Advising Writers
 Gilly Adams
As the director of the 大象传媒's writer development unit 大象传媒 Wales, Gilly Adams gets hundreds of scripts on her desk every year.
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In part one she gave some advice on making your work stand out from the rest and explains what commissioners are looking for in a good script. In this part there's advice for aspiring writers.
Q5.
What tips can you give to aspiring writers?
My main tip is to educate yourself by watching and listening to as many programmes as possible in the medium that interests you and to understand that writing is a rigorous discipline. Writing is difficult and rewriting is even more difficult but it is absolutely essential.
You should also look out for writing courses of different kinds which are available through various organisations. Anyone who has access to the Internet can check out all sorts of courses.
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Q6. How do you know when your script is ready to send off?
Don't send work off to be judged or adjudicated as your calling card script without being convinced that it is absolutely the best you can do. Don't send off a piece of work you have written out once, that you haven't reworked or rigorously checked for typos and inconsistencies. If possible give it to a friend to give feedback on whether it works and makes sense.
We receive so many scripts where it's clear it's the writer's first draft, that they haven't checked it in any way and it comes with an absolutely naive letter which says 'let me know when or whether you would like to do this'. This is too much of a leap for anybody and it is absolutely exceptional for a script to be picked up on its first time around. If you are serious about it in any way take it seriously and work very hard before you submit something because once you send something in that's careless people remember and they are less likely to take you seriously the next time you send something in.
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Q7.
What are the most common downfalls you see in new writers?
One very obvious one is when you get a writer who has an idea where their script is going, yet it is clear by the way they write they hardly consume any television or radio at all. I think if you want to write for these mediums you need to find out everything you possibly can and you can learn enormously by just watching and listening.
A fault that hits you straight away is a lack of trust in the audience. That results in the writer feeling they have to tell us what the plot is in great detail, so they put too much into the mouths of the characters for fear that the audience will not understand.
Another common fault is when a writer has not sufficiently and imaginatively entered into the world of the characters. The result is all the characters having the same voice and that voice is the author's. I think it's really essential that writers know their characters inside out; know where they've come from, what their background is, what their relationship is to other characters and what that character had for breakfast.
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Q8.
What is most important - being a good storyteller or a good writer?
I think that both things, in my mind, carry almost equal weight although probably being a good writer has the edge. Of course, if you are a good writer and don't have a story to tell and you have no ideas then that's a problem but having a story to tell but no skills in which to tell it would probably mean it knocks the story on the head.
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Back to part one
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