The Authoritative Guide to Writing – And Selling! – a Great Screenplay

Ladies and Gentlemen, we interrupt this long period of blog silence to bring you this Important Announcement.

The Authoritative Guide to Writing – And Selling! – a Great Screenplay

Early Bird Discount – Last Few Days – A reminder

Sat-Sun 24th and 25th September, 10am – 5.30pm Central London

You just have 1 day left to book your place at the Early Bird discount rate. Full price will apply after SEPT 9th .

The seminar comprises two intensive, interactive days, designed to focus your creativity, your screenwriting skills and improve your networking.

It’s run by two very experienced practitioners: Producer/Script Editor Philip Shelley (Waking The Dead, BBC; Inspector Morse, ITV), who also runs the Channel 4 Writers Course and the script-consultant.co.uk website, and Screenwriter Philip Gladwin (Trial & Retribution, The Bill (both ITV ), who also owns and runs the Screenwriting Goldmine website.

If you’re a screenwriter who is looking for new inspiration after the summer slowdown, and if you want to learn some very specific and highly effective techniques for writing – and selling – a great screenplay, then this two day workshop is for you.

If you are interested in finding out more, and seeing some of the excellent feedback we got from our inaugural course in July – and booking before the Early Bird discount runs out this Friday – please follow this link for more information.

Here’s my personal recommendation: if you can only afford to invest in one screenwriting course this year, make it this one. These guys know their stuff.

Celtx: Open Source Screenwriting Beginner’s Guide

Here’s how it goes with new screenwriters: They can’t afford pro screenwriting software like Final Draft, so they struggle with a hobbled demo version which limits them to just a few pages of script. They’re so eager to get on with writing that they don’t stop to learn the basic rules of screenplay formatting, structure, tone or style. They don’t spend time learning about three-act structure because they don’t know such a thing exists.

The net result is a bugger’s muddle that completely fails to express their beautifully honed inner vision in any meaningful way. How do I know? Because I made all of these mistakes and several more that I’m too embarrassed to recount.

I learned the basics the hard way, by buying several screenwriting books, going on courses and reading scripts. Even then I always had this nagging feeling that my scripts were missing something tremendously important. I still have that nagging feeling. I don’t think it ever goes away.

Back to the point. New screenwriters don’t have to cough up a couple of hundred quid for Final Draft. There’s an excellent piece of software called Celtx which does everything FD does and a bunch more besides. It’s free and it works well.

But Celtx isn’t going to jump off the screen and tell you how to use it or how to format a script or what a synopsis is or what the difference is between a logline and a tagline.

That’s where Celtx: Open Source Screenwriting Beginner’s Guide comes in. Ignore the baffling ‘open source’ bit in the title, this book is aimed squarely at new screenwriters who want to get on with writing their magnum opus. All the information they need is here: not only how to install and drive Celtx and how to write and edit a script but also how to work with different project types including feature scripts, documentaries, stage plays, audio plays and so on.

The book then rises above your average ‘how to’ by including a shedload of useful information about treatments, synopses, outlines and, of course, loglines and taglines. There’s a whole chapter on how to market your script and a list of recommended screenwriting books.

This book won’t turn you into the next Aaron Sorkin, but if you’re standing at the starting line scratching your head, it’ll give you a solid boost in the right direction. It’s available in old-fashioned paper and new-fangled electronic formats. One’s cheaper than the other. Guess which.

All in all worth a few quid of your money. Download Celtx, buy this book, get your head down and get your first script done.

This morning I have discovered The Law of Synopses: the time taken to write a synopsis is the inverse square of the desired length of the synopsis.

I’ve been working on this two page pitch for Coming Up for bloody hours. I could have knocked out 30 pages of script in the time it’s taken me to write these 800 words.

Big Pink update: pre-production is nearly complete. Here’s the teaser.

Robin Kelly’s provided an excellent pre-treatment checklist. Can you answer all these questions about that treatment you’ve just finished?

Oh! It looks like I’ve just finished my first feature script. Hm. What shall I do with it? Print it out as quickly as possible and send it to important people?

Nope.

It’s going in the drawer. I’m not going to look at it for at least a week.

Then, and only then, I’ll re-read it and find all the horrific mistakes.

Then the re-writes begin.

Stormhouse

Have a look at this, horror fans, ghost fans, film fans. Have a look.

Stormhouse was written by uberscribe Jason Arnopp. That’s how I know it’s going to scare the pants off me. Arnopp has the knowing of scare-pants-offness.

Half a conversation

Hi! How are you?

Excellent. That’s what I like to hear.

Yes, I know. I’m hopeless.

Okay, okay, I’m sorry. I should’ve called. I’ve been mad busy.

