I gave a talk at the SWF in Cheltenham and many people who did not get into the room asked for a copy to be provided, so it is up as a TwelvePoint article. I was going to do a blog about the subject but decided to put the key points of the talk and article into a blog. Here it is.

I am suggesting that writing prose is a serious and complementary activity for scriptwriters.

Yesterday I had one of those conversations with a client and then with his producer that made me wonder about the manipulative nature of what agents do. Not necessarily bad manipulation, more like the golden oil that ensures that your car starts smoothly.

The writer is anxious the producer won’t understand what he is trying to do in this draft of the script. The producer has issues with the draft.

I had an interesting meeting with Jen Segaio (sp) this week as she is helping organise Mark Travis’ influential workshop, The Solo Workshop, in the UK later in the year. In this Mark works with a limited number of writers on a project of theirs: in essence it is to find out what the story is really about. http://www.markwtravis.com/

This reminds me of the dictum I have always loved: what happens in a story is not what the story is really about.

I am doing the research for a book on writing for television and came across this quote (in a tweet): 'Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self'. Cyril Connolly

I re-tweeted, commenting that what Cyril Connolly is saying is rubbish. It is simply not true for 95% of the thousands of writers I have met over the last 40 years. It is cute but makes assumptions about the purity of being a writer that suggests pure self-indulgence.

There are some writers who genuinely do not care if no one ever reads what they write.

The Writers’ Guild blog has an interesting and important debate over the assertion that the BBC Writers’ Academy favours its trainees so that other writers get less of a chance.

After all the stress of travelling, life returns to normal and problems that seem to be a hill of beans suddenly loom too large to forget them when I leave the office. Today’s was dealing with a producer (producer 1) who commissioned an adaptation, paid the commencement and (eventually) delivery of the first draft, only for us to discover that he didn’t have the rights to the underlying book.

He had warranted in the writer’s agreement that he did have those rights. After lots of discussion with various parties including producer 1 we were no further.

The suitcase and passport are packed away, I have no travel plans for the rest of the year. This is not really much of an achievement since we are nearly one week into December. But there are no trips planned for January (yet) either. After the Frankfurt Bookfair, the Cheltenham Screenwriters’ Festival, The World Conference of Scriptwriters in Athens, a terrific wedding in the north-west of England and the Black Nights’ Film Festival in Tallinn, all in about 6 weeks, home does not seem to be where you lay your hat.

This is further confounded by December being a short month.

Sorry the blog has been irregular: the last two of five trips in as many weeks are coming up, then I am around for a while. But interesting things keep happening, the latest of which is repeated every few months as a negotiation takes place or a producer tries to vary elements of a contract after the contract has been signed.

There was quite a lot of tweeting about this topic and the session today (which I missed).

It is now 48 hours since I returned from the Screenwriters’ Festival (and just over two weeks since the Frankfurt Bookfair, and less than a week before the World Conference of Screenwriters. I have not blogged recently because I have been overdoing the networking.

Networking is a bit of a black art and one that many writers shy away from. But, for a writer, developing and maintaining the right contacts can mean the difference between a hobby and a career. I asked scriptwriter and marketing consultant Caroline Ferguson what she thought her session with Scriptwriter and networking ace Janice Day would be offering: she replied:

'Many writers would rather rip out their own teeth than introduce themselves to complete strangers. Self promotion simply isn’t part of the character set of the typical writer.

‘Starving in a garret may be traditional for writers but these days it’s no good unless you’re broadcasting it on the web’ according to PR and Marketing guru K D Adamson. We have managed to get her to come to the Screenwriters’ Festival in Cheltenham at the end of the month to explain why any ambitious writer needs to establish three key things: their positioning, motivation and objective.

Sounds miles from anything in Sid Field or McKee et al.

The season of party conferences is over for the public but for screenwriters and those who work with them it is about to start. For months there has been unprecedented bad news from broadcasters and from the traditional sources of finance for film.

I am not doing a blog today because there is a far more important article in Screen International by Phil Parker for anyone who works with scripts. Whether you are a writer, script editor, producer, director or agent, please read this and get to the **Screenwriters’ Festival in Cheltenham where there will be a major debate over the four days dealing with this situation. Be there where the real action is going to be. It could be your future.