Having been overwhelmed with work, family life and MA studies, I didn’t keep a reflective blog for the whole of the last Writer’s Room module. Shame on me.

However, it’s a new module and a new day, and I’m going to attempt to do some reflection. It may be simple but I’m at least going to try.

Having mulled all the options, I’ve decided my professional case study is going to be on the process and business of adaptations from existing IP. Not the creative process, that’s an entire course in itself, but the nuts and bolts of optioning books, news articles, blogs, short stories etc. It’s a huge part of the entertainment industry which I don’t really understand and I feel I should.

My pitch bible, coincidentally, is going to be the adaptation of an autobiography which I tried and failed to option a couple of years ago. The book has in my opinion all the ingredients needed to make a great screenplay, even if it’s purely an exercise.

Week 8’s study block was all about how digital technology has changed the means and ways modern screenwriters are able to sell their projects and screenplays.

The screenplay is the standard format for a film idea, but more and more these are being accompanied by visual and musical support material, normally in the form of a treatment or moodboard. Crowdfunding through sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo were highlighted as an example where the focus of the pitch is no longer the screenplay. What all the successful pitches have in common is that they’re highly visual, there’s often original concept art and proof concept films or scenes, and the rewards are all very creative and produced for the sole purpose of the pitch. Within these pitches there’s a minimal description of the story and a total absence of screenplay. The idea, mood, visuals and credentials are what potential backers clearly are more interested in.

What does this mean to writers? It means we should be open to raising our game and getting better at selling our screenplays with supporting visual material. Not in the screenplay itself, but potentially as an accompanying document. What we need to be mindful of is that visuals are an interpretation of the text, and directors see that being THEIR role. This means the imagery should be designed to get people excited and see the potential, but not be so specific that a director feels like they’re being told how to interpret the screenplay.

The highlights of catching up on Week 7 have watching ‘The Detectorists’ and finally getting some feedback on the 2nd draft of my screenplay.

‘The Detectorists’, which will be the focus of a collaborative writing exercise, I found to be a reasonably enjoyable watch. I found the pace a little slow and the writing a little on the nose but the strong cast make up for it. Watching it it did bring to mind the difference between UK and US comedy. A show like this would never work in the US, it’s too meandering and not punchy enough and you can tell it’s written by one writer.

Receiving feedback on my screenplay was nice for 2 reasons.

The first being that the feedback was very positive and it’s not a steaming turd of an idea. Phew! Two classmates however rightfully identified the 3rd act was underdeveloped and needs a clearer resolution. I also had a 1.5 hr long chat with the course tutor talking through the strengths and weaknesses of the idea, which was really useful, and gave me lots of food for thought. Have committed to altering the structure of the intro, reworking the 3rd act and writing the next draft as a ‘comedy pass’.

The second reason was that, having fallen behind, this was the first contact I’ve had with my fellow students. I’ve not felt that connected to the course and so it was great to get some interaction. One of the main reasons of signing up to do a masters was to connect with like minded aspiring writers so if this first 8 weeks is my season 1, my character has learned that falling behind is shit and that in season 2, I’m going to need to learn to manage my time better so I stay caught up…

Catch up continues. The theme of Week 6 is ‘the scene’ and dialogue.

Cherry Potter’s chapter on ‘Characterisation and Dialogue’ was a pretty enjoyable read and a good overview of screen dialogue’s function, how it works best and some starter-for-ten suggestions on how to best write it. My issue with dialogue is that I enjoy writing it but have perhaps always over relied on it, especially in my attempts at comedy, to convey wants, meaning and information. So one thing I’m very conscious of now is asking questions like how could this scene be told with less or no dialogue? I know from my day job as a commercials director, working in a medium where the skill is to communicate entire stories including characters, ideas and desires in as little as 30″, that viewers will remember most of what they see, but can often miss information if its spoken. For example, you can have woman sat on her sofa saying she’s a stressed out mum. Or you can have a woman on the phone, a child demanding her attention, someone at the door and dinner burning on the stove, all at the same time. Story telling on screen at its best is primarily visual, then backed up with strong and efficient dialogue. 

