BBC Writersroom Writers festival

Last week I managed to blag my way (God knows how) onto the BBC Writersroom Writers festival - So I thought I'd blog my way through it for anyone who might find it useful.

It was a couple of days in Leeds, of intense lectures and meeting lots of grand folk, all of whom seemed way more progressed in their careers than me - so, the only way is up!

The festival started off with a round table with successful writers debating whether it was right for writers to try and change the world. Hugo Blick, writer and director of The Shadow Line recently on the BBC was very interesting about the writer's relationship with the audience and politics in general. His point was that without opposing political ideologies - i.e. that all parties accept the Neo-Liberal framework and only disagree within those confines - it is hard for a lone voice to offer an alterative. He then went to connect this with apathy being a self-fulfilling prophecy, but what I took from this was the relationship he saw between writers, politicians and the general public, one I hadn't really examined before.

Then I went to a great session on Holby City - how the process of writing for them works, where and how they find their writers. Basically they'll get you in for a chat if they've read your script (supplied by an agent) and liked it, and may try you out on their shadow scheme - or if you have experience, give you an episode. The other thing that came up was the 5 act structure - a new one to me, but apparently what most of the BBC hour long dramas adhere to. It's basically three acts, but act 2 is split into 3 separate acts making 5 - which means a big turning point or reversal every 8 or so minutes.

A couple of session after that were no great shakes and then off to the pub for a bit of boozing - grand.
Though not so grand when the master of BBC Drama, John Yorke, gave us a potted history of screenwriting craft from Aristotle to the present day. It was titled "The Curse of the Scriptwriting Guru", and while admitting he was setting himself up as one, he proceeded to trash all claims to guru dom.

His argument - one which I had come to in my own way, though not nearly to the same depth or development - were that there were many paths up the mountain of structure - that there was a Platonic ideal of structure that all these masters - Vogler, McKee, Field - were reaching toward, though each were forging their own path and understanding. It boils down to the basic idea that humans understand information by assigning patterns to it. And the most basic way of doing this, as one of them old Greeks says, is THESIS; ANTITHESIS; SYNTHESIS.

This breaks down into the three act structure. Humans then naturally think in this structure, and all these gurus have come up with ways of understanding this underlying truth. So they are all right, and are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, to be successful with structure, one needs to be inclusive - to know the different systems of thought and choose which one, or combination of more than one, suits you best.

A pale shadow of what the man said, but it was brilliant.

There were a couple of other sessions - notable "Starting a New Series", in which the round table stressed the need for fantastic characters matched with a great hook, and the orchestration of the piece - i.e. set it up so there's room for natural stories of the week and built in conflict between characters. Wit and humour is an essential that many writers often forget to put in.

It was a fantastic couple of days, and as ever, the chance to meet and talk to like-minded people was brilliant. If they do this again, get your self on it. Leeds is nice too.