Making pointless characters matter and making pointless competition meaningful. Here’s some different things I’ve been thinking a lot about this past month. Maybe there’s something here to interest you too?
WHAT I WROTE THIS YEAR – 2019
It’s felt like a very long year! While it started off a little slow, it ran up into a big and tiring finish. There’s been lots of great stuff going on professionally, loads of development work and a couple of wins too, with some Story Development funding from Screen Australia (the application for which is […]
How To Write Movies: Mazin and Arndt’s Screenwriting Philosophies
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 […]
What I Wrote This Year – 2018
A look back on my main writing achievements for 2018.
How Do You ‘Find Your Voice’ As A Writer?
On the destructive myth of a writer’s ‘voice’, and what ‘finding your voice’ actually means.
Advice To New And Emerging Screenwriters (And Script Editors)
So, I write for television and I get paid for it. It literally pays my bills and keeps me fed. I don’t earn an outrageous living, far from it, but I earn enough to maintain independence and sanity. I don’t have to dig wells, sell shoes or wait tables* to keep myself afloat. AND I […]
What’s The Point (Of Scene)? How The One Liner Changed How I See Stories
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, […]
3 Reasons Why I Recommend The NYC Midnight Writing Challenges
About a year ago, I came across a group called NYC Midnight that run a slate of online writing competitions. I’m usually pretty suspicious of these sorts of things, and to be honest I’m not someone who regularly enters competitions. But after poking about their website, I thought, why not? I’ll try it once, and […]
Ann Hood’s Top Ten Tips On How To Write A Kick-Ass Essay
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 […]
Finding Your Process (Is Hard)
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 […]
Have You Tried Turning It Off and On Again?
In which I discover ‘The I.T. Crowd’ properly and also discover Graham Linehan’s awesome approach to writing sitcoms. I clearly have been living under a rock for some time (not an unusual feeling for me I have to say). I recently picked up the box set of The I.T. Crowd, the British sitcom […]
