Essential Reading for Screenwriters – and then some more…
Also well worth a read: Writing Television Drama by Nicholas Gibbs Writing Movies for Fun and Profit by Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant The Complete Book of Scriptwriting by J Michael Straczynski Essential Reading for Screenwriters: Poetics by Aristotle The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for […]
Essential Reading for Screenwriters
Here’s my recommendations: Poetics by Aristotle The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting by Syd Field Story by Robert McKee Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder The 21st Century Screenplay by Linda Aronson Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale: The […]
Don’t Denigrate Mainstream Drama Writers – Peter Bowker
Here’s the brilliant, insipring speech that Peter Bowker gave to open this year’s BBC TV Writers’ Festival: Before I begin, before we begin what I hope will be two days of discovery and support and inspiration, I want to name the elephant in the room. When I’m faced with a room full of hungry, ambitious […]
BBC TV Writers’ Festival 2012
This year’s festival kicked off with an inspiring opening speech from the brilliant Peter Bowker about ambition in television drama. I then headed to a session with Lucy Gannon titled ‘Get Real’. Lucy’s list of television credits is awe-inspiring but I could also recollect a period when her name seemed to disappear from the authored television […]
Research Links
Research can play a big part in writing fiction so here are a few links to websites you might find useful. If you need more in-depth research it’s always a good idea to speak to someone who is an expert in the field you’re writing about. Wikipedia – the one-stop information shop, although it’s always […]
Scriptwriting Tips
Story Get your hooks in early – the first 10 pages are the most important. If the person reading the script is bored, so will an audience be watching it and they’ll switch channels! Have a narrative thread running right through, it doesn’t need to be continually taut but it mustn’t break or the audience […]
Oscar Nominated Scripts
If you want to write screenplays you need to be watching lots of films and reading lots of scripts. To help you, those lovely people at Raindance Film Festival have put up lots of Oscar-nominated scripts for you to read here. And when you’ve read all those, why not read lots of other scripts? There’s […]
In Conversation with Hilary Salmon and Tony Garnett
Thanks to David Edgar and WGGB (West Midlands) I was very lucky to hear two legends of British television drama Hilary Salmon and Tony Garnett debating the state of television drama. You won’t be surprised to hear that although Tony had recently criticised the BBC and Hilary is one of its Executive Producers, there was a […]