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.
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.
‘Writers often get so focused on the details they can’t see the forest for the trees’. John Yorke Story course tutor Chelsea Morgan Hoffman looks at the process of developing a screenplay, and the power of 5 Act structure.
Perfecting the structure of a story is what makes the difference between a good idea and a successful piece of screenwriting. In this one-to-one session, David Roden explains to a John Yorke Storytelling for Screen student core elements of five-act structure: inciting incidents, moments of hope and despair, and the point of no return.
In his bestselling book on screenwriting Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them, John Yorke argues that all compelