Friday, July 06, 2007

The Allure Of The Glass Teat (or ‘The Pictures Are Better’)

I don’t think I’ve specifically stated it, so I might as well now: I’ve broadened the range of my writing recently (not that you’d know from the blog).

By which I mean that I’m trying to broaden the range of things I write, on the basis that some stories are better suited to particular media, and this means I’m venturing away from the familiar territory of prose into the less charted waters of radio and TV – oh, and even a screenplay.

Which is part of the reason I didn’t post so much last week – I was racing to make the deadline for a BBC radio submission thing (should find out in the next few days if they liked the stuff), and so my typing energy was being expended there. Now I see about a screenplay competition which has appealing prizes, so I’ll try to get something done in time for that too.

As a result of thinking and reading and researching about these sorts of things, I find myself reading a lot of blogs and sites online about screenwriting and the like – the eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted that I’ve added David Bishop’s blog to the column of links to the right – and I suspect I’ll add more. And you’ll probably notice me posting more comments about radio, TV drama and the soaps, as I continue my research and try to make sure I know my market, and all that.

(Which is why I was looking at EastEnders the other day and thinking that you could see the rewrites in the Dawn-May-Rob storyline, most notably in the absence of a proper answer to the question ‘How far back does Rob and May’s “evil plan” go?’ I appreciate that they’ve rewritten it in the light of real-world news events, but I think that the holes showed a bit.)

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