Journal

I have just posted another story taster to the ARIGNI Writing Room.

I am pleased with the way  material about characters from ARIGNI 1 has been accumulating. So far I have stories started (and some finished) for Yulia, Tina, Amalia, Giovanni, and Gibson’s brother.

In fact, the story about Gibson’s brother was finished earlier in the year, not during the current burst of writing. I would particularly welcome feedback on that story, so will post all 5k words to the Writing Room once there are readers there.

I can report that I had a good writing week. Developing back-history stories for two of the characters in ARIGNI. These won’t necessarily find their way into the screenplays for ARIGNI 2. They could, but it’s likely they won’t. And that’s OK because, alongside the book-length versions of ARIGNI 1 and ARIGNI 2, I am now thinking of producing a set of short stories featuring the characters from that world, but not necessarily set in that world.

The storylines I worked on this past week involved Amalia and Yulia and experiences that they have in their home towns between the summer just past in ARIGNI 1 and the summer to come in ARIGNI 2.

I was asked during a walk this afternoon if I was writing straight into screenplay format. I’m not. I’m doing a handwritten first draft then typing it into iAWriter. As the scenes are conceived televisually from the start, and dialogue driven, the move into screenplay format will be straightforward. It’s the move into book format that may require extra texture in the form of new writing. ARIGNI 1 started out as a work of prose fiction, so the opposite was required there, with texture such as characters’ own thoughts having to be stripped away or conveyed differently.

This time I am working very much as a screenwriter, albeit the formatting will not strictly be in place until the words are transferred to Highland Pro. That won’t be until the whole story of ARIGNI 2 has been written, because I am writing as a storyteller who wants the series arc (the story being told in the full six or however many episodes) to have the coherence of a novel.

As luck would have it, just when I would ideally be concentrating on ARIGNI 2 and adding content here on Story for Screen, two large editing jobs have landed — ones I couldn’t say no to.

They are both novels. One for a longstanding client, a New Orleans author who writes complex historical time-slip stories set in his home city. The second for a new author, who is hoping his story may one day be filmed (he has a film directing background) — so you can see why I could not refuse that one.

As for ARIGNI 2, I have decided that a start I made on it in the early part of the summer was heading in a wrong direction. It involved introducing a new group of characters who would have been far too interesting in their own right, especially in terms of the dynamics between them. So, I’m going to be starting again and putting that group of characters aside for the time being and maybe using them in the future for a feature script or even a TV comedy drama.

This doesn’t mean that things will be completely quiet here. I’m going to start reviewing the online platforms I’ve been using over the past 12 months to try and get myself up to speed with the world of film and TV (having previously only really known the books world), beginning with a review of Stage 32.

There have been some updates on arigni.co.uk

The screen snippets were originally photographs of sections of the script printout. They were OK but I decided it would be much better to have them coded into the html and formatted to screenplay conventions. It makes them more readable on different viewing formats and means I can swap them around from time to time.

I have also been busy doing a fresh redrafting of the first episode following some helpful notes received from Mere Walton. In particular, she pointed out that I was — in my inexperience and naivety — emulating many conventions from produced scripts that are out of place in a spec script. Well, you live and learn. So changes are being made.

Another change is a very slight rewording of the main logline which now reads: “A sheltered innocent holidaying abroad must be reunited with two lost duffel bags at all costs — since the consequences of failure are unthinkable.”

Last week ARIGNI and Story for Screen went live. Getting both sites named consistently, linked to each other and to Patreon, and in front of Google took more time than the launch itself. All of that is now in place.

From here  the journal can do what it was for: log progress on ARIGNI 2, give updates on ARIGNI 1, and share reflections on the multitude of sites, such as Stage 32, offering help and advice to screenwriters.

Hello, I don’t know what your August was like but mine, here in the UK, was filled with tropically hot days and family visits. It was a good time with a summer holiday feel. I didn’t get much real writing done but I did put some thought into two new websites:
https://arigni.co.uk – companion site for the ARIGNI book and screenplay (an online series bible if you will)
and this site, Story for Screen, a Journal covering all things related to screenwriting as well as news about my own pitching journey.
There’s also a Patreon (see footer) if you want access to a few extras.