September 24, 2014 · 7:41 pm

Suddenly September

Yes it’s happened again, another summer has flown past and we’re rushing towards the end of the year.  My time was divided between nose-to-laptop and a wonderful wedding.  Family weddings are joyous things where you share the moment when someone you’ve known and loved all their life begins another life with someone they love.  And then the day you’ve prepared for over many months is gone as quickly as the summer that you’re left remembering.  But from that day you have a mosaic of memories of faces, glances, laughter, words whispered and declared, silhouettes on the dance floor, speeches you remember so clearly, they’re etched in the air,  all of it your own private album, never dimmed by time, coloured by that unique moment, playing on a live, moving screen, unmatched by anything in the world.

You could lift them complete and slot them into your latest screenplay, novel or story and wonder why they don’t work or we could plunder them as writers do, though never the things that are closest to our hearts.  But the more you relive and remember, you’ll sift the essence and distilled, it will filter into your writing, though you must be careful with your own emotions, if you want your characters to be as individually pure as they can.

When I first started writing I was given a list of things you should know about your character which included what size shoes and colour socks they would wear and, okay, so maybe it was meant as a guide from which you could build a picture but there was nothing on that list about emotions.   Even the most bloodless, boring person has those and the reason they appear so sanguine could be just as valuable to the writer as what lies behind a life and soul of the party person.  Our greatest fears influence everything we do and every character has a colossal fear that drives and restricts them.  Find that fear and work out what is stopping them from overcoming it.   The best piece of advice I ever had from a script editor was “dig deep”.   But first dig into yourself and find out what your greatest fear is, and it will hurt, but only if you’re completely honest.

Some resources I’ve found valuable on character:  favourite screenplays, The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri and Laurie Hutzler’s Emotional Toolbox Character Map.

 

 

 

 

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June 2, 2014 · 11:10 pm

London Labour Film Festival

I was in London last month to see Big Society the Musical open the London Labour Film Festival. Big Society was written and produced in Liverpool by over three hundred and fifty people, who gave their time over three years to make a statement.  It seemed a long time since eight writers got together in a room off Hope Street, Liverpool to thrash out a story.  Our inspiration, David Cameron’s Big Society speech.  When he delivered it, he made it sound like it was his idea, when all over Britain, the ethics of the Big Society had been practised for centuries but then how can someone who has never experienced poverty understand what it’s like.  As a line in Big Society goes, it’s ” …. falling like change through a hole in a rich man’s pocket.”

The Festival opened with a speech from Unison Northwest Regional Manager, Lynne Morris who introduced the film with passion and commitment and explained how important it is that trade unions invest in the arts and in creative responses such as ours.  The screening of an extract from the recent Tony Benn film which followed, was the perfect empowering short to be played ahead of “Big Society” and set the tone for our anti-austerity musical.  Tony Benn’s message expressing the need for the people’s voices to be heard could not have been a better lead-in.   As one character in Big Society the Musical says, “If they don’t hear us shout, then we’ll sing.”

After our screening there was a Q&A with our Director Lynne Harwood, leading lady Paula Simms, performer Joe Maddocks and composer Andy Frizzell, kindly chaired by Carl Roper, National Organiser for the TUC.

Read a review of what Trade Unionist blogger Jon Bigger thought of the screening here 

The screening was attended by Industry professionals, trade unionists, filmmakers and independent cinema owners and the production team were excited to have forged a number of exciting partnerships off the back of the screening…. more will be announced in the near future but in August the team behind this exciting piece plan a one day mutli-cinema mass audience event… to be sure there is a screening in YOUR area sign up for a screening here:http://www.first-take.org/screenings#/

 Help us get the message out about the film. Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bigsocietythemusical. 