Uh, well, I’ve been pitching stories to filmmakers for Virgin Media Shorts. Working on two different shorts for that, one live action and one animated. Serious fun.

Well, no, that’s not occupied *all* my time obviously. A feature rewrite job that I pitched for a few weeks ago suddenly popped up again and they want everything done and dusted yesterday, if not sooner. Of course I’ve explained that rewrites take a while. Producers have a mental filter that literally blocks anything they don’t want to hear from reaching their brains.

Ha ha, yes, mea culpa. I swear I’m not a producer at heart. Honest. I just get super-focussed on what I’m doing. Like my spec TV drama, Murderwood? You know I’ve been hacking away at it for months, right? Well, it’s gone off to circalit.com, entered into one of their competitions. I sent it off to Writersroom too, which was the original plan.

Sorry, that was me. I’ll buy some more ink for the printer today. Writersroom only accept printed scripts. That’s the BBC for you.

The diamond film? You mean Big Pink? That’s in pre-production. The producer’s running around like a madman and the director’s fretting about sick actors and hiring kit. The fact that they’re both the same guy is only adding to the confusion. Still, we’ve got a dead good location in mind for the main scenes. Absolutely top-hole. If they let us use it, of course.

No, I’m not telling you. It’s in London. You can wait and see it when the film’s finished.

Oh, and there’s my psychological horror feature script. That’s nearly ready to go out for a couple of reads. It’s been a bit held up what with other stuff. I’ll be getting back onto that tomorrow.

A rest? What, you mean a break from writing? Ha ha. No. There’s the next TV spec, those other three features, those other VMShorts filmmakers I pitched to. And the blog, of course, and maybe some long-form fiction, and…where are you going?

MURDERWOOD

I’ve just finished my spec TV drama, MURDERWOOD. It’s up on Circalit http://www.circalit.com/laurencetimms/projects/murderwood/ and available for reads and reviews. It would genuinely appreciate as many reads and reviews as possible. I mean proper reviews: constructive criticism that highlights the things that works and underlines the things that don’t. This kind of feedback only serves to improve a script.

Here’s the logline and synopsis as a taster:

MURDERWOOD
A quiet English town becomes a crime-ridden frontier as it stuggles to cope with an influx of unearthly human-like creatures.

Fairies aren’t the tiny winged creatures of legend. In fact, they’re a lot like us. But their world has become a place of oppression and they’re escaping in their hundreds into our world, just as they did a thousand years ago. Back then we treated them as sacred, supernatural creatures. Now we just see them – the Faer – as carriers of disease, the bogeyman behind every crime, a burden on the state, thieves, animals…monsters.

The quiet market town of Marwood is where they come through. The main portal lies in the former RAF Marwood base, now a detention centre holding hundreds of Faer refugees. However, the land around Marwood is like a sieve, with Faer slipping through at will. Most of them come to escape the suffering in their own world but some of them come with criminal intent, for the Faer are just like us: good, bad or evil.

The local police force is stretched to breaking point as the locals turn against their unwanted neighbours, saddling them with the blame for every act of vandalism, every case of arson, every assault, every murder. Vigilante gangs roam the streets at night, ostensibly protecting their homes. Human criminals are drawn to Marwood, intent on trafficking unsuspecting Faer into prostitution, drug running and slavery.

On the front line is the Faer Crimes Team, an underfunded, overworked group of CID’s least wanted, shuffled sideways to deal with crimes nobody else wants to touch. Their job is made more dangerous by the strange powers some Faer possess: the ability to alter our perceptions, to influence our emotions, even to wrest away control of our bodies.

With the government ignoring the problem, the locals’ xenophobia reaching new heights and the stream of refugee Faer showing no sign of slowing, things are only going to get worse.

Virgin Media Shorts – an opportunity for aspiring scriptwriters

Okay, aspiring scriptwriters. You will have already read all about the Virgin Media Shorts competition and you’ll be wondering how you can hook up with some filmmakers in order to get your incredibly smart and clever short film script turning into living, moving pictures.

What? You *haven’t* read about Virgin Media Shorts? Are you living under a rock with your head in a wooden box filled with polystyrene beads? Stop what you’re doing, go here and read about it. Then come back.

Got it? Right. Now White Tiger Films is running a competition off the back of VMShorts, looking for scripts from new and coming writers. That’s you. This is a real opportunity to get your script turned into a film. I mean, hell, just making it into production is an incredible confidence-booster for a new writer but if the resultant film does well in the Virgin competition itself then the sky’s the limit.

Go to White Tiger’s competition page, read the rules and get involved.

Now.

What? You want the link?

Here you go.