Inventing stories and treatments
with Julian Friedmann – 30th July RADA, London

With the editor of ScriptWriter Magazine, one of Europe's leading scriptwriting agents.

Julian writes: “I have worked with writers for over 30 years and several things have remained constant: many writers make the wrong choices about what to write and even more choose the wrong way to tell the story that they want to write.

Throughout those 30 years I have seen how easy it can be to find a better way to tell a particular story; or to make the likelihood of selling a story or script better by refocusing the way the story is told for a different market from the one first chosen. Frequently the idea is excellent and commercial, but the writer does not know how to make that story work for the market they want to sell it to.

How can you take almost any idea and make it work, or at least be well-received? There are no formulae or magic bullets, only a practical understanding of why audiences watch what they choose to and how you can use that information to give yourself a better chance of coming up with ideas that will sell and scripts that readers – your first audiences – and the cinema or television audiences will like.

Many of the principles of storytelling haven’t changed since Aristotle described them. The day will start by examining the market for scripts and exploring an understanding of what audiences want.

We will then develop a story - probably from the morning newspaper - and assess how one would change the approach depending on where one was hoping to sell the story, since stories don’t (or should not) be developed in a vacuum.

I believe that the best way to learn how to invent or develop stories is by doing  (or observing it being done) rather than by studying. The dynamic is what is important here.

The most significant moment in my training was a workshop where we were given three pages of a sitcom at the end of the Saturday and asked to rewrite it that night for the following morning. None of us were nearly radical enough – the tutor merged two characters and changed the gender of another character and it all worked so much better. This made me realize that one should never be satisfied with what one has written and at the same time one needs to be very open to making changes that seem inconceivable.

Learning to have the judgement about when to start changing things and when to stop comes from experience.

I learned so much from a few hours playing around with that sitcom, that I believe it is a better way of learning than the more didactic lecturing. As Alexander Mackendrick said in the recent issue of ScriptWriter: ‘Scriptwriting can’t be taught, it can only be learned.’

The day will also include a detailed explanation of how to write pitch documents or treatments that will help sell the ideas you want to write.”
 

Biography

Julian Friedmann has been a screenwriting and literary agent for many years and has taught all over the world. He designed and set up training programmes for MEDIA, including PILOTS (for the development of long-running television series); and the MA in Television Scriptwriting at De Montfort University. He is on the Writers’ Guild Executive Council. He is the Editor and Publisher of ScriptWriter Magazine, author of How To Make Money Scriptwriting and editor of two volumes on Writing Long-Running Television Series.