Screenwriter
I’ve spent a lot of time recently recommending a couple of fantastic resources to anyone and everyone I know in the middle of slogging it out on a screen story. The below two story lectures are fantastic for lots of reasons, but key to their impact is that they’re incredibly useful, craft-focused overviews for anyone […]
On the destructive myth of a writer’s ‘voice’, and what ‘finding your voice’ actually means.
The delightful Holly Lyons, screenwriting lecturer at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, and maven behind script assessment service Screenwriting Scriptease, invited me along last week to a speed pitching session for her screenwriting students. Along with some fellow industry peeps, we lined ourselves up for an onslaught of pitches from emerging writers and filmmakers […]
You can click here to jump straight to the checklist! As writers, we’re told to think outside the box. We strive to look beyond genre conventions, to make interesting connections so our concepts feel ‘fresh’ and ‘unique’. We scout for intriguing ways into our stories, and look to develop characters with traits and motivations that […]
It all started (for me at least) when I saw this tweet from J.K. Rowling: The tweet was in response to sports blogger Bradley Geiser’s (aka NBA Kurt Vonnegut @therealbradg) request for people to write their autobiography using only predictive text, starting with the words ‘I was born’. This blew my mind! How amazing, and […]
A couple of months ago, a friend got in touch to let me know about her latest project. And my heart skipped a beat. Nicky Shortridge and her childhood best friend Vivien Jones are busy creating Kookie – a fun, feminist print magazine designed for girls, that they are looking to fund through Kickstarter. In their […]
Being a good producer takes a lot of guts. Generally speaking, I think film and TV producers get a bad wrap. We envision them as ruthless, mercenary sharks with no respect for the creative process, just the bottom line. But good producers couldn’t be further from that stereotype. (And that’s not to say there aren’t […]
If writing is re-writing, scriptwriting is script editing. And one of the most basic tools of script editing is the One Liner, which focuses you on POS (point of scene). As a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed trainee script editor, my boss assigned me some practise. After I’d mangled my way through a set of off-balance notes, […]
Towards the end of last year, I was in a bit of a state. I was still coming to terms with being a freelancer, I wasn’t being productive as a writer or as a filmmaker, and a couple of personal projects kind of fell apart. Things felt stuck. As someone who needs to always be […]
I came across this fantastic podcast the other day via Tin House and featuring writer Ann Hood who shares her ten rules on how to write a ‘kick-ass’ essay. It is excellent and I urge you to listen to it immediately! The podcast is a recording of Hood’s lecture given during Tin House’s 2014 Summer Writer’s Workshop. Hood is […]
In which I say, try it all at least once, no matter what anyone says, and go with what works right now. I remember being a kid and wanting nothing more than to sit down with a fresh new notebook, full of lovely, clean white pages, and fill every single one of […]
In which I get all a bit hot under the collar about people who dismiss youth media (or any genre storytelling) because of their own prejudices about the intended audience. When we think of ‘ageism’, we generally think of a bias towards the young over the old. We see it everywhere as we are […]
