Ashley Pharoah, award-winning writer and creator of shows including Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes and Wild at Heart, dropped by our classroom to take questions from our John Yorke Story for Screenwriting students. Here they discuss pitching, his development as a writer and the often long wait from script to screen.
What’s the key to great comedy? How can you engage the audience while still making them laugh? What should a new writer look out for? Actress, writer and producer Katherine Press met up with BBC Studios Executive Producer for Comedy Simon Nicholls to clear up all these questions and more in an exclusive interview for John Yorke Story.
You’ve written your story, now how can you test whether or not it’s as good as it can be? In Into the Woods and on his online courses John Yorke recommends asking 10 questions to check you’ve got your story straight: an approach as relevant to business, science, marketing and tech stories as it is to dramatic narratives.
Nick Parker looks at why mastering the nuts and bolts of story structure is as important a business skill as project management (no, really).
Published for the first time outside the UK, this is the Preface to the US edition of Into the Woods [cite publisher, Lucy and link to US book on their site] in which John Yorke looks at how much nonsense has been written about screenwriting – and how you can tell the real rules of narrative from the fake ones.
You’ve perfected your first spec script and are ready to send it out to production companies. Congratulations on a huge achievement. So what’s the process? How do you get your work read and your talent noticed? Here, we explore the steps an aspiring writer can take towards success.