Monday 9 August 2010

It all started when....

I've randomly decided to go down one of those "write a blog post on something and tag a few other people to do the same thing" posts.

I know a lot of people have talked about their long journey to screenwriter, but I just felt the need to talk about that initial moment where you decided that this was something you could/should/would do. So here's mine:

Early 2008 during a creative writing seminar at uni. I think the module was called Verse & Narrative and was very much the basics of writing. The main focus was to get you to understand story structure, characters, voice etc. This particular was (if memory serves) on dialogue and our tutor (the Texan lady who later guided me through my first feature script) presented us with a few pages of Trottier's Screenwriter's Bible.

After 90 minutes of reading through it and lots of thinking, I realised that writing screenplays could be majorly fun! So I bought the book, read it in one weekend and got to work on the whole writing thingy. By the summer of that year, I decided I was ready to write a feature script. I wasn't, because what I produced was an 80-page piece of (in a word) shit.

But I can remember exactly where I was when I wrote the words "FADE TO BLACK" and hit save. It printed it out and it was one of the most awesome feelings ever!

And that was the moment I knew that screenwriting was what I wanted to do. There wasn't any other option. Yep, it's all very cliché. But, as my writing tutor told me repeatedly last year, I'm a huge fan of cliché!


So, I hereby tag Miss Michelle Goode, Mr John Hunter and Miss Manda Diaz to tell the world how they knew they wanted to be a writer......

1 comment:

Manda said...

Thanks for the tag! This is going to be tricky...