Long gone are the days where cat videos were the sole rulers of the internet. Today, modern audiences are hungry for compelling dramas and original fictions easily accessible from any device. Within this context, web series have flourished in the past few years.
​
So what's the key to writing a successful web series that will make you stand out from the crowd?

​Let's take a look at the first indie web series ever nominated for an Emmy award, Her Story to find out the answer.

 You probably don't need me to tell you how things are in the world.

But here’s a short reminder of the current state of affairs:

• "Populist" politicians tricking and bullying their way into power
  
  
• Shadowy billionaires and rogue states manipulating election results
  
  
• Corrupt institutions from Hollywood to the Vatican covering up sexual misdemeanours
  
  
• Previously respected, even loved, public figures outed as abusers
  
  
• News becoming another commodity, with consumers buying the "truth" that suits them
  
  
• New levels of substance abuse and knock-on gang violence
  
  
• The illegal supply of drugs established as an international big business
  
  
• Powerful corporations tracking and manipulating our behaviour
  
  
• And, in the background, the steady destruction of the environment in the name of profit

Although we may want to comment on these issues, fitting them into fiction is a (big) challenge.

But they do have things in common which might give us a clue.

Many of them have a perverse aspect, in which something positive (the need for security and comfort, for instance) turns into its opposite (undermining conditions for all life on the planet).

Similarly ...

• The careers of dictators and firebrand politicians often end in disaster
  
  
• People who vote for populists end up with leaders who act against their interests
  
  
• Sexual abusers are dicing with shame and exposure, maybe even willing it on

Q:  What factor unites these things?

A:  A certain perverse, twisted, self-destructive quality

It's worth remembering that no matter how large the issue, we can still locate the way in which they play out in a human level - where individual hopes, dreams, and relationships are at stake.

But how can writers rise to the challenge of depicting these things?

One route is the heightened comedy of satire - a genre that requires furious energy, originality, and the pin-point targeting of a very contemporary issue.

Another is horror. With some creative thinking, the figures that litter the contemporary world could be transmuted into memorable movie monsters.

But what if you want to write something that isn’t comedic, and stays closer to our notions of realism than horror?

There's another genre that can help here.

One whose tropes and conventions provide a tool-box of plots, characters and situations to deal creatively with our self-destructive tendencies.

This genre is Neo Noir.

In some ways it’s a ‘hidden’ genre. People don’t often say “let’s see a Neo Noir tonight” in the way they do with Horror, Rom Com or Science Fiction.

Audiences tend to read Neo Noirs as “elevated thrillers”.

But they respond to the special kind of tension and extremity in stories like BREAKING BAD, MEMENTO, NIGHTCRAWLER, YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE, CHINATOWN, THE CONVERSATION, and TAXI DRIVER.

Neo Noir protagonists don’t really need antagonists – they do the job so well themselves.

And divided psyches provide great potential for drama.

You can learn much more about Neo Noir at our workshop on March 23.

In the workshop, we'll:

• Detail the many powerful themes and ideas the genre can address.
  
  
• Use fun and interesting exercises to help you to create the elements of your own Neo-Noir story.
  
  
• Demonstrate ideas with carefully chosen film clips
  

You'll end the process with a basic outline for your own Neo Noir story.

And afterwards you can continue to learn and share information about the genre in a Facebook group.

For more information and to book, click here.

Attend our next speakeasy

Article and image by Ian Long

“Let’s start on page one, shall we? Now, listen …”

The mood of the generally affable Paul Viragh, screenwriter of BRAZZA, SEX & DRUGS & ROCK N ROLL, THE FACE OF AN ANGEL and others, darkens a little when he remembers a meeting with a Script Executive who proceeded to read choice bits of dialogue from his screenplay in an affected, sing-song voice, and went on to preface each of his comments with the phrase:

“Now, if I’d have written this …”

The topic of the evening was script feedback - where to get it, how to take it, how to use it, and how to give it. And this is definitely not how to give it.

Early days

Paul has come a long way since this incident, and since the evening, long ago, when he and good pal Andy Serkis, both struggling actors trying to make headway in the film business, met up in Soho’s Blue Posts pub to plan their next move – and were so short of money that they had to share a pint. In fact he’s come as far as Fitzrovia’s Wheatsheaf pub, on the other side of Oxford Street, where he was the guest for our first Speakeasy event.

We’re hosting these night on the first Tuesday of every month: informal chats with writers, directors, agents and anyone else who might be of special interest to screenwriters.

