“Don’t wait for permission”

The first panel of Storytelling360’s first London conference: the people who read the scripts, on what makes them keep reading.

Edited for length and clarity.

How do you approach working with a writer?

Christina Pickworth (agent, Imagine Talent): The first thing on my list isn’t a creative consideration at all. I have a strict no egos, no as*holes policy, because it’s too hard as it is.

So — don’t be a dick. That will help.

And then creatively, I look for hustlers. People who are working hard and making their own opportunities. Part of that is writing and being good at it, obviously. But the hardest thing to create and keep is momentum, and people who are generating it are always what I look for.

Queenie Miller (comedy development, Hat Trick): From the production side, resilience. Not stopping yourself when things get hard, because it’s a tough world out there.

I’ve seen that hinder projects in the past, and it’s understandable. But it’s a good sign of moral character to say: can we find another way round this?

What are the biggest mistakes you see?

Christina Pickworth: The big one is taking every note someone gives you.

It’s your project. It’s not ours. There’s a desire to please the execs or the producers, when quite often there’s something happening in the script that you know better than they do.

So be really clear on what your project is and what you want it to be, and then use our notes as a way to work through that. There’ll be times we disagree, and we can discuss it. But it’s about having real belief in your abilities and in your project.

Queenie Miller: And identifying the note under the note, which is half the producer’s job with commissioners in paid development. Between producer and writer, the writer knows what they want to say. So there’s a balance to strike between openness to collaboration and clarity about your own intent.

Christina Pickworth: I’d also say: don’t wait for permission. If you want to be a writer, be a writer. Not having an agent isn’t a barrier.

Agents are looking for people further along than you might imagine. Most people look for an agent too early. So put yourself out there and be working hard. If that’s what you want to do, go and get it.

What do you expect a writer to have before you’d represent them?

Christina Pickworth: A number of scripts, already written and well polished.

The amount of people who come to me with one really good script — and it’s genuinely great — but I can’t do much with one script. That might have taken you ten years to perfect, and it’s one thing to sell and pitch.

Because inevitably you get feedback from a development person: we love the writing, but we have something in a similar space. What else have they got? And if you’ve only got one thing, that’s the end of the conversation.

So: a body of work. And some kind of industry recognition. You’ve been on a scheme, or placed in a respected competition, or you’ve got something in development somewhere. Or an industry recommendation — the things agents will read. If it comes recommended by a producer we know and like, whose taste is close to ours, we’re much more likely to read it.

And on the development side?

Helena Murphy (head of development, Hartswood Films): Clarity and conviction of voice. Knowing what story you’re trying to tell — and having an endpoint.

Increasingly you can have the best pilot script in the world, with every twist and the ultimate hook, but if you can’t say and by the way, we end up here, that’s a problem. You don’t need every twist of the whole series planned. But knowing the direction matters enormously.

Because when you come to a development team, you’re creating a series. It’s not about polishing one perfect script. New writers come in and say, I’ve got this, it’s not quite right, I want to keep tinkering. And it’s — no, forget that. What’s the rest of the story? Where are these characters going?

This business is about persuading people you can definitely do it. If you can walk into a room and say I have thought about this, don’t panic, there’ll be an end, there’ll be loads of twists, there’ll be a dragon, there’ll be a princess, it’ll be great — that stands you in enormous stead.

A lot of it is being able to tell your story not just on the page but in person.

And then: be open to conversation. Our job in development is making what’s in your head clear to everyone else. So the notes are really just — I think you’re trying to do this, but it isn’t as clear as it could be. What if you looked at it like that? Am I understanding this properly?

Ultimately we’re all trying to be cheerleaders for you.

Andin Ngwa: I’d add: think about the reader experience.

It’s for the screen, but it’s so great when a script really knows what it’s saying. If it’s a comedy, write it in a way that feels funny on the page. If it’s a thriller, get that paciness in. Make it a genuinely enjoyable experience for the person reading it.

Queenie Miller: For me a lot of it is taste alignment and personality. At Hat Trick we’re very locked in with talent as individual producers, so it’s about creating a space where — because we’re creatively aligned — the conversation can be open. Could it go this route? If you have a plan for series one, two and three, are you open to thinking about it differently?

Still very writer-first. We’re not trying to change your ideas, just sculpt them so they’re clear to everyone else.

Every company has a house style.

Helena Murphy: In the UK we’ve got a thriving industry with a lot of companies, and each has quite a distinctive creative output. You can tell — that’s a Hat Trick show, that’s a Hartswood show.

As a writer that’s an excellent opportunity to almost speed-date and find your right people. Because TV is all about taste and tone and getting it, which is this horrible glittery-glue nebulous thing.

We get loads of scripts from writers who are fantastic, but we’re not going to make a gritty dark kitchen-sink drama, because that’s not what we’re known for. We do slightly more fun, escapist, pacy, adventurous shows.

So if a writer comes my way and I think we can’t do anything with you — why don’t you go and talk to the people who do darker, edgier, grittier stories? And vice versa: our peers will say we love this writer, we can’t do this one.

You’d be surprised how much everyone’s on your side, even when it doesn’t feel that way and you’re thinking, they haven’t got back to me again.

Voice or craft — which comes first?

Christina Pickworth: Voice comes first. If you haven’t got a voice, we’re stumped, because you want something to feel authored. You want it to feel original, and that can only come through voice.

Craft in screenwriting is relatively easy to learn. There’s a Screenwriting for Dummies — go and read it, you can probably write a script. But if you can’t use that knowledge to craft something that sounds like you, that’s the barrier.

There are plenty of people who are successful without it. But we’re looking for a good idea, a good voice, and something that feels authored. You can have a good idea and the technical ability, and without that you’d struggle to get far.

