My Day at Elstree

I’ve returned from my sojourn to the Big Smoke and my visit to Elstree Studios where I was fortunate enough to attend a workshop run by James Moran and Dan Turner, organised by Studio Five.

This eight hour workshop – whose contents I won’t divulge, you can just go and pay to attend their next session – was engaging, interactive and extraordinarily informative for someone looking to break into the TV/Film writing business.  I think I learnt more practical tactics for advancing myself as a writer than I did during my whole two year M.A.  And I paid a fortune for that.  This was just £40.  A flipping steal if you ask me.  And they were funny too.

What I will say about the workshops contents was that it was divided into how best to generate ideas for a script you’re developing in the first half, and the second half examining how best to put your ideas out there into the market place and how you sell them (and yourself) when someone’s mad enough to bite.

The session I attended was the first this they’ve run – but there will be more (keep an eye on their websitefor details of the next session).  It was attended by people on the same path as me, all at roughly the same level, and the conversations we had in the bar during, and after, were fascinating, enlightening and reassuring.  They were really smart, keen and talented (if a little insane - you really don't want to know about the Princess Diana and Camilla zombie wrestling match suggestion.)  It really helps keep the crazies at bay if you know others are treading the same path, that you’re not stumbling about blindly in the dark.

I feel doubly blessed because I got a solid, workable feature film outline from the workshop as well – which James Moran very kindly said was his favourite from all the ideas generated by the other writers in attendance – that I think, once I’ve finished up the BBC Wales Drama Award entry I might just begin writing.

So a cracking day out in Elstree, followed by a morning being a tourist in London.  I wandered the South Bank, walked around the edge of the Houses of Parliament, saw Downing Street, and finally Trafalgar Square.   I say I was being a tourist… I was actually walking the paths the female lead of my novel walks in the opening pages of the novel I’m finishing up.  I wanted to see what she would actually see.  Stand where she actually stands.  It was rather disconcerting, seeing the world in this way.

Finally, I heard back from the Dead Roots anthology.  They’ve passed on my script.  I understand.  I know they’ve been inundated with scripts and that not everyone is going to make the final cut.  But I’m glad they at least liked it enough to consider it, and I had fun working out how to write in comic book form.  I’ll certainly be buying a copy of the anthology when it comes out.

Updates on a Life

I’m clearly not any good at this blogging thing.  I broke my promise, twice now.  So I can’t blog continuously for thirty days.  But I will try and blog frequently(ish) or until I got so lost in something new that I haven’t the focus any more.

So what’s new?  I’m about to embark to London Town for a one day workshop with James Moran (the wonderful writer of Severance, the Pompeii episode of Doctor Who, amongst many other ghoulish outings) and Dan Turner (director of the very scary Stormhouse, written by another ghoulish writer, Jason Arnopp) so that should be fun. Insights into how to get my brand new, sparkling scripts into the hands of people with money (and hopefully the passion to throw lots of it at me to make the thing).   

I’m reworking my script for the BBC Wales Drama Award 2012 – an award open to all new writers of Welsh residency that I just know is going to be swamped with material of such high quality that I’m going to have to bring something higher than my A-Game (but I don’t know what that is – do we have an A*Game?).  I have a script I think very powerful, but it is part of a six part miniseries, and though they say they’re open to anything, I suspect something that comes to a natural ending at the end of episode 1 might prove more winning – you’ve a beginning, middle and end – where all I have is set-up of the central mystery, of the characters’ lives, and of the community, with a dark suggestion of where it is all going end (badly).  The script rolls along and there are some very strong dramatic character moments and oodles of personal tension…. But it’s like the first three chapters of a novel.  And they don’t want novels.  They want scripts (or stage plays).  I think my problem is I trained as a novelist.  I think like a novelist.  And writing a script is so, so different to writing a novel.

Then there are a few other things cooking away on the script front that, right at this moment, I’m not going to mention.

Then there is the novel.  It needs a new middle chapter, a better summing up of everything that has come in the first half and a better segue into the final act.  It’s all nip-and-tuck work, not major surgery.  But once it’s done, I think I’ll have something special.  I am truly proud of this novel.  And I sincerely hope I can sell it before the end of the year.

So I’m off now, to London, on a long train ride south.  I’ll have pen and paper handy, to write down what I can, but not have computer access for three days.  So au revoir cyber-life.  Keep the fires burning.  I will be back.