My Books. Buy Them
Touchstone (3. All the Time in the World)
Baby, baby, baby… you’re out of time… Rachel, lost and alone... read more
Ghosts on the Moor
Three women spend Christmas in a remote cottage on Dartmoor to escape problems... read more
Lovers in Paris
Can your love live up to the most romantic city in the world? It’s Disneyland... read more
Touchstone (2. Family at War) – a time travel Blitz story
The unforgettable fire… Continuing the adventures of Rachel and Danny, a... read more
Meet me in Montmartre
New Year’s Eve. An English girl. A French boy. A blind date. A kiss... read more
The Striker’s Fear of the Open Goal
Get a life. Get the girl. Get to Wembley. Ewan Glumie was born on the day Man... read more
The Budapest Breakfast Club
This summer: Go to Budapest… Make a movie… Have an affair. Ten... read more
The Very Thought of You
What happens when you fall in love with a woman who died before you were born?... read more
Train Can’t Bring Me Home
Love. Literature… and Tom Waits. Lots of Tom Waits. 1993. The former... read more
The Girl with the Bomb Inside
School is shit, your hero killed himself and your girlfriend’s pregnant.... read more
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Tag Archives: screenwriting
A spooky little thing I noticed about our unconscious need for structure
I go on about structure a lot, particularly in screenwriting, but also in my prose fiction. I teach screenwriting classes at Worcester University and Birmingham City University, both at undergraduate and masters level, and with each intake I find myself giving students my take on the basics of 3-Act Structure as defined by screenwriting guru Syd Field (hear us chat about it in my podcast), or the mythological paradigm of the Hero’s Journey, from Campbell via Vogler. A lot of …
The story therapy that will rock your constellation
How can a German family relationship therapy exercise help with your story? I went along to the London Screenwriters’ Festival to find out. And boy, was I surprised at what I found. I volunteered to be a guinea pig for new story tool Constellations, when script editor Hayley McKenzie innocently asked me if I’d like to take part in one of the workshops at this weekend’s London Screenwriters’ Festival. They needed a writer who had a problem with a script. …
Why Hollywood wants your ebook
Today is a day of conflicting emotions. You see, my good friend Jonathan Turner, the man who wrote the best spec script I’ve ever read, is at the 2011 Screenwriting Expo in LA, and I was supposed to be there with him. I don’t feel too bad. It wasn’t a concrete promise. In fact, it’s something we’ve promised each other to do every year since we met, rather like the Jews of the diaspora who every Passover say ‘next year …
Arjun & Alison: the trailer is out!
Been waiting all year for this, and it’s finally here. The trailer for Arjun & Alison, the indie feature film I was hired to script in February 2010, worked on all that year and saw shoot in Birmingham last November. It’s been in a Mumbai edit suite most of this year and this is the first glimpse of what the film might actually look like. (The security guy with his back to camera is me, by the way).
Jimmy Sangster 1927 – 2011
I suppose it’s normal that most screenwriters who pass away go to that Underwood in the sky with little ceremony. Sometimes we don’t even notice their passing ourselves, and often we don’t realise how much certain screenwriters mean to us or what they’ve given us over the years. Jimmy Sangster was a self-effacing screenwriter, director, producer who, while giving DVD commentaries recently, seemed surprised that anyone would be interested in his life’s work. But to this screenwriter, he was a …
It’s a marathon, not a sprint…
I know, I know. I’ve been pretty quiet this last year. Hardly a blog to my name and my hits have plummeted (I’m still amazed so many of you keep coming back to look, if I’m honest). But there’s a reason. And the reason is that, rather than writing about screenwriting, I thought I’d actually do some. And last week something very special happened. Yes, fifteen years of hard, largely unpaid work finally came to fruition, and my first feature …
The crime is in your mind
The cries go out every week in the filmmaking community: everything is being dumbed down, there’s no space for complexity any more, films aren’t as demanding as they used to be, we’re all going to hell in a flatpack assembled handcart. It would be a matter for grave concern if it wasn’t total bollocks. Last night I went to see Inception at my local multiplex. As I bought my ticket, the ticket teller warned me that the film was three …
You make my dreams (come true)?
In the romcom everyone loves to hate, Notting Hill, floppy-haired beta-male Hugh Grant bemoans his mid-point split with out-of-his-league movie star Julia Roberts with the words ‘It’s as if I’ve taken love heroin, and now I can’t ever have it again.’ We then see a montage of him depressed and lonely without her, mocked by memories of her. If they turned that montage into a move all of its own, its name would be (500) Days of Summer. They would …
Love me one time, baby
Anyone who’s ploughed through this site will know that I’ve got a bit of a thing for time travel stories, as well as a penchant for romcoms and tragic love stories like Somewhere in Time. So it’s no surprise that I was pretty eager to see the long-delayed movie adaptation of Audrey Niffeneggar’s smash hit faux-lit novel The Time Traveler’s Wife. And, despite the sickly trailer, it doesn’t disappoint. Bruce Joel Rubin has done a great job distilling the novel’s …
Blake Snyder : 1957 – 2009
It is with great sadness and deep shock that I learned today of the loss of Blake Snyder, who died from cardiac arrest on August 4, 2009. Blake was a screenwriting teacher and author of the brilliant Save the Cat!, a manual that offered a fresh approach on screenwriting structure and laid out a revolutionary template for genre. I’ve referred to his work frequently on here* as he so often nailed the concepts I was struggling to formulate. His 10 …