One of the areas that interests me is how dialogue is used in different genres and how the skill of a writer is being able work within a specific world and set of audience expectations. Aaron Sorkin is famously verbose and high speed, writing a form of dialogue that isn’t necessarily 100% realistic but is often very dramatic and entertaining. Tarantino is famous for the heightened tone and referential nature of dialogue. The Coen Brothers are famous for the depth, wit and idiosyncrasy of theirs. Judd Apatow is famous for the comedically truthful and painfully honest style of his dialogue. Or Phoebe Waller-Bridge for the self-deprecating, unflinchingly honest and insightful style of hers.

What all of these writers have in common is they write very specifically within a genre, with a huge amount of the tone and mood of the work coming from the specificity of the way their characters speak. Equally, all of their characters are incredibly definable with strong identities and points of view. The hard work has been done creating intriguing characters, putting them in entertaining situations, giving them difficult obstacles to overcome, and then giving them voices that not only perform the task of communicating feelings, wants, needs, personality and information, but also delivering a specific tone, world view and staking it’s place in the storytelling multiverse.

Where I have always struggled as a writer is that I get plenty of ideas about characters, themes or basic premises, but I’ve lacked the craft and knowhow how to plot them and turn them into compelling stories. Which is why I’m doing this course.

So I’ve parked the Western. A classic case of having a premise and a character but not the plot to explore them through. So the idea I’m developing now has the working title ‘Love or Nothing’, which I’d like to improve. The premise is:

When nearly man filmmaker DAN (33) is humiliated in front of RUTH (31), the focus of his unrequited love, he enlists in a ‘How To Direct Actors’ masterclass to impress her by showing that he’s willing to ‘put himself out there’. However, he quickly finds he’s bitten off more than he can chew and goes through a painfully embarrassing but cathartic experience where he is able to finally voice his true feelings, proving to himself that he is capable and deserving of more.

In the story Dan is a shy, uptight and unsuccessful wannabe filmmaker (don’t know who that’s inspired by…) and the plot revolves around a script he’s writing, which he then has to publicly perform. So I’m breaking two rules here, writing about writing and making a film about filmmaking. They’re massive cliches I would normally avoid right now it’s the story that’s coming out of me. In the past I’ve always been too critical and filtered ideas to the point I wouldn’t finish anything. My aim now is to just get the stories out, finish them, and focus on the learning experience and building my writing stamina. And just as photographer start out taking photos of their feet I need to get this personal shit out of my system and out of the way…

The inspiration for the plot is the combining two of the most embarrassing experiences of my life. The first, being in a love with a girl who used me to make herself feel wanted, when she couldn’t get it elsewhere. And my excrutiating experience doing a directing actors course in London. Ordinarily this would have been a bit of an ordeal as whilst I’m not as shy as Dan my character, I’m not a performer. As it happened I had been filming in Cape Town the week before and returned to London with gastroenteritis from seafood poisoning, meaning I had to do the week long workshop bunged up on Ibuprofen and Imodium. On the first day when I learned I was to do some acting (my understanding was I’d be directing, not acting…) I had to play a teenager being seduced by a Mrs Robinson type older woman. The actress I had to do the scene with was in her 20s, and I was 40…and I trying not to shit myself…in front of 20 actors and directors who were way more capable and up for it than me.

The experience was humiliating and painful, but ultimately cathartic. The class were incredibly supportive and by the end of the week I had lost much of my fear and was starting to enjoy performing. Reading Robin Mukherjee’s process of collecting experiences from his life and turning them into plot lines was the inspiration for wanting to incorporate this into my script. Whilst I have lingering doubts about whether people are really that interested in filmmakers as protagonists, or that interested in things like acting classes, it’s a world I know and one I can bring an authenticity and humour to.

I’ve tried to think of ways to transpose the idea onto other professions to something more relatable, but as a story about finding your voice and overcoming inhibitions, I’ve not been able to find an alternative.

So my week 5 story goals are: 

• make my protagonist Dan more relatable

• make my love interest Ruth more relatable

• make my story goal and dramatic need clearer

• make the story more visual and less reliant on dialogue

So Romania was a success. The shoot went well and after a year of not working it felt great to be back in the saddle, doing what I love…making daft TV commercials.