Paul looks back to those early days, when he and a number of his actor friends were trying out other roles to give them more purchase in the industry, with mixed feelings. “We were all looking for some kind of validation,” he says, “and that was a long time coming.”

Fathers and sons

Paul wrote SEX & DRUGS & ROCK N ROLL on spec – “no one pays you for your first script” – and admits that he was more intrigued by the character of Ian Dury (charismatic and talented, but a tyrannical monster of ego), than by his music. And, for Paul, the real topic of the film was the relationship between Dury and his son.

Both Viragh and Serkis (who played Dury brilliantly) knew how it felt to have an absent father, and some scenes were lifted directly from their own lives rather than Dury’s. “You’ve got to write a human being,” Viragh says, and it’s clear that for him achieving emotional truth is more important than the niceties of biography.

Looking for funding

Many of the studio executives he approached for funding demurred with the tired fob-off that Dury was “an unsympathetic character” (Viragh notes that DOWNFALL, the massively successful, multi award-winning biopic of Adolf Hitler, had just been released when he was having these meetings).

Once he’d secured a large tranche of funding from one source, though, previously timid investors decided that unsympathetic characters may, after all, have a certain appeal – proving that the herd instinct is alive and well in the film business.

“Why don’t you make something up?”
​
Paul says his daughter often asks him this question, complaining that his scripts tend to be true life stories rather than free flights of fancy. He reminds us that a very high percentage of released films are, in fact, biopics – or are based on books.

Telling the life of a real person (particularly one who is well-known) gives you a head start in terms of recognition value.

​And – to return to the subject of bad advice – writing about real people protects you from script editors and executives whose notes about your protagonist go along the lines of:

​"What if she was a man?”



Want to meet other writers and hear industry advice from pros?

Attend this month's speakeasy on Feb. 26th 

Del Toro’s story suggests that, rather than being one-dimensional figures, monsters can have depth and nuance, embodying positive aspects as well as threats.

Which can make for complex, intriguing, dramatic stories.

As writers, we can blur or eradicate the line between heroes and monsters. We can use them to raise deep questions about human psychology, and show how “ordinary people” strike bargains with them, for various reasons - perhaps themselves becoming monstrous in the process.

And as we’ve seen with del Toro’s own health problems, dealing with monsters also has its costs – which is also inherently dramatic.

This is something that the creators of shows like BEING HUMAN, DEXTER, HANNIBAL, TRUE DETECTIVE and PENNY DREADFUL have recognised.

All these shows have great strengths, but Penny Dreadful may be the richest of them. Its creator, John Logan, consciously shaped it as a primer of ideas about monsters and monstrousness, which he used to think the subject through from just about every angle.

Like del Toro’s tales, Penny Dreadful is inspired by Victorian Gothic, and its lead characters are a kind of incestuous, dysfunctional family. Sir Malcolm Murray is the obsessed, driven father-figure. Vanessa Ives, Ethan Chandler and Victor Frankenstein are his wild children.

And as we know, Victor also has a "child" of his own: interestingly, both he and the Creature use the epithet “demon” to refer to each other.

As Vanessa asks the flamboyantly amoral Dorian Gray: “To be alien, to be disenfranchised from those around you, is that not a terrible curse?”

“To be different, to be powerful – is that not a divine gift?” Dorian suavely replies.

It's a story about outcasts who find a common cause. But the things that keep them together are fragile and constantly under threat.

Q: But where did Logan’s interest in monsters come from?

A: It’s all about sex.

“I've always been drawn to monsters,” Logan says. “As I grew older, I realised what really attracted me to them was … to do with growing up as a gay man.”

The teenage Logan saw the gay area of New York as “a forbidden, sexy, scary place”. Although he quickly realised that this is was where he belonged, "to step through that door would mark me as different from my brother, my family, my schoolfriends.”

“The thing that made me alien and different and monstrous to some people is also the thing that empowered me and gave me a sense of confidence and uniqueness and a drive toward individuality that I think is important for any writer."

It's something that also figures in Hellraiser creator Clive Barker's relationship with writing - to name just one other example. John Logan goes on to say:

​"Until I grappled with and accepted the reality of who and what I was – which many people would consider monstrous – I couldn't be the artist or the man that I am.”

I've talked a lot about writers' potentially positive relationship with monsters.

Does it seem likely, though, that audiences - the fine, decent, upstanding bulk of the population - would feel any affinity with creatures that overturn ideas of normality?

However - difference isn’t just felt by gay people, writers, or thin, almost albino boys.