Follow us @BigSocietyFilm 
Other Ways to get involved: 

We are actively seeking partners and champions to help us host screenings around the country, share the Video on Demand campaign and get involved with marketing and distribution.  If you are interested in discussing opportunities to partner with the film please contact the team on all@first-take.org

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May 2, 2014 · 11:41 pm

Pitching and loglines

I’ve pitched a few projects recently at two very different events – one was the London Screenwriters’ Festival and the other, a Creative England ifeatures networking event. The LSF was organised with strict time limits on the individual pitches – five minutes and then move on to the next one.  Held over the three days of the Festival, there were an average of eight to ten producers in each session and anything up to thirty people pitching.  In the session – about an hour, I pitched to seven of the eight producers and got requests from six of them.   Even if your project doesn’t get picked up, it’s worthwhile attending because you’re making connections, getting contact details and the most valuable part of the process, seeing how your log line stands up.

The networking event was more relaxed and probably closest to the kind of pitching situation we’re likely to find ourselves in but the same criteria applied to the log line.

Blake Snyder highlighted this in “Save the Cat”.  He recommended before you typed Scene 1, you test marketed your pitch on complete strangers and assessed at what point they lost interest, because if you can’t keep their attention, how are you going to keep anyone else’s?  And that point where they look away or just look plain bored is where I go back and look at the story.

But it can work the other way as well, sometimes by sheer accident, the log line will come out slightly different and you’ll see the affect it has and you’ll know you need to go back and look at your script and make sure it reflects what you’ve just seen and felt.  And the feeling wins every time.

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December 28, 2013 · 4:57 pm

Feedback: Give and Take

Feedback is what I dread receiving and dread giving but I keep on asking for it and saying “yes” when someone asks me.

Anyone who doesn’t write won’t understand that gut wrenching, stomach falling, palpitation inducing moment when you realise your next draft isn’t going to be a few tweaks away from winning the Booker Prize or grabbing you an Oscar.  Instead you’ll be back at square one or at least that’s what your self-defense mechanism is telling you – well it would do, that’s its job – to stop you from getting hurt by sitting back down at the computer and starting again and failing again.  Your self-defense mechanism doesn’t want you to get hurt so it tells you success is so far away, you’ll never get there.  Why not give up now?  But who’s in charge here and why did you ask for feedback in the first place?   Hopefully because you wanted to get better at this thing you’re driven to do every day and get withdrawal symptoms when you can’t.   However, in that complicated cocktail of desperation, insecurity and expectation we call our egos, we’ll be satisfied with nothing less than praise and success.

If you want to avoid the mistake I made the first time I asked for feedback, don’t tell that person the story of your script.   It’s what I did when I asked my husband to read my first screenplay.   I steeled myself for what I knew would be fair, accurate, analytical criticism  and received a puzzled response.  “Are you sure you’ve given me the right script? ”   He was looking for everything the natural storyteller in me thought was on the page,  but wasn’t there at all.  When you read your own work, you ‘re seeing the characters as you created them moving in that fabulous world that exists somewhere in your head.    Don’t tell anyone your story if you want feed back from them.  Their job is to tell you what they’ve read, which is how you’re going to work out how to make your script better.   If they don’t understand anything, they should be asking you questions.    It may well be the brilliant sub plot that’s overshadowing the main plot  or that subtle reference to a key part of the story that’s so subtle, no-one notices it.

It helps if the unfortunate friend, colleague or acquaintance you’ve picked on, has some knowledge of the accepted structure and format of the genre you’ve given them.  It’s vital that they should ask questions like “Whose story is it?”; “Who’s the intended audience?” or even if it’s a film script, “What size budget did you have in mind?” ; because if they can’t or don’t, then the feedback they’re giving you is unlikely to be helpful.  And if you don’t know the answers, then you’ve learnt something very useful straight away.

Even if you pay for your feedback, buyer beware,  check out the C.V.s of the professionals giving it and try to find someone who has experience of the genre in which you’re writing.    It’s not unknown for professional script readers to give contradictory advice but if more than one person is telling you that something isn’t working, you should be looking at it with an objective eye.  However,  if there’s one lone voice criticising something that your gut feeling tells you is right, go with your gut.  You haven’t the experience to do anything else at that moment and it was your gut that likely gave you the inspiration in the first place.

People will tell you that the first draft is always “s**t” – which isn’t exactly fair and does nothing for the self-esteem of the writer or any artist for that matter.    Remember you’re the person who started with the blank page; the one who burnt the midnight oil;  who ran into imaginary brick walls and had eureka moments in unlikely places like the supermarket queue and then lost your flash of inspiration scrawled on the back of the weekly shopping list in a windy car park.   You’ve sacrificed a great deal to come this far so read the feedback, decide what you believe and start the next draft.   And forget the Booker and the Oscar – they’re just prizes that people receive.  Far more valuable is the one within your own gift – to produce the best writing you can.

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October 31, 2013 · 11:05 pm

A picture’s worth a million words

Back from an energy sapping but riveting four days at London Screenwriters’ Festival, I settled down to the working week and the chores and joys of clearing the inbox. The beautiful short film, Moments, directed by Chris Cronin and produced by Andrew Oldbury and Phil Meacham with Mike Clarke as Executive Producer was definitely one of the joys and a brilliant reminder of why I began screenwriting in the first place – the power of pictures alone to tell a story.

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In Director Chris Cronin’s own words, Moments is “a love letter to all those Disney classics that used dance to express powerful emotions that simply couldn’t be described by words alone.” From the moment the first dancer flies across the screen, you’re swept up in that perpetually sunlit, magical world where all Disney stories live. Love is not only all around us but makes us want to leap and dance just like Cronin’s leading man, hapless Joel, played by an engaging Simon Hardwick, who keeps missing out on love and even unwittingly sabotaging the feel good factor for everyone else.

It’s skilfully paced and plotted, with charming, funny scenes and there’s the feel of a potential feature film here. There’s comedy and pathos and Simon Hardwick hits just the right note in his search for love and Madeleine, the girl he keeps missing while Lauren Harvey plays Madeleine with a humour and gentleness that complements Simon Hardwick’s mixture of wistfulness and gung ho enthusiasm.

“Moments” is currently screening at film festivals around the world, but do look out for it in the future once it’s released for public viewing. It’s most recently won Runner-up in the short film category at Screen Stockport Short Film and Television Festival, UK.

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“Moments” was shot over three days with cast and crew drawn from all over Britain and shows what fantastic talent we’ve got in the UK.

And one last word, before I get back to my inbox – this is a writer’s blog after all, so I can’t finish without mentioning – Chris Cronin for story and Joanne Gardner and Tina A. Wake for screenplay.

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August 22, 2013 · 5:37 pm

Never, ever, ever throw anything away.

NEVER, EVER, EVER, THROW ANYTHING AWAY

A writer I knew once, in the depths of despair after a snowstorm of rejections – like buses, they always arrive together – took every single thing she had ever written and made a bonfire in the garden and burnt it all, and swore never to write another word again.

First of all, let me make it clear, I was not this writer, as in “There’s this friend of mine …” I’m not a good liar, which is why I probably write fiction. Everyone knows you’ve made it up, so it doesn’t matter and you also get to practise the lying part. And secondly, if I ever set fire to everything I’d ever written, I’d need a far larger location than my garden.

But the thing I admired about my friend, the writer, was the certainty with which she could decide to destroy all that time and effort, all those ideas, all the emotional input and give up writing. I wished I could be that brave, that sure of never needing to get those infernal words out of my head. If you can stop writing and not miss it, then you are very lucky. I’ve taken breaks from writing and filled them with travelling, working abroad, jam making and allotments and finally children before I gave up and went back to writing, bizarrely when I had the least time of all.

Just because you’ve had something rejected many times over, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a market for it somewhere, (see Rejection and the Boomerang post). A few years ago, I wrote a short film script. It was a coming of age story and it attracted some interest but never got made. It garnered its own little pile of rejections but I’d rather have that than dust and then out of the blue, an opportunity presented itself. A friend needed a script for a group of actors. Did I have anything that would fit? I had something that was almost right – that coming of age story. Since writing the original, I’ve changed computers several times and whilst everything’s backed up on disks, it was much easier to open a filing drawer and put my hand on the script.