But I’m still behind on the Masters and desperately playing catch up. I’ve greatly underestimated the demands of doing such a course and if I’m to succeed I’m going to need to be super organised. One of the reasons for not catching up as much as I had planned was that I was struggling to break my Wild West short idea. I went from Wild West story told from the point of view of an emancipated slave (I felt under equipped to tell this story), to Wild West story told through the eyes of an autistic man (a personal issue but too incongruous?!), to a Wild West story told from the point of view of two idiot brothers, inspired by two featured extras on my western TV commercial. What I was looking for was something more comedic and modern, which is my ambition, to do contemporary comedic takes on well known genres, like the Western or Sci-fi.

But it wasn’t coming easy. So on reflection I’ve decided to work up the story I wrote to get onto the Masters in the first place. A story based two of my most humiliating experiences. A tragi-comedy if you will. The premise:

When reserved nearly man DAN tries to win close friend RUTH’s affection by signing up to an acting workshop, he finds himself in a situation where he has to choose between retreating into his shell, or overcoming his deep inhibitions and showing for the first time how he truly feels.

It’s a story about unrequited love with a plot revolving around a wannabe filmmaker doing an acting course. I know it’s a cliche to write about writing or filmmaking, but I feel the need to get some of the more personal stuff out of the way before I can look further afield. Such as The McLaury Brothers, two idiot brothers travelling the Wild West, in search of fame, fortune and a misguided sense of what it means to be an outlaw.

So it’s the end of Week 2 of quarantine in Romania and the end of Week 4 of the Masters course in screenwriting. Pre-production on the TV commercial I’m working on is going well but typically, after a very quiet year, the buses are starting to line up.

I went into the week planning to do some serious catching up on Week 2 and 3 coursework, which began with turning my premise into an outline, discussing Maras’s thoughts on Auteur Theory and feeding back on classmates short film outlines, even though they’ve moved on and are in Week 4. I’m determined to do everything that’s asked of me, even though giving feedback at this stage will be akin to talking to an empty room…hello? Anyone?

Then of course two more potential jobs came along and I’ve spent most of the week writing treatments for an Irish supermarket and a global travel agent. It’s not a great excuse – the dogs eaten my homework would be preferable – but it’s the truth.

The time that I have spent on coursework I’ve found tough but enjoyable. I’m still trying to crack my Wild West short film outline. Mainly because I have a theme, I have a setting and I have a character, but I don’t yet have the killer story with a great ending to explore those three things. At the moment I’m still going through different ‘what if’s’ waiting for inspiration to strike. I know from the day job you can’t force inspiration and you sometimes have to relax and trust that it’s in you somewhere and the process will let it out. But screenwriting is very different to directing commercials and it’s made me very aware that I don’t know what my screenwriting ‘process’ is? I’m hoping that by the end of this course in 2 years I’ll have a better idea.

So questions of the week are…what precisely constitutes a script? What does the role of screenwriter involve and what’s it’s place in society?

The text this week was on Auteur Theory which I found a little arduous. I’d forgotten how dense and un-reader friendly some academic texts can be. Maybe it’s because I’ve worked in advertising for too long but my reaction was to slightly recoil from it as many of the suppositions seem to be from people more interested in commentary and theory than in real world practice.

Born from my modest experience making films and adverts I subscribe to the school of thought of script as blue print. It’s the starting point, the launch pad, the seed, from which a film is grown. It is unarguably a valuable work of creative expression, but unless the writers aim is for it to live on a shelf and never be made, it’s an incomplete work or as Paul Schrader described it, an “invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.”

Recognising and accepting that seems to me to be part of the job of being a screenwriter. If the writer is looking for more ownership or recognition, then perhaps they should be writing novels where they can claim sole authorship. As for how society regards screenplays? I think the screenplay is seen as an incomplete work and really only of interest to cinephiles. It that respect it’s also definitely not revered in the same way a play can be, although perhaps that is due more to the film industries chosen structure of script ownership. If a script could be made by whomever wishes, that would certainly place scripts in a very different light…

At the time of writing it’s the end of my first week of quarantine in Romania. It’s been a busy week and not quite the relaxing writer’s retreat I’d envisaged. However, I have started to catch up my student work. I’ve written my premise. Tick. I’ve written about what story telling means to me. Tick. I’ve left constructive feedback. Tick. Week 1 complete (albeit 2 weeks late) and it feels good to be doing the work and making some progress.

