Brennig Jones

You might know that I’ve been playing with short stories for a few years.

Pieces like ‘Braindead’, ‘Send Us A Sample Of Your Writing’, ‘Dogfight!’, ‘California Dreamin’, ‘Confession’, and the award-winning and internationally-published ‘Horse Of A Different Colour’, were all written, and found their way in to print, some years ago.

But, although things have been quiet on the short story front for a while, I have never left the genre alone.

You may know that, in the last year, I have been working on a couple of screenplays; a sitcom (‘Shelved’), and a short double-headed drama (‘Familiarity’).

Well I’ve finally finished editing the screenplay for the latter.

And I’d like to finish it. And when I say ‘finish’, I mean ‘film’. I intend to film the screenplay, in HD format, and publish the piece on YouTube.

So I’m looking for a male and a female actor, to play the joint-lead roles.

I have begun contacting local amateur dramatic societies, in order to try and find my willing victims volunteers.

I’m unsure how to conduct the interview process, but as with all things in life, it’s a learning curve!

A novel comes at 50,000 words or more.

A novella is 20,000 – 50,000 words.

A novelette is 7,500 – 20,000 words.

A short-story is 1,000 – 7,500 words.

And flash comes in at 1,000 words or fewer.

As if writing for any or all of these forms isn’t tough enough, missing from the list are the other challenges; word-counts on commissioned articles and features.

And now I’ve invented a new one.

Twitfiction.

Working within the 140 character limits of Twitter, I’m writing a short-short story.

Each day I’ll put out one or two tweets on a theme, until that theme reaches its natural conclusion.

I’m going to try and keep as much humour as possible in the story.

I’ll be honest, this is a fun challenge.

Working on a piece of prose for a short story, a feature or just mapping roughing out an idea is relatively simple.

Working on a script, even in the early stages, is far more complicated – and all because of the formatting.

When I started working on scripts I used to write everything as simple prose and, much later (after at least the first two rounds of editing), paste it in to script format and add the shooting and editing instructions.

Although that worked, I found it to be really cumbersome when, later on, I needed to make additional edits.

So I bit the bullet and started to do my script writing in the correct format from the outset.

It’s a steep learning curve, but the truth is that writing in a script format is a knack that only gets easier with practice.

There are some good applications out there which, if you’re interested, can do a good formatting job for you. I use CeltX, you can get a free version of this, if you’re interested.

But the bottom line here is that it really is easier to write in script format from the outset.

In a day or so I’ll put a link here to a segment of a script I’m working on. Feel free to let me know your views.

I had a spell, some years ago, where I couldn’t translate any of my ideas on to paper.

They were falling over themselves in my head, I just couldn’t get them out.

I recently had an email exchange with someone who was suffering with a numbing case of writers block, so I thought I’d share the mechanism I have developed to help me ‘beat the block’.

1. Choose a song. It has to be a song that you know really well. Not, necessarily, a well-known song, just one that you are familiar and comfortable with
2. Find a quiet place to write, but a place that is not your usual venue. It should be warm, not too comfortable and should have no distractions: no visual scenes that could take your mind off the job; no internet (yes, I know how difficult that can be!); no telephone
3. Set a limit. I recommend 500 words as the absolute maximum number of words for this exercise. I find that having a defined limit helps my thought processes and editing skills
4. Plug yourself in to a pair of headphones, close your eyes and absorb your chosen song. Don’t just listen to it, push yourself in to the story, and…
5. Write a piece of fiction that is clearly linked to (or even, a part of) that song. This must not be an obtuse reference. The relationship between the song and your piece has to be obvious to all readers.

And that’s it.

What you’re doing throughout the course of this exercise, is using the musical/lyrical framework set within the song as your storyboard template.

Yes, it’s a challenge, but because you’ve chosen the song, it’s a very enjoyable one.

Give it a go.

Let me know how it works for you.

I’ve finally got around to redesigning this section of the website.

I know! Get me. Finger on the pulse! It’s taken five years, don’t go on about it.

The new layout is fairly self-explanatory.

There’s a bunch of pages up there. Look up, can you see them? They’re arranged in some kind of order that means something to me – well, this is supposed to be the writing section of my corner of the internet.

Anyway, those pages?

The content in them won’t change often. Just now and then. But probably not more often than that.

And this front page, which I’ve called ‘news’ will be a scrolling page of occasional news updates.

The clever thing about this redesign is this version of the website produces updates via RSS feeds. So just point your Reader at the RSS feed over there, on the right, and Robert’s your Mother’s Brother!

Oh yes.