In my last post on Filmmaking: the screenwriter’s role I told you how many people, including the director, can suggest or even demand a script rewrite. So I’ve asked an up and coming writer / director for his perspective on the creative process.
Alex Kinsey is a 28 year old actor and director. Acting work has included short films, TV dramas, commercials and theatre work. He wrote, directed and produced his first short film ‘Smile’ – a strange tale of a sinister meeting in the ‘Get Carter’ car park in Gateshead. Alex directed the short film ‘Maybe One Day’ through the Stingers scheme in 2008. Another recent short film he wrote and directed, ‘The Other Woman’, can be seen on Northern Film and Media‘s website.
Continue reading ‘Screenwriting: the director’s perspective’
Last week freelance writer and guest blogger Suzanne Elvidge gave us some tips on how to find work in the potentially lucrative field of report writing. This week she shows us how to go about producing the copy.
Continue reading ‘Report writing – the nuts and bolts’
Writing for the business market or copywriting can be a lucrative string to a freelance’s bow. In this two-part series, guest blogger and freelance writer Suzanne Elvidge gives you some tips on how to find the work and then tackle the reports.
There are a lot of different types of report a freelance writer might be called on to write, for a wide range of different audiences. They include
- annual reports for a company or charity;
- reports from meetings and conferences, including those looking at research areas or products;
- reviews of products or topics; and
- business intelligence and market research reports.
Like all freelance work, there is no simple one stop shop for finding all the work you need (but if you know of one, please let me know…). There are as many places to find work writing reports as there are types of reports.
Continue reading ‘Report writing – finding work’
After twelve months of hard graft I was thrilled to finally see my four-minute short film, ‘Enemy Lines’, on the big screen. ‘Enemy Lines’, the story of a British soldier returning from Iraq and witnessing an anti-war protestor getting mugged, was one of 11 short films produced and screened through Northern Film and Media’s Stingers programme in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Now I’m ‘officially’ a screenwriter, with my very first commission in the can. Here’s what I’ve learnt so far about the writer’s role in the filmmaking industry:
Continue reading ‘Filmmaking – the screenwriter’s role’
Field Report.com is a community website that features true-life stories. Membership is free, and you simply have to ‘rate’ five other stories in order to qualify to up-load your own 2000 word story. They’ve currently got a competition going with the closing date now extended to 31 December 2008. Each month, the winning story will win $1,000 and be entered into a $250,000 prize draw in January 2009. I thought this might be too good to be true so I checked it out and found that both the Guardian and Time Magazine have featured the website and this contest and seem to think it’s legit.
So what are you waiting for? Get writing! If you need some tips on writing from life, check out this session in our free non-fiction writing course.
I love it when I come across a genre niche I’ve never heard of and I love it even more when I find a writer as savvy in marketing as he or she is in writing. I found both in Joanna Campbell Slan and her debut novel Paper, Scissors, Death. This was my first introduction to the ‘craft cozy’ mystery genre and though talk of scrapbooking and other activities that an already overworked woman and mother ‘should’ partake in normally turn me cold, this was strangely compelling. However, if I’m honest, my interest is more to do with the business and craft of writing than in scrapbooking or ‘cozy’ mysteries. But hey, that’s me; as Joanna shows, there are millions of readers out there who will lap this up. Go for it Joanna!
Continue reading ‘Craft ‘cozies’ – mysteries for crafters’
Who knows what’s in the mind of an editor? I decided to ask one of them for his top tips on pitching freelance work. Ian Wylie is editor of the Guardian newspaper’s weekly Work and Graduate sections. He also writes on business issues for a wide range of titles in the UK, Europe and US. In the last 12 months his features have been published in the Financial Times, LA Times, Monocle, Management Today, easyJet Inflight and Velocity. So over to Ian …
Occasionally poachers turn into gamekeepers, but few hold down both jobs at the same time. I’ve been a freelance journalist for 15 years, selling ideas to a variety of newspapers and magazines both in the UK and abroad. But for the last 10 years, I’ve combined my freelancing with a part-time job as a commissioning editor at a national newspaper.
Continue reading ‘What editors want – the right pitch’
As some of you may already know, I’ve just made my first foray into screenwriting and have received a commission for a short film – ‘Enemy Lines’, produced by FNA Films. It will be screened next month in Newcastle. Since receiving that commission I’ve written another short film and have been hired to write the pilot of an animated children’s series – first draft in the bag.
Up until now I have simply been writing on instinct. I felt like a bit of a fake because I hadn’t read any screenwriting books and wasn’t fully aware of the ‘proper’ way of doing things. I had simply downloaded the free Scriptsmart Gold software from the BBC Writers’ Room and figured it out by trial and error and looking at sample scripts.
Continue reading ‘Screenwriting for Dummies’
Have you ever read a book – fiction or non-fiction – in which you felt you had been transported to another world? You could almost feel it, taste it, touch it and smell it. How did the writer achieve that?
- They used their senses.
- They focused on a few choice details.
- They used imagery.
- They established power relations between the narrator / character / reader and their environment.
Continue reading ‘Creating a Sense of Place’
The 2008 Man Booker Prize longlist has been announced and I’m sure we’ll be delving into some of them in The Crafty Writer Book Club soon. If you haven’t already done so, please drop by this month’s Book Club discussion which looks at Bill Bryson’s delightful Shakespeare: the World as a Stage. Next month we will look at Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which was shortlisted for last year’s Man Booker. So now, without further ado – drum roll please – here is this year’s longlist:
Continue reading ‘Man, it’s the Booker Prize’