The brutal fact is that we all share this experience at some stage in our lives. And we all have transgressive, antisocial drives that we may not want to enact, but which we need to acknowledge at some level. Monsters can help us do this.

Why else would people feel so intrigued by the Child Catcher, Freddie Kruger or Hannibal Lecter?

And why else would all the films and TV shows I've mentioned be so popular?

Exploring difference in this way can bring you closer to audiences, not further away from them.

For now, though, let’s look at a great example of making and breaking patterns in the first season of HBO’s TRUE DETECTIVE.

Spoiler Alert: I’ll be revealing one particularly surprising moment of the story, although the season has many other intriguing character and plot elements.

The Characters

The story features Louisiana State Police homicide detectives Rustin “Rust” Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Martin “Marty” Hart (Woody Harrelson).

The two men embody contradictory sides of the standard “hard-boiled” detective – aspects which are usually contained in a single protagonist.

Hart is an unreflective man of action, all fists and fiery passion, while Cohle is a sort of nihilist philosopher-cum-policeman - detached, despairing, unfathomable. Both share an overarching sense of alienation, of being at odds with life.

The Unforgettable Sequence

For much of the season, Cohle and Hart's spoken testimony squares with what we're seeing onscreen. But in “The Secret Fate Of All Life,” the fifth of the season’s eight episodes, this pattern is broken.

The duo track a suspect to a meth lab hidden deep in the bayou. Finding two kidnapped and abused children in the compound, Hart is incensed and unnecessarily kills the suspect, who he’s already taken into custody.

But the voiceover we hear from the men as we watch these events tells an entirely different story.

As Hart and Cohle tell us that they came under intense fire and were obliged to retaliate, the scene that we see is quiet and tranquil. And then we watch as the men fake evidence of a desperate shootout which never happened.

They’re subsequently decorated and promoted for their heroism. But they've become conspirators in covering up a murder. It’s a lie on which the rest of their lives will be founded.

The Emotional Impact

I vividly remember the sense of unreality I experienced when watching this scene: a feeling which drew its power purely from the way in which information was “coded” in the story. With it went feelings of bafflement, almost betrayal, as the visual information I was receiving departed so far from the characters’ verbal descriptions.

It’s these moments of thrilling strangeness – when viewers feel cut adrift and experience something genuinely new and compelling – that we need to look for in our stories, and which makes them truly memorable. ​

And when reading scripts, these are the moments that producers and directors are searching for.

The brilliant title sequence which includes the images in this article were made by Elastic, and you can find out more about the ideas behind the sequence here.

​For more details and to book on my Deep Narrative Design workshop, click here.

Thank you for reading, and please let me know of any thoughts or comments.
​

Some writers aren’t keen on Horror. They see it as dumb, low-rent and crass.

I think they’re missing out on some of the things that make cinema vibrant, powerful and entertaining.

My Writing Horror Now workshop on July 9 is there to supercharge people who already love the genre - and to help others see what they’re missing.

So - to lure you into my (cackle) lair, here are 6 reasons why you should be writing Horror (even if you don’t think you want to).

1. Politics, Society, Religion, Sexuality...

…Interested in any of these issues? Want to comment on them in ways that will make people sit up and listen?

The genre’s visceral, unbound quality lets you talk about social and political ideas in ways that are devastating– and memorable.

Think of recent films like GET OUT and UNDER THE SHADOW. Or older ones like CARRIE, the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and JAWS.

All had intriguing depths and important things to say about the way we're living.

Horror cuts to the chase, dealing with deep, primal issues that other genres skate around.

2. Visual and cinematic qualities

Horror intensifies stories which might otherwise lack cinematic interest, opening up visual possibilities, heightening emotions, increasing stakes.

Sound is also crucial (many of cinema’s breakthrough sound and music design came in the Horror genre).

In other genres, a problem may be talked about, or acted out. In Horror, it’s embodied … by a monster. And it’s up to you how that monster looks, acts and sounds.

3. Popularity with audiences (and critics)

Horror is the most profitable genre of them all, and producers always want good, original Horror scripts. Many popular recent TV shows (HANNIBAL, BEING HUMAN, DEXTER) have strong horror aspects.

And lots of the movies that “break out” of their home territories and achieve international success are in the Horror genre (TROLLHUNTER, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, THE ORPHANAGE).

And when the films are good, the critics will also come on board; all these films were very well reviewed.

