The Journey To Being A Screenwriter

This last weekend I had the amazing opportunity of being able to participate in a Screenwriting workshop in London, taught by Julie Gray from Los Angeles - see her blog on www.justeffing.com She is 'good people'.

I was a bit concerned that maybe I wasn't worthy to be there as although I love to write and have more ideas than I have time to work on, in my ideas journal, I wouldn't dare to presume that I have any talent. I mean talent is something that other people have, such as authors like Carlos Ruiz Zafon (writer of novel The Shadow of The Wind) and screenwriters like Shane Black (writer of the Lethal Weapon movies) and Bruce Joel Rubin (Oscar winning writer of Ghost and The Time Travelers Wife).

But Julie is an amazing encourager so I went along down to London anyway, ready to learn as much as I could and to make the most of the opportunity.

The class was absolutely, unbelievably excellent, far exceeding my expectations. After the first day – I was exhausted as I’d taken in so much and met some really cool people but after a few writing exercises and testing some of my movie ideas, I ended up feeling like a worthless, talentless, little wannabe. I was devastated and considered not going back for more on Sunday but then I prayed and asked God to help me get my head together and present some more movie ideas on Sunday morning.

So I went back with 6 brand new ideas, each of which had varying degrees of merit but when I presented them to Julie she said yes to 3, no to 1 and said the others were more novel ideas and suggested I put them in my ideas folder.

By the end of Sunday when I had worked on 1 main idea – I left on cloud 9 feeling so inspired, encouraged and motivated but at same time utterly exhausted. The idea was just a fluffy, frothy romantic comedy but everyone loved it and said it was very commercial and had ‘legs’ to use a Hollywood term.

I met some of the most incredible and amazing people who were just so lovely, talented, inspiring and collaborative. We all exchanged email addresses and I know that it's going to be fun to keep in touch and see how we all develop and grow as writers in our careers.

I’ve got so much more hard work to do now though so better stop blogging and get on with my story development etc.