could plead. You could be plain scared. You could be snide and superior. You could be angry. Antagonistic. You could be anxious. Bored.

Any of those and it would be an utter disaster. You could be a bit interested, a lot interested, cheerful - those would be better.  But there's only emotion that really works: Enthusiasm and it has to be genuine.

If you can't be genuinely enthusiastic about your own work, you're on to a loser. I'd probably argue that you could get away with a minimum of preparation, as long as you're enthusiastic. Your idea still has to have merit, of course.

This year I'm not relocating to a nearby hotel, because my latest contract has me in a room in Kensington, London. So no additional costs incurred - nice. But I won't be heading home at the weekend to see the family which is not so nice.

Last weekend I was intending to get all the pitches and one pagers done. I didn't. So this evening I rushed out after work and bought a nice little Epson printer that takes the same inks as the one I have at home. Excellent.

So what have I been writing? Well the planning on Winter web-series has been going very nicely but I've had to hold fire on that for the LSF'11. I did a tidy up on my feature Rebel set in the same steampunk universe as Winter in fact it happens at almost the same time. I'll be pitching Rebel in the speed-pitching.

For the Advanced Mentoring I'm pitching Monsters (SF action thriller TV series) still my favourite after all this time.

There's also the deadline (the day after the LSF'11) for the Channel 4 screenwriting course which I completely failed to get into last year. For that I'm sending my broadcaster-friendly detective series Mara though I'll give that a brush-up first as well.

And that's it.

I don't know if I'll be supplying a day-to-day rundown on the LSF'11 this year, I'm going to be a lot busier than usual. We'll see how it goes.

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What's on the turntable? "Always somewhere else" by Steve Hackett from "Highly Strung"

What are your characters doing?

It's been a while since I wrote a blog exclusively on writing, the craft of. And that's what this is.

I've been reading "The Tools of Screenwriting" and finding it a very useful book indeed. I'm not one for formulas (except Aristotle) but I'm always keen on tools for the screenwriting toolbox - they don't necessarily make things easier but help you to incorporate those things that make your writing better.

This isn't a review and I'm not going into depth (you can buy the book) but this afternoon, as I travelled home on the train, I've been working on something that came from just a single sentence in the book:

"Determine the actions that reveal character and move the story forward first."

I'd been working on character background for the web series Winter and applying various other tools (such as Bill Martell's "just come up with scenes, lots of scenes, more than you need") but when I came across this gem I put all those aside.

There are three main characters in Winter and I knew the overall arc of the story (I had roughly plotted the acts and there is an earlier draft), so I sat down with the Protagonist and went "What does she do first?" and wrote it down, then I went through the whole story listing her actions that drive the story forward and reveal character.

The thing I observed was that nailing it down to the specific actions could not help but reveal character - a character is what they do - and character is story. It was a revealing experience to go through and nailed the story so much better than I ever had before.

Then I did the same for the other two characters. After all they are the protagonists in their own stories.

All in all it was a very productive couple of hours - I highly recommend it.

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What's on the turntable? "Will you love me tomorrow?" by Carole King from "Tapestry"

When things are good

Just received confirmation from a producer that he does indeed like a feature script of mine. And likes it to the point that he is interested in moving forward with it. Which is nice.

Of course it's the nature of the business that the magnitude of said "movement" will be zero for months - and possibly forever. That's not being critical, I'm very happy about it, but you can't eat hope or promises (and he didn't promise anything).

It just is what it is: a producer is interested enough to want to move forward but he's busy on his current project.

Cool.

It's another step forward, and if he likes one script, others may well like other scripts of mine.

Onwards and upwards.

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What's on the turntable? "Inside" by Jethro Tull from "Benefit"

A couple of weeks ago I got the final feedback on a feature I had sweated blood over, in its 5th major rewrite. This time I knew I'd got it right, I had really got a feel for the theme and the characters, it was all there.

I knew it.

Jez was very apologetic in saying there were serious issues. The US coverage company were businesslike in their damning analysis. Philip Shelley was somewhere in between with his negative appraisal.

Though they all agreed it had something solid at the core, the implementation was something else.

It was about this time I started to realise that perhaps I was not quite as good as I thought I was. Humility is a good thing, it just hurts a bit when you're forced to remove the rose-tinted spectacles. Producing two very good scripts early on gave me the wrong impression.

And I have this web series to write.

I was reading Bill Martell's screen tip and was forced to acknowledge that the flood of the first draft (or even the flood of the fifth draft) is not a replacement for the hard work you actually have to put in to make a script really work.

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What's on the turntable? "Bridge over Troubled Water" by Simon & Garfunkel

Blankety-blank! or Who's creativity is it anyway?

This time I'm not talking about the collaboration aspect of film/TV production.

This is a reference to something I wrote about a long time ago (2009); how factors like sub-text, the "off-screen screenplay", "in late, out early", dramatic irony, character emotion, and so on, are all aspects of the same thing: audience involvement.

I was reading the Bitter Script Reader this morning and he was also talking about this subject.

Then I thought what are we doing, really?

Aren't we encouraging, nay, forcing the audience to be creative? Because we are forcing them to fill in the blanks?

Of course if they are unwilling to do it, or can't see what's supposed to go in the blanks, they aren't going to enjoy it, are they? And everybody is different because they have different ability to fill in the blanks.

Genre? Same thing. Genre is something that has a given set of blanks that the audience is expected to fill in simply by knowing what type of production it is. If a person does not like a genre maybe it's because they don't understand the blanks.

The same thing applies to a crew making a film - do they understand the blanks? If they don't, they will do an adequate job, but if they really get the blanks, they'll know which blanks they should fill in and which they should leave uncoloured-in, for the audience to do it.

What do you think?

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What's on the turntable? "A Hazy Shade of Winter" by Simon & Garfunkel

It's more than writing

David Bishop just* posted a blog on the invisible bits of a writing career, which reminded me that I needed to write an email to a producer. Which I was just doing when I thought that's something that needs saying.

I have a feeling that new writers think the only thing that's important in a writing career is the writing. Even though all the experienced writers will tell you that networking, staying in communication with people and knowing what's going on in the market are very important.

As a web developer I have to stay up-to-date with my industry: learning all the new stuff; seeing what the trends are; even staying aware of relevant legislation. Because even though the visible part of my job is to "just create websites" according to a supplied specification, my skills have to stay relevant and I need to know whether any new laws affect what I'm being asked to do (which happened recently). This is all part of the job. And if a website specification says "do this" and I know that "doing this" might contradict a relevant law I can say so (at the very least it protects me) - and that's what makes me a professional in my industry.

As a writer it's worth knowing, for example, when the BBC commissioning rounds take place. Because it's worth talking to producers and production companies in advance of those commissioning rounds if you have a script that might go into them. And giving that as your reason for contacting the producer shows that person that you are a professional.

And that's why I had to write an email to a producer. There's a commissioning round on the way (only four months, so it's close) and if the producer likes the script we can put it in.

And if I hadn't been to the Kid's TV event on Friday, I wouldn't have known. And if I didn't read David's blog I wouldn't have been reminded, because even reading blogs is part of the job.

* When I say "just" it was a couple of days ago but I have delayed publishing this blog entry.

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What's on the turntable? "South Horizon" by David Bowie from "Sound and Vision"