However, reading my earlier blog posts, and re-reading the briefs, I need to treat this blog more as medium for academic reflection and not a personal journal. However, I’m really gonna struggle to separate the two. I’m a working filmmaker of sorts (“no daddy you make TV commercials!” – it still stings…) and so my work and my study are intertwined. What I do at work is inevitably going to feed into my course work and vice versa. For example, I’m currently working on a Wild West themed TV commercial so the short film script I plan to develop is a western. So there’s gonna be crossover. Anyway, time to reflect…

Question 1: What kind of story telling do I use and why?

This is one of the main reasons I’ve signed up to do an MA. I don’t know yet. The types of stories I’ve always been drawn to are comedy and character studies. If I read back through my early attempts at writing, it’s all comedic or absurdist. The scripts I wrote on my film making BA, were black comedies. These days I make a living out of directing comedic TV adverts. Yet ask my family or friends and they’ll say I’m quite serious and not particularly funny. Don’t worry, I’ve made my peace with that.

But why comedy? Robert McKee calls comedy the ‘angry art’ and I guess on some level – as a mixed race, child of hippy parents, growing up in an all white, rural part of the UK, where I received some half-hearted racial abuse and made to feel like an outsider – that yeah life isn’t fair. Whilst my childhood was largely very happy and secure (thanks mum! thanks dad!) I have always felt like an underdog and I had something to prove. And I guess I had something I needed to say. But why comedy? If I was feeling injustice why was I not drawn to documentary, journalism or drama?

If you put a gun to my head now, I would probably start babbling incoherently about how comedy is as powerful a tool as any in shining a light on the darker or ridiculous aspects of humanity, just take Borat, The Coen Brothers or Judd Apatow. I would probably try to argue (whilst soiling myself uncontrollably) that comedy can make challenging issues more accessible to jaded audiences who just want some joy after a hard week at work. And that (whilst sobbing pathetically) entertainment is, if done well, as important as any other storytelling medium, because life isn’t just about correcting wrongs and empathising with other people’s suffering. It’s also about laughter, togetherness and gratitude (again, thanks mum! thanks dad!).

But that’s all just post rationalisation. I didn’t think about any of this as a child. I just wrote what was inside. So, I don’t know why I’m drawn to humorous storytelling in particular. But it feels like a worthwhile activity trying to find out.

Put simply, because I have to. I’m doing a Masters in Writing for Script and Screen at Falmouth University. I’ve been told self reflection and keeping a journal is a key constituent of academic study.

This may be obvious to many but it’s been some 20 years since I was last a student. I’m a working dad living in London doing the devil’s work making TV commercials. I have a job. I have a wife. I have kids. I have a mortgage and 28 direct debits to pay (I’m working on getting those down). But because I’m a sado-masochist I thought that wasn’t enough and decided to become a student again. Which as it turns out is much more work than I anticipated.

The thing is self-reflection is something that historically I’ve tried to avoid. No one really wants to dig around in the back of the cupboard for fear of what you might find. A jar of mouldy regret. A tin of out of date dreams. A large multi-pack of personal limitations. There’s so many of them!

Ok fine. Let’s just do this. The reason I’m putting myself through this is I’ve always written but I’ve never been particularly good at it. A couple of years ago I did a directing short course in London and the first thing we had to do was a skills audit. And hey, whaddya know, there were a few gaps in my resume. It turns out I was a very good technical director, a good organiser and a good collaborator. But as it turned out my knowledge of story was patchy at best. Sure I’ve read Robert McKee and listen regularly to the Script Notes podcast. But it turns out that’s not enough. It turns out that you can’t just absorb writing knowledge and craft through osmosis.

You have to work at it. You have to read. You have to write. You have to study. So here I am. I’m a student again. Self-reflecting.

So fresher’s week as an adult is somewhat different to back in the day. Having barely worked in the past year because of the damn plague I suddenly find myself starting a big job the SAME week as my Masters Degree in screenwriting at Falmouth Uni.

Instead of wrapping my head around the online learning portal and familiarising myself with the curriculum I’m juggling homeschooling, work, recruiting childcare and a number of DIY projects I fear are now going to be left in half finished limbo for a number of months.

Oh, and I only say this as it will undoubtedly come up, one of my kids is autistic. Which makes life complicated.

Like I said, fresher’s week as an adult is somewhat different to the first time around.