Queenie Miller: Coming from live comedy, it’s a privileged position, because my scripted slate is built from writer-performer relationships. That voice is being worked out on stage and it’s already very strong. You identify what region they’re from, what story they want to tell about their family, and then you put it into a script.

Voice over technical ability, for sure.

Zoe Ross (agent, United Agents): I come at this from a totally different point of view, because I work predominantly with authors.

When I’m talking to producers about material that might lend itself to adaptation, the author’s voice is there — but you’re also conscious the screenwriter will bring their own spin. So voice is perhaps less important in that instance. What matters is tone, atmosphere, world, characters, and the shape of the story.

And then you’re thinking technically. What’s the structure? Could it be eight parts? Could it be returnable? Could it be a feature?

The other thing I think about is whether the author of a book can make the leap into screenwriting. A lot of authors assume it’s straightforward. It’s a very different craft.

Bad advice you keep hearing.

Megan Halpern: There’s a trend right now for writing and selling short stories as a way to get something off the ground — make sure you own the underlying IP. Five or ten years ago it was: do a graphic novel.

I always thought that was slightly unhelpful advice for writers who aren’t trying to do that. Who aren’t trying to own something, but to tell a story in a certain way.

Gavin Glendinning (producer, Qwerty Films / Goldcrest): Bad advice is being overly cynical and reverse-engineering something to fit what you perceive to be a demand — rather than writing what you believe and letting it take the form it wants to take.

Writing a book or a story very much with adaptation in mind, rather than writing the thing you want it to be.

Zoe Ross: You’re putting a lot of effort into something you’ll then need to put more effort into, to create a different type of story. And short stories don’t always lend themselves to television, or vice versa.

Form is very important. It’s probably the reason you picked it.

And the thing people worry about that they shouldn’t.

Helena Murphy: People jealously guarding their ideas in case someone steals them. That doesn’t happen. It just doesn’t.

There’s a zeitgeist. At one point I got about four scripts in that were all about the same incident, and I thought — this is weird, why have I got four scripts about this one thing? And you go back three or four months and there’d been a massive news story. They’d all been inspired by the same thing, which makes sense, because it was a cracking story idea. Annoying, because it makes them hard to place. But not theft.

We’re in the BFI, so — in 1989 two films came out based on the same book. Dangerous Liaisons and Valmont. One was scandalous, awful people doing awful things to each other in wigs. The other was quite swoony, sexy people doing things in wigs. Totally different tones, totally different films, same core idea. And both succeeded and both found audiences and both are great.

So don’t worry about sharing things. To get anywhere in this industry you have to be able to share and trust that it’ll work itself out.

That’s the real privilege of working in development — people trust you with these things, because stories are part of you. Even if on the surface they’re nothing to do with you, they are, because you’re trying to express yourself.

Christina Pickworth: The advice I don’t like is that you have to only write one kind of thing.

I think that comes from what I said earlier — when someone says we like this horror film but we don’t want to make it, what else have you got, they mean they want another horror idea.

But you’re writers. You have vivid imaginations, you can create amazing worlds and characters, and you should be able to do that in whichever form you want. What matters is that if you have a horror idea and a comedy idea and a crime idea, you don’t just have one of each.

So write whatever you want. Just make sure you have other things in that lane. Which is more work — but people put themselves in a box because of that advice, and they shouldn’t have to.

On money and time.

Christina Pickworth: Think about how your income stream allows you the time to write. Because if you want to write, you have to keep doing it, and it’s no good saying I’ll do it when it pays me. Sadly it doesn’t work like that.

Find a way to support yourself while you’re building. Taking that financial pressure off at the beginning is a really good idea, because it’s hard to write when you’re worried about keeping the lights on.

Three pages a day is a feature script in a month. That’s what I always tell new writers. It’s not that much — and dialogue is small. Just get it on the page. Then you can fix it.

So many people say they’re writers and haven’t actually finished anything. Just finishing something, and being able to call yourself a writer, puts you ten steps ahead of a lot of your peers. And then doing it again. And again.

There’s nothing better than meeting someone whose work you love, asking what else they have, and finding they’ve got other incredible things, and they’re already working on a third and a fourth.

Zoe Ross: Which is interestingly so different from publishing. If I get a submission from someone who says here’s my novel, and by the way I’ve got three others, you think — are they TV ideas? Should you be doing that?

Last pieces of advice.

Queenie Miller: More of a general notion than a thing people say — but the idea that if you’re not on Final Draft writing something new, you’re not a writer, is obviously bullsh*t.

If you have a job you’re doing to supplement the writing, you’re a writer who’s always listening to people’s conversations and thinking that was funny, that was interesting, they’re a character. That’s as inspiring a place as anything else. And it’s probably better than being stuck in your flat looking inward all the time.

Some of the best workplace and family sitcoms have come from doing the jobs that make you interesting. Bob Mortimer was a lawyer — who would have thought. Jo Brand was a nurse. We got some really good stuff from those two.

Christina Pickworth: To be a writer you have to write loads of stuff. But writing isn’t just writing. You need to be networking, building connections, watching things, applying to schemes. You should be doing all of it.

Nobody’s going to come and knock on your door. You’ve got to go and knock on theirs. Hi, it’s me again. I still exist.

Gavin Glendinning: And increasingly you can make your own. There’s a film that was just at SXSW and won the Neon Auteur Award, made for six thousand one hundred pounds by a group of people from the NFTS. They went out and shot for nine days.

Now it’s going to festivals — Edinburgh, Sydney, LA. Loads of traction. They haven’t got agents yet, but they’re being set up with their next one.

We’re in a world where you can make stuff and distribute it yourself.

So — make friends with directors. Go out and make it.

Three pages a day is a feature script in a month.

Christina Pickworth speaking on stage at State of the Story, BFI Southbank, London