This is a terrific video. It only takes a minute to watch, but it says a lot about writing, and having an effect on your audience. Thanks for sending it, Doug
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Screenwriting
I first met Philip Shelley in the late 1990’s when he was a very amiable – and acutely perceptive – editorial presence in an office along the corridor from mine in the BBC Drama Series Department. Since then he’s gone on from there from strength to strength, worked on some terrifically high profile projects, and [...]
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The other night I saw Sherlock Holmes (the 2009 version, credited to Michael Robert Johnson) and a few other writers. I thought it was funny, smart, ultra-enjoyable, with some great set pieces. Even if the story lacked a little muscle, and even if it had a number of tremendously hammy lines, and even if the [...]
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That was horrible. It’s done, but it was a real battle. And rather more than three weeks too. The biggest problem I found was that pretty soon after I started, and every day since, I was working on the script with one eye on what the blog was going to say. Sounds insane, but I [...]
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This is great. And got me through a black horror spot this morning. http://harkaway.tumblr.com/post/12362617025/7-minutes I’m always banging on about how writing every single day keeps the Muse hovering close to hand. Once again, objective tests (by me) show it’s true. But sometimes I simply need to be forced to follow my own advice. That 7 [...]
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What was I thinking? In the story breakdown I glibly painted a scene where a 15 year old and her two slightly unhinged friends waltz around some dark inner city pubs, emerging having bought an illegal handgun. This gun turns out to be highly instrumental for the rest of Act 3. I can’t do without [...]
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Have to prepare a section for our screenwriting seminar next week, and I’m going to look closely at a movie to see how the structure works (or doesn’t!) re. the Goldmine method. “Back to the Future” worked beautifully, but I’m a bit bored with that. Anyone got any suggestions of something from this century (movie [...]
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Pretty stable day today. Another six pages down, pretty lively stuff. This idea of David Milch’s is great. I’ve always, up till now, spent ages and ages visualising the scene, running it through in my head to get the pictures right, then, when it was rock solid, getting it down on the page and adding [...]
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Real life will keep on getting in the way. And I say ‘real’ that advisedly. So far today for example I’ve spent exactly 12 hours on my own with a computer. You have to do that if you’re writing. But add it up over the years, and, my god, that’s a long time to spend [...]
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Pretty good day. I sat down, wrote solidly, and I’m now at 21 pages, well into Act 2. That’s not actually quite as good as it sounds, because a lot of it is pretty slack stuff, and I’m going to have to cut it right back when I come round to polish this draft before [...]
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How To Write A Screenplay