Blog posts by year and monthNovember 2007
Posts (10)
Send us your quotes...
We're going to be relaunching the site shortly... and we'd like you to help. Do you have a favourite quote about writing that you'd like other people to know about? If so, email it to us at new.writing@bbc.co.uk, and we'll add it to the list of inspiring quotes for the site.
Wellcome
Can't really put this one in the opportunities page, as it's not primarily aimed at writers. But it's well worth knowing about. Fortunately we have a blog for just such an eventuality. The Wellcome Trust is an independent charity which funds research to improve human and animal health. It'...
It'll Never Work
Part of the process of developing a programme idea is an endless series of conversations about what "works". Does it work to set the whole series in a coffin? Does it work to tell the whole story in flashbacks? Or (in my case) does it work to have a lead character who only speaks Bulgarian? T...
What's In A Name
Phew - what a busy couple of weeks! I've missed a blog entry somewhere along the line. I've been in the writer's fug where I wander aimlessly from room to room wondering what it was I was looking for .. my daughter asks what's for tea and I answer .. FBC's U's and E's and 4 pints cross match ple...
Spooks Script
Thanks to our pals at Kudos and writer Neil Cross , we now have the script for episode one of the new series in our script archive.
Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich
John Malkovich has a new laptop. Whoopee. Where it gets interesting to readers of this blog, is that there's a writing competition attached. Kinda-sorta. If you visit the John's Funky Laptop website (or whatever they've called it) and choose "Online Script Project" on the top left, you'll get details of how to write the next couple of pages of a script, the first couple of pages of which were written by Mr Malkovich his own self. Then there's voting, and the winner each month gets feedback from Mister M. Er. That's it. Still, it's writing practice. And, hey! John Malkovich! I'd link there directly, only the marketing wretches who created the site built the competition-bit so that it can only be accessed via Flash. So I can't. But, y'know. Thought it was worth mentioning.
Stand out. Be different.
Danny Stack has recently been reading a lot of scripts for the Red Planet screenwriting competition. And he's noticed that a lot of them start the same way. So if you want to stand out from the pack, go read his list of common ways to begin a spec script. And then do something different...
Stephen Poliakoff event on 19th November
Stephen Poliakoff is one of the UK's most respected writers, with television plays including Friends and Crocodiles, Gideon's Daughter, Shooting the Past, and multiple Emmy-winner The Lost Prince. BBC writersroom in association with The Royal Court Theatre are holding an open and free event ...
Notes are suggestions...
My schedule has gone out the window this week. I've only just sat down and watched last Saturday's Casualty (goodbye Josh, I'll miss you). I'm not beholden to some fancy Soap tracking device that reads my mind and tapes my progs in my absence, I have to load the disc burner and remember to progr...
A soap opera (but with a bullet!)
Paraphrasing wikipedia "A soap opera is an ongoing, episodic work of fiction... with an open-ended narrative often following the lives of a group of characters who live or work in a particular place." For many of us, soap can become cliched and dramatically unengaging ... On those occasions w...
