Following on from a longer piece I wrote here on storytelling versus plotting (http://www.agoodstorywelltold.com/content/storytelling-versus-plotting) it seemed like a good idea to take some time to talk about storytelling and space.

A slightly esoteric one this - so what's new?!

Reading a very good book called 'Lines - A brief History' by Tim Ingold which is about the anthropology of lines, threads and traces and covers some very interesting ground about such diverse things as weaving, seafaring, writing, drawing, threads and writing. One of the riffs is about the difference between wayfaring and travelling and it's logical double storytelling and plotting.

There is a school of thought that believes that the script that you are developing will have a direct relationship to your own life - more explicity that the transformational arc of your charcaters and the deeper themes of the piece are probably not so different from that which you need or are going though. Obviously this may not occur at the reality level (if you are writing sci-fi for instance) but at a thematic level in your life.

I wrote this one for a forum question on Twelvepoint.com, but liked it enough to copy it over here. The question was whether is was a good idea to write a treatment or outline etc etc. It is a good thread, but it was frustrating me as words like 'always' and 'never' got used; always write a treatment, always do this and so on. So here's what I wrote back to the thread...

Everyone is wrong, it's only you that needs to be right

What I am spending a bit of time with at the moment is putting sound recording in the centre of the script development process. By running through a draft or getting to a difficult scene there are a few things that I do that help me assess it as I go...

1. Read it aloud

I thought I would take a moment to review one of my latest buys: 'The Sequence Approach; The hidden structure of successful screenplays' (Paul Gulino Continuum press, 2004). I bought it at the recommendation of Colin and Jak from the London Scriptwriters Consultancy at one of their excellent 'Soho screenwriters' evenings.