Getting a bigger boat

After the feedback from Derbyshire Scriptwriters on my short screenplay, I took the plunge this weekend, and saw whether I could make a feature out of it or not - and you know what?

I'll tell you in a minute.

I spent a blisteringly hot Saturday in the good company of Michael Eaton and a group of other writers at Nottingham Contemporary on a Scriptwriting Workshop- one of the excellent sessions organised by Nottingham Writers Studio.  Michael has a phenomenal track record, and his thoughts on how to apply his philosophy of the process of scriptwriting to the incredibly varied stories around the room was inspiring, and marvellously invisible - we went into the room with a bunch of completely different stories, and came out with a bunch of completely different outlines for screenplays.  My thanks to Michael and everyone at the workshop for the help and encouragement they gave me for my work; I hope I was of help to them too.

There are more events coming up after the summer, so if you're inspired, take a look.

So...?
Yes, it is a feature (I'm practicing adding suspense as I blog), or at least it will be.
I have to finish rewriting the novel first...

Expect the unexpected

The interesting thing about having your work critiqued by other people is that you never expect the most interesting thing they say...

I've just had my short film screenplay excellently critiqued by Derbyshire Scriptwriters - there were a lot of positives that came out of the session, and some really useful comments which showed me what I thought was clear as day on the page... well, it wasn't.  But this is what it's all about - I might have come up with the same conclusions, I may not - but when several people all tell you the same thing about your work, you get a little look into what the audience might be thinking if the film was shot from the current script, and as a writer who wants people to say they enjoyed the story, it's invaluable.

By the end of the crit, I knew what I could do to make it work harder, and I began to make notes to make it an even better short screenplay - then came the googly:

'You know I think this could be a lot better as a full length feature.'

I'm gonna need a bigger boat.

Just 4 miles

I was about to write that it's not a lot - but it's all relative.

I hadn't planned on running that morning, and when the chance came up in the evening, I took it.
I only had about an hour, so I ran as far as I could in that.
And while I was mentally grumbling that the music in my headphones was hard to keep up with, one of the characters in my story explained why they wanted to see Penny, my central character. Then Penny gave her reaction to the meeting, and the kind of request a character should leap at in a story. Then everything kicked off in the setting of the bricabrac-infested flat Penny hides away in.

So it was just four miles, but when I look back on how far I've come, it's a long way.

Inspiration at Lowdham

I've been inspired to get moving with a blog after a great session with Leicester Writers Club who were one of the sessions at Lowdham Book Festival last weekend - brilliant day, blazing sunshine, and a cracking sandwich from the co-op down the road.

I'll tell you more about what I've been up to as I get up to it.

First step

And here we are. Just starting out with blogs and html and the like, so hang back a little - unexpected sharp braking may be applied at any time within these first posts.