There’s something about hard copy that’s satisfying – the feel of paper in your hand and it’s harder to ignore or pass over in the way you can a title in a document file. You can’t delete it in a temporary angst driven aberration. Like my writer friend, you have to give it a proper funeral pyre and if you expend all your energy in blue sky thinking like me, that’s a deterrent in itself.

But when you unearth this old script, be prepared. It’ll be a bit like seeing yourself in an old photograph next to a mirror – you’ll have moved on a fair few years but it’s what’s inside your head that matters not the exterior and best of all, your story gets another chance and you, another bite at the cherry. So whatever way you store it, hang on to it – all that person power and imagination. Don’t consign it to the digital dustbin or add to global warming. Keep it safe.

“Last Tango” is now in post production at ALRA North, Wigan.

There’s a special summer offer on my Anthology, “Life, Love and Holidays” on Amazon – http://www.amazon.co.uk/Life-Love-and-Holidays-ebook/dp/B00B1EP2FC/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1376140013&sr=1-2&keywords=Life%2C+Love+and+Holidays

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June 27, 2013 · 8:01 am

Team writing and the “Big Society”

The UK, 2011 and the financial crisis: cuts in just about every area of life were beginning to bite and more were on the horizon. In May that year I was asked to be part of a writing team to make a film about the effects of those cuts – the title – “Big Society” taken from a speech by David Cameron. But this wasn’t just any old drama – this was a Musical. How could I say No?

The film was a community project – everyone gave their time and skills for free. There were six writers on the outline script, not all of us there all the time – people had jobs, commitments, responsibilities as well as their own projects but from May to July, one day a week, the story grew on the wall, scenes shuffled about, the structure solidified and the characters became real until a detailed scene by scene had been hammered out.

We wanted to get this film made as quickly as possible, while it was of the moment, not history, so there was no time for drafting and redrafting. Instead the director took the scene by scene and went into production with the actors improvising the dialogue. A method that’s used by some famous directors.

Team writing has disadvantages – you never fully own the final product but whether it’s film or anything else that needs a writer, sooner or later you’ve got to hand it over for someone else to put their stamp on it, even if it’s only a magazine editor cutting your 2000 word story by 1000 words to accommodate a full page advert!

The advantages probably outweigh the disadvantages: when you run up against a brick wall, there will always be at least one person who can find a way round it even though sometimes your fellow writers will have you climbing it. Yes, there’ll be arguments about motivations and reactions but objectivity and a week’s distance will always show whether you’ve made the right choice; climb downs and humble pie eating can be good for the soul.

But how do you know that the end product is better than all the other possible products that were discarded along the way? If that quirky, vibrant, funny scene you wrote had been included instead of getting the thumbs down from your fellow writers, who knows what a difference it would have made. Well, so what? Accept the fact it didn’t and move on. If it was that good a scene, it will metamorphose in another story – you can’t keep a good scene down.

I’ve written with a partner on comedy drama, with five men and a woman on comedy sketches, with script editors on television series and a script consultant on a film. To know there’s someone dozing on a sofa at Elstree, waiting for your next scene at 3 am, when you’re working to a deadline, or just a friendly face in the pub at the end of the day to give you feedback can make the difference between failure and success.

At the beginning of your career when you’re writing for the love of it, team writing offers support but teams are like committees, there’s always someone who doesn’t pull their weight when there’s no financial incentive. Whatever the reason they don’t is neither here nor there. Whatever you’re doing, you’re either committed 100% or you won’t get anything out of it. You’ve got to give it everything. And your reward? At 3 am when no one’s there to help you, you’ll have learnt what to do.

Big Society – the Musical is now in post production. Film London has revealed it is to be one of the 12 projects participating in Audience on Demand, the training and mentorship programme addressing the changing face of feature film distribution. For full details visit Screen Daily http://www.screendaily.com/news/film-london-selects-audience-on-demand-projects/5057669.article

Visit the Big Society web page: http://www.firsttake.org/bigsocietythemusical‎
Watch the trailer on:www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiXHmR0F2Ws

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May 18, 2013 · 12:20 pm

Character, character, character

It was ten years ago and I was sitting in the doctor’s waiting room with one other person ahead of me. I can remember how dark it was and the time, early evening on a rainy summer’s day but not the reason why I’d gone there. Maybe it was because of what happened afterwards. I was flicking idly through a magazine with true life features when I turned a page and read something that hooked me.

