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York Festival of Writing, organised by the fabulous Writers Workshop (www.writersworkshop.co.uk) has been and gone for another year. It was an amazing weekend full of inspiring sessions and workshops and a tremendous buzz – the like of which you can only get when you put 300 or so authors, agents, publishers and writers-aspiring-to-publication in one place.
So now, a week later, I’m ready to put my reflections on the three wonderful days into words. In this post I’m reflecting on the first workshop I attended, the Screenwriting Masterclass with Ashley Pharaoh, creator of Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, and other ground-breaking shows.
Firstly it was a fantastic session, delivered in a wonderfully down to earth way by someone who obviously has a huge amount of passion for his craft.
There were a few lightbulb moments for me in this session:
Conflict: if conflict is inherent in the story set-up it makes for tension from the start
Scene design: start as late and leave as early as you can from the scene – it cuts out the boring bits!
How many storylines can you fit in a story? As a novelist I feel pretty chuffed if I’ve got four running through the story. But when we looked in detail at the first six minutes of an episode of Life on Mars, by the sixth minute we found there were seven, yes that’s right, SEVEN storylines in play. Pretty cool stuff!
I left the session inspired to put into practice the things I’d learned in my own writing.
Screenwriting looks and sounds really interesting too. Maybe I’ll have a go at that once I’ve finished my novel!
Related Articles
- WonderCon Video Interview: ‘Terra Nova’ Stars and Creators (screenrant.com)
- The Storyline and The Muse: Non-linear writing (storybodyguard.com)
- What is the importance of storyline and character development within Teenage Drama. (smiffy1994.wordpress.com)
