Inspiring Script Writing Workshop

I have had lots of blog posts planned and almost ready to go for ages now, but for one reason or another have never been able to get around to actually sitting down, finishing or posting them. It’s weird, as I keep a written diary every day, and have for the last 30 odd years, but the actual act of sitting down in front of my laptop often is difficult, especially after a day at work.

So, this is about a workshop that we had at City Voices on 9th July. I had been looking forward to it for a while as it was run by Deb McAndrew, who is our sponsor at City Voices. Deb is a multi-talented person. She is an actor (Coronation Street, Heartbeat, Holby City), voice over artist (Benefits Britain – Life on the Dole) award-winning scriptwriter, co-founder and creative director of Claybody Theatre Company, and enthusiastic bee-keeper! She can often be found Tweeting and posting on social media, extolling the virtues of the city of Stoke on Trent, which she now proudly calls home. She is a great ambassador and promoter of the city’s cultural heritage and future.

Since I had a script partly completed (it’s really taken a back seat in the last few years), I was really keen to glean any tips and information I could from this workshop. It turned out to be nothing like I expected – I guess I was expecting to hash out a script we had written and get some pointers - but what Deb did was very engaging and interesting.

She got us to write down different aspects of a character (name, age, occupation, problem they had) and after we had written each aspect down, we passed our pieces of paper to the left, so that in the end, whatever character we had in mind was diluted with everyone else’s, and what we each ended up with was a jumbled personality. We then had to put all the characters into groups of at least two, or more, and then select a group of them for ourselves to try to write a scene around that.

Everyone really enjoyed it and some great ideas were flowing. A unique way of eliciting ideas from us, and this gave me confidence for my upcoming workshop which was booked in for the 6th August.

Below: Everyone hard at work at the script writing workshop.