“She took over my life like she’d stepped into my clothes”.

I always know when a story’s got legs, because the main character keeps stalking me like some cerebral troll and that one line kept repeating in my head like a refrain. When she appeared in my short story, “Dolls”, she became Carol Jones, a wife who’d been deserted by her husband and seen the new woman in his life do exactly what the woman in the magazine feature described. However, this is where fiction departed from fact as the market I was aiming for preferred endings that offered some hope.

When “Dolls” was published in UK magazine, Essentials, the editor changed the title to “Paul’s Playthings”, which suits the story better for it’s written from the perspective of Paul’s two wives. In my story Carol makes a Plasticine voodoo doll of the new woman in her ex’s life. Whatever caught my attention in that feature and made me write that character also caught the attention of readers and “Paul’s Playthings” was syndicated all over the world. As one editor said, “It’s got something that people connect with.”

That something that reaches out and grabs you can happen anywhere and it doesn’t even have to be a character you like. You can be caught off guard and assaulted by some fictitious creature you’d cross the road to avoid. Six months ago, I was tucking into the best cheese cake in Liverpool at the Walker Art Gallery cafe when a generously proportioned and quite aggressive female character invaded my imagination and refused to leave. She stalked me on a tour of my favourite paintings and all the way home on the bus. Why she’d chosen to suddenly appear then might have something to do with the cake I was eating for it figures large in her story.

Eventually I gave up trying to ignore her and left her to rummage and ruminate in my imagination. By the time I put my key in the front door, her narrative was taking shape. It’ll be a while before Maddie’s ready to step out into the world in “The Pudding Club” but I’m having a lot of fun making her acquaintance.

There was another reason though why I remember that rainy summer evening in the doctor’s surgery. Having found Carol Jones, I had no pen or paper to jot down the idea, so I waited until the buzzer went and I was alone and tore the page out of the magazine. I wouldn’t have done it to a book but I still felt guilty enough to remember it years later. I’ve kept that yellowed magazine page. When you find a character you connect with, don’t let them go.

To find out what happens to Carol and the voodoo doll in “Paul’s Playthings” get my e-book anthology – “Love, Life and Holidays”. It’s free on Amazon for 5 days from 20th May 2013 to 24th May 2013 or if you miss the offer, only $2.00 or £1.28.

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April 9, 2013 · 9:30 pm

Rewriting and the boomerang

There are some things in life that nobody tells you, which perhaps is a good thing because if they did, you wouldn’t do those things, like say, giving birth. Nobody tells you how much it’s going to hurt, even though you’ve sat through whole days of classes and birth videos you’ve watched with one eye closed, read enough pamphlets to wallpaper the Albert Hall and chosen your favourite music to deliver by. They just don’t tell you about the pain.

It’s exactly the same with writing classes and rejection. They mention it, they tell you not to take it personally but they won’t even begin to touch on how it will feel – so let’s not go there. I was lucky with my first submission, I didn’t have to wait long for it to be rejected. And it hurt but not enough to stop me from writing something else and rewriting that first submission, when I could bring myself to look at it again.

But sometimes there’s nothing wrong with the story – you’ve just sent it to the wrong market. That first short story I wrote was a boomerang, it went out and it came back, again and again and again. To be fair, I hadn’t heard of writing for the market when I wrote it. I had that first burst of inspiration and away I went, so it had everything – a love interest, a ghost, a murder, a dream sequence and a heroine who liked gardening. I quickly learnt to research short story markets and one rainy afternoon in a large branch of a national newsagents I was rewarded, I found a women’s magazine, fresh on the market, with a story about fairies in a compost heap. Could it be possible my boomerang had found its home. I sent it off and to paraphrase Jane Austen and Rolf Harris – “Reader, my boomerang didn’t come back!”

What I learnt? Don’t throw anything away, don’t despair, keep researching and writing – oh yeah, and rewriting.

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