4. The Illustrious Tradition

Horror has no lack of cultural or intellectual credibility. Many great writers have contributed to the genre – from Daphne du Maurier, Susan Hill and Hilary Mantel to Charles Dickens, Franz Kafka and Honoré de Balzac (not forgetting Mary Shelley).

Join this gilded roll-call with your own contributions!

5. The Creative Challenge

Horror is an extremely malleable genre which gives writers the chance to reform the world and its possibilities at will. It also blends in interesting ways with other genres.

Think of David Cronenberg’s comment that his film THE BROOD was a more truthful account of a marriage break-up than KRAMER VS KRAMER.

The workshop will look at ways of making something new from this “blending” process.

Take up Horror's creative challenges and give your imagination free rein!

6. Horror isn’t polite

At times when cultural mores become a little rigid, some outlet is necessary for us to say the unsayable, and to give vent to the dark things that underlie our psychology and culture.

Horror is always going to provide these opportunities (humour does something similar - and there's a strange bond between these seemingly very different genres).

Use Horror to indulge your inner punk-rocker, to be provocative, and to experiment with divergent ideas. Audiences will love you for it.
​

For more information on the workshop, and to book, click here.

By Charles Harris

Your script is complete.  Everything works - but there is one more thing that you absolutely must deal with before you send it out.
 
If you've been following this series of blogs from the start, you've taken your idea from first spark to final draft, step by step, and learned a great deal about your story along the way.

You've honed the premise until it had that spark that lit up when you pitched it. You developed it into an outline that worked, with an intriguing beginning, a dynamic middle and a surprising yet satisfying end.

You've created a first draft that was a mess, but contained a few hidden gems.

You edited for structure, character, scene dynamics, dialogue and description until the whole screenplay worked from fade up to fade out.

In the previous draft, you faced up to the "X Factor" - the one thing (perhaps more than one thing) you've been putting off dealing with.

One more thing...

It's done and ready to send out. Yes?

Not quite.

Because you only get one chance to sell your script to any one buyer. And if there's an obvious flaw that you've missed, then you've blown it.

Before you send it out, you need feedback.
 
So far you've been doing this all on your own. You've been writing - to quote Stephen King - "with the study door closed." Now it's time to open up.

Screenwriting is a collaborative art, and no script has ever succeeded without feedback. Now is the time to get it.

If you thought the previous steps were scary, this will be the scariest yet. Nobody likes getting feedback.

The only thing worse than negative feedback is no feedback!

We all want to believe our writing is brilliant and unimprovable. And we're all wrong. Even the greatest novelists have editors. The greatest playwrights listen to their actors and directors.

Better that you know the problems now, before you've tried to sell the script, than after, when it's too late.
 
But listening to feedback is an art in itself. Not every response is right. Not every suggestion should be followed. How do you know which to listen to and which to ignore?
 
First, take the process step by step.
 
Before you send off for a report, tidy the draft. Check carefully for typos and spelling mistakes. Put it in the right format - this is crucial (if you aren't sure about screenplay format, I've written a simple guide and a couple of templates that you can download for free here).

Check also for inconsistencies (such as characters whose names change) and factual errors (Dr Google is a great help here).
 
Then , If you've never had feedback before, begin slowly. Start with a couple of friends, who will (hopefully) let you down lightly.

What do you want to know?

If they've never read a screenplay before, you may have to give them some guidance.

Suggest they imagine their favourite actors in the roles. Ask them to be constructive (not "this sucks" but "here's a place you could improve!")

I also like to give them some questions to think about, such as "Pause at page 10. What do you think is about to happen? What do you think of Josie? Do you care about her?" Etc.

Give them a reasonable time to read the script and then allow yourself time to make any changes that seem to be indicated (see below).

This may entail retaking all the steps from first idea onwards. But if so, don't complain, celebrate.

You're making it better.

Bring on the pros

Once you've gone though all this, you must get professional feedback. Useful as friends may be, they probably don't know the industry. And even if they do, they want to be nice.

Even after all my years and awards, I still get at least two professional reports on any screenplay or novel before I send it. And there are always issues that come up.

The one time I didn't, I ended up spending two years after filming, fixing the problems that should have been spotted in the script - at far greater expense!

Of course, not even the best feedback must be listened to and evaluated. 

My rule is you have to listen when they say something needs to be fixed - but you don't have to agree with their suggestion of how to fix it!

Sometimes, you just know a criticism is wrong.

Sometimes, you just know it's right! Especially if you find yourself getting angry or defensive. That's always a good sign that you need to listen.

Sometimes, it's right to follow recommendations - sometimes the opposite will work just as well. 

Sending one comedy script for feedback, I was told I should make it funnier.

In fact, I made it more serious. The resultant balance of light and dark actually made the remaining comedy work better.

And then you really are finally done

You've listened to the feedback. You've decided what it means. You've taken note. You've made the necessary changes.

You're finished. Celebrate. Well done!

You've done something that most people never do - however much they talk about it. You've written a professional, polished screenplay.

Start researching the right people to send it to - and begin sending it out.

And while you're doing that - start work on the next....

​<previous
 
Charles Harris' best-selling satirical thriller novel The Breaking of Liam Glass is out now, published by Marble City Publishing. It has been selected as Finalist for a Wishing Shelf Book Award
​

To get you in the spirit for our Neo Noir workshop on January 31st, let’s explore how this flexible genre can be adapted to many different circumstances

1. Neo Noir is international!

Many people think Noir is an American form – even though it was made in Germany (M, 1931) and France (Pépé le Moko​, 1937) years before the classic US era.

In fact, the themes in Noir and its contemporary cousin, Neo Noir, can apply to a host of settings.

For instance, as detailed in a recent BBC radio programme, there’s currently an explosion of Noir in the Arab world – particularly Egypt, Morocco, and Algeria.

2. It works well in big cities - any big cities

Neo Noir can be made in many settings, but it thrives on the energy of cities, where people are crammed together and there’s a thrusting sense of money, modernity, crime, struggle and corruption.

So it should be no surprise that Cairo, with its 20-million population (one LA and two NYCs hitched together, anyone?) works well as a setting.

We’ve been blown away by Neo Noirs brewed in mega-metropolises like Seoul (A BITTERSWEET LIFE) and Rio de Janeiro (CITY OF GOD). So where's next? Nanhui New City? Bucharest?

3. Neo Noir can be a great vehicle for political themes

Raymond Chandler’s essay The Simple Art of Murder suggests that all crime novels are political.

In the Noir world, Chandler says, gangsters can rule nations and cities; men who made their money from brothels can own hotels, apartment houses and celebrated restaurants; a screen star may be working for a mob; and “the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making.”

Arab writers in particular are all too used to the misdeeds of their gangster ruling classes, and they know how Noir can be used to shine a light on them. 

4. And sometimes its targets are surprising

Did you know that the woes of the welfare state are at the heart of Nordic Noir?

The shadow side of a squeaky-clean modern society is central to Scandinavian stories from Lars Von Trier’s mini-series THE KINGDOM (set in a state hospital), to THE KILLING, THE BRIDGE and BORGEN.

Take LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (a horror film with Noir aspects). It’s set in Blackeberg, a neighbourhood in the showcase Swedish city of Vallingby.

Here, a communal rural past has been swapped for a vision of rational, state-planned ‘perfection’ – but one which threatens social and familial bonds. And, as we know, an older threat is also rearing its head…

5. Manifestos can help creativity
​
In an echo of state plans for flawed Nordic Utopias, Ingolf Gabold, head of the dramatic fiction department of DR, the public channel responsible for the Danish TV Noirs, used a Dogma-style manifesto (with different content) to shape its shows.

The manifesto shaped the company's output and production methods, and - crucially - its attitude to writers (putting them at the centre of the creative process, rather than seeing them as an unfortunate side-issue).

Sometimes it's good to have a clear vision of where you want to go, so why not write a manifesto?

6. Murder is usually the beginning – but it's a means to an end

What process could lead to the taking of a human life? Who was involved, what was the logic, and what stood to be gained? Tracing this is often the crux of a Noir story.

But once we have the pretext, it can lead us in any direction that a writer wants to go.

As Egyptian novelist/screenwriter Ahmed Mourad (once ex-President Hosni Mubarak’s personal photographer, so a fly-on-the-wall observer of the inner world of power) says:

“While the hero is solving the case, which is merely the means, we get to see every level of Egyptian society. It’s like cutting a cake with a knife. Each layer is clearly exposed. The crime is only the beginning: we need to see how a whole society works to produce it.”

7. Noir reaches audiences!

Crime stories, particularly ones with the extra twist ​of Noir, have a wide appeal.

Would we be thinking about the problems of the Scandinavian welfare state if Nordic Noir hadn’t made them thrilling and compulsive?

And Neo Noir can morph into many different forms to reach its audiences: films, novels, TV series and comics (like Magdy El Shafee’s Cairo-set Metro).
​