Now that the furore of the Screenwriters Festival is starting to die down and real life slowly seeps back into these old writer’s bones, it’s time to sit back and evaluate what I have learnt and what the next steps from here are?

Before I begin I should point out that this isn’t going to be a guide to festival. For a start, although I was certainly in a very advantageous position in many respects, I wasn’t really in any position to get a detailed overview. Ask me how to DJ between weblinks to DVD’s to Powerpoints in venue 7, or how to find Julian Friedmann after another walkabout session or how to hold multiple conversations at once, both in person and on the radio then I’m your man. If you want to know the simplicities of what a Euroscript session was like, forget it!

So if you do want to have a guide to the festival I recommend this one by Ellin Stein.

________

I started writing this blog a few days after I got back from the festival and then work struck so this blog will most certainly NOT be a guide to the festival or much to do with the festival at all anymore. In the world of media SWF was so mid autumn 2009. Not true at all of course. The festival was a fantastic experience for me and is one of the biggest dates in a screenwriters diary, but in an ever-evolving universe those who stand still move backwards.

I had the opportunity to work in Bristol on Being Human and low and behold, what should I discover but that an old friend of mine has been cast in the new series.

I cast her in a short film back in 2005 and then over the years we slowly fell out of touch (more to do with the fact that I had a couple of years in the wilderness). She is the hugely talented Amy Manson and I was absolutely delighted to see her doing so well, cast as Lizzie Siddal in Desperate Romantics.

So where from here?

Well it’s difficult to say, but after reading an interview in Fujifilm’s Exposure magazine about another film school peer of mine – Richard Perry – I feel the class of 05/06 is about to have it’s time in the sun. Richard is one of the hardest working people you are likely to meet and has just shot his debut feature pretty much off his own back. Looks like it will be a cracker and I look forward to seeing the finished product.

So what does all this mean for me?

I guess if I partake in the shining star of the 05/06 elite, I hope it will be for writing. I’m currently working on a short, which we shall be shooting in the next few months. This is going to be a full-blown festival piece more on this later. On top of that I have a couple of features in interested hands, one of which is a martial arts script, which would be shot in Thailand if it goes ahead. As far as the future is concerned I have two primary projects right now, one is a series of young adult novels and the other is the first in a trilogy of fantasy/realism feature scripts.

I’ll keep you posted.

You don’t have to get up at 5:45am and try to beat 7 other people to the shower?

You don’t have to run around like a blue-arsed fly for 15 hours straight, before standing up for another 3 hours schmoozing at the Queens Hotel (or possibly Wetherspoons… but certainly not The Playhouse)?

You don’t have to spend from 8am to 4:40pm trying to get one single bloody banner hung from a three-story girls school main hall.

You don’t have to wonder whether it’s healthy to work this number of hours on a Bacon Roll and countless coffee?

You don’t have to risk certain death (Abi), breakdown (Xandria) or visitations from Elvis (Johnny) on your drive in to work?

You don’t have to listen to two conversations at once? Generally questions from delegates in one ear that you can’t hear because Kenny’s impersonating Big Brother through the radio in the other.

Kinda makes you wonder what was actually good about volunteering at the SWF…

…well all I can say is it’s a guilty pleasure that can only really be understood by those that have had the pleasure. I can guarantee you though that not one would ever regret having been there. For my part …

It’s things like sitting down with the highly talented and under-valued (here at home) Chris Jones and chatting about families and writing and how they really should invent some kind of pill that allows the two to exist in harmony side by side.

It’s things like making friendships with some of the most fantastic people I could ever hope to meet. Friendships that you know are going to last a very very long time. You better believe it when the changing of the guard comes (and it’s coming soon) we’ll all be there ready to take the helm. Love you Xandria, love you Johnny, Love you Neil, Love you Abi the list goes on.

It’s things like the immense satisfaction in hooking up a million pieces of media to switch between in the course of a one hour lecture and actually see it work perfectly (almost). Don’t ever do that to me again Mr Ginn.

It’s things like standing three feet away from Ben Stephenson, that’s all I really need to say I stood three feet from him. What? Yeah next year I’ll talk to him.

It’s things like standing in the hottest, sweatiest over-packed hall with 120 others listening to the super-immensely-motivating Kate Adamson. Who would ever believe that a non-writer would be one of the most sought out events of the festival. Like I said Kate, writers can’t talk and now they’re supposed to act like producers… there’s a lot of worried writers out there.

It’s things like Stephen’s omelette.

When I travelled to the festival that first morning I was in a little dream world mulling over the idea of my previous blog. I began to write it down in a notebook and the idea was that I would then blog every day from the festival.

HAH!

The six days were some of the busiest and yet most fun of my life. It was not dissimilar and very almost as fun as working on a film set. There was no chance I could find time to write as well though. In fact if you look across the blogs of all the writers that were there… like a dessert. The Screenwriters Festival, the one time of the year when writers don’t write.

I’ll be saying more about the festival over the coming week, but for now I just wanted to get back into the swing of typing, I’d almost forgotten how!

He leaves the house trembling with excitement – the adventure beginnings.

Stepping out into the twilight world he sees a street filled with glowing orange orbs, afloat in a miasma of Victorianesque fog, like something out of a Conan-Doyle novel. The world is silent and beautiful and it is fitting that his Cheltenham adventure should start with such filmic raptures.

He leaves the sanctity of the storm-porch.

It’s not a Victorian fog; it’s rain.

He clatters down the street, the wheels from the suitcase sending a volley of ack-ack fire into all the surrounding houses. The echoes bounce back intensifying the sound. After about 200 yards and a street full of angry neighbours he decides that the vibrations from the case are probably not going to be doing his laptop any favours. He picks it up and puffs his way further down the road as the rain slowly plasters his hair to his forehead. The romanticism is slowly departing this tale.

At the next junction imagination and imagery soar. The world has moved from Doyle to Rankin. The Victorian lamps have become cold sodium pools, scant comfort in this isolated early morning as the occasional car purrs past on slick tyres. Headlights cause hundreds of thin shadows to creep towards him from the decaying corpses of fallen leaves. The shadows stretch forward distending like evil claws – then the car passes and they melt away their source, once again, an urbane symptom of the season.

Now Rankin, in turn, gives way to Graham as our adventurer turns into Butchers Baulk (that most Midsomer of alleyways). A kilometre of claustrophobic alleyway hemmed in by over-reaching trees, which act as a barrier to a graveyard on one side and playing fields the other. At least it will provide shelter from the rain. The fine mist that is enveloping the upmost canopy is slowly working it’s way down the bark of the trees like the creeping sweat of a high fever. It is collecting in leaves and dripping slowly down the tree leaf at a time, each drop getting heavier with every mini descent. He finds he is getting wetter here than he was out in the open. If Barnaby is likely to investigate anywhere else before he retires it should be here.

At the station he collects his thoughts.

Stepping off the train we are now in PD James territory. The world is waking up as Cambridge station offers its usual myriad of students, tourists and commuters. The sinister cawing of corvids summons images of a body soon to be found, soon to become the painstaking project of Cordelia Grey. They wheel in a flat slate grey sky, which dissipates the first of the dawn light uniformly without hierarchy or differentiation. This is in direct contrast to the town and gown it sits heavily upon.

No time to contemplate any further as the train to Birmingham approaches and suddenly Cordelia Grey feels more like Marple about to take a train to another unsuspecting village due to be stricken by a plague of murders.

It’s at about this point that my brain went dead and I stared out if the window for hours until Birmingham New Street.

I dreamt last night.

I don’t (remember) dream(s) very often.

I had a rather weird dream, you know the kind, where you sort of grasp what happened but not really the specifics. Where the mise-en-scene is what really sticks out in your mind.

The central motif was that my best friends where obviously having a baby. ‘She’ is rather slight in real life, but in my dream she looked like one of those Paleolithic ‘Venus figurines’. Heavy swollen breasts and distended belly. Beautiful, I should point out, and tastefully dressed in white linen, but quite clearly of mother earth proportions. This in itself is nothing strange,  the really embarrassing moment comes from the point in the dream where I am standing next to my wife and we are both looking at our pregnant friend and I’m saying… “I didn’t want to ask if she was pregnant just in case she had put a few pounds on”!

So before I go any further, extreme apologies K, I would never really think that you could put that much weight on.

The dream itself though, was like some bizarre glossy American brochure for clean-living suburban ennui (I know I’m using a lot of italicised words in this blog, it was one of those kind of dreams). It revolved around some kind of pub lunch in the country. I was driving in my dream and I remember my friend throwing the car keys to me across the car park in a manner that summoned images from Littlewoods catalogues. Fathers in their late thirties who are in love with life and the sheer wonders a sunday lunch can bring. I wish I could remember more, but I’m pretty sure if I could we would have been wearing our jumpers over our shoulders, sleeves tied round our necks. We would probably have high-fived or at least slung a rugby ball back and forth in remembrance of our, clearly not lost, youth.

I turned 34 just two weeks back… is this what I can expect now? Is that the magical age? Is the angsty rebellion of my youth finally over to be replaced with passionate discussions over the pro’s and con’s of choosing between a Toyota Prius or a Mazda 3?

I can’t see it to be honest, but it was a bloody weird dream.

Oh and just in case you’re wondering, before the pub lunch was over the baby had somehow been born and was enjoying a good joke with my own seven-year old daughter. Kids today grow at such a rapid rate compared to when we were young, don’t you think?

I’m heading off to Cheltenham the day after tomorrow and I have to say I am looking forward to it immensely.

For some fairly obvious reasons…

I will get the opportunity to spend a week surrounded by writers and producers (OK so mostly writers), people who love story-telling and the craft of transferring words to images. There can be something quite magical about a gathering of so many people with the same interests. Conversations are easier to engage in, with each person already having an inherent understanding of the other’s unspoken background. We all know why we are there and we all know there are a great number of common-ground areas that we can nod to “I know just what you mean”! This gives far more time to finding out the really interesting stuff about those you meet.

This is a networking occasion and that in itself is something to look forward to. I was recently involved in (although I kept myself to the peripheries) a group email discussion about the virtues of attending the SWF. The main arguments put forward by those most disinclined to go were it’s ratio of payoffs compared to the cost of attending. [I am working as a volunteer this year, which is one of the reasons I stayed on the edge of this conversation, it will still cost me a fair amount in travel, accommodation and food though - is it worth it?] Well I think yes. Some of the participants in the debate had got down to some really interesting mathematical statistics. There would be a highly unfavourable ratio of sellers to buyers (100/1 was the figure put about). That for £700 (that’s cost of festival, accommodation and travel) how many leads would one gain? Someone had attended an event for £600 and made only three leads (that’s £200-a-head), they also stated that in a previous year they attended the SWF and managed to price the leads gained at £50-a-head, better than the previous event but still fairly expensive. A writer (especially in todays changing climate of recession, collapse of traditional funding methods and online content) is a one person business and does needs to consider these issues as part of a marketing budget. But… are some important factors being left out here? Is a marketing budget really as simple as dividing the amount of money spent by the number of business cards you walk away with? Some of the participants had been to the festival before (maybe two even three times before) and just didn’t think it worth their while to go again; based mainly on how much work they had managed to source from going the previous times. However I would state that as much as trying to get work (and some people can put too much emphasis on this and come across as pushy or desperate) being at the festival is just that – being there! It is a social occasion for people in the same profession. Yes go to see as many events and talks as you can, yes really try to sell the script that you believe can be the next hollywood blockbuster, but for heavens sake also just mingle and talk and make FRIENDS. You heard me folks friends, don’t see everyone as a possible business associate. With a business associate if nothing happens it’s unlikely you will get a call a year down the line offering you a job. With a friend a year down the line, when something turns up, you are just the person they will call. The wonderful Lucy Vee argued similar points to this and for those of you that are unfamiliar with her blog it’s worth checking out for useful pieces of advice. When going to these events you really can’t calculate how effective your money was, the oddest things can happen and years down the line that event you thought was a complete waste of time could just be the one that sets your career sky-rocketing. And for those that have already been three times who’s to say that on that fourth occasion some producer isn’t going to think ‘I see them here every year, they must be hardcore’! At the end of the day, it is showing your face, being pleasant, friendly and helpful to those you meet and perseverance that will help you succeed, in fact as a great example of that a wonderful friend of mine, Laurence Timm’s, has won himself a job for showing just such qualities. Check out 0110 which looks set to be a cracker!

As I’ve mentioned I’m volunteering, which I think offers a wonderful opportunity for some ‘backstage’ camaraderie. It comes with some very hard, unpaid (often unappreciated) work, but that is a great recipe for bonding and friendships that can last a lifetime.

And some not so obvious ones…

Continuing from the volunteering theme I am actually really looking forward to the work itself. Things have been very slow for me recently. Both my wife and I have suffered a few months of redundancy and lack-of-work. I’m one of those people who like to be out there in the thick of it, collaborating with others and getting stuck in. Something that is not always available for a writer. So even when it means cleaning toilets and stacking chairs – bring it on!

Travel. Simply getting away, I love it. I love my family too and it would be great if they could come with me, but I have to say I am really looking forward to just getting away from things and getting to enjoy an unfamiliar city. Who knows maybe I’ll even get some writing done! Well crazier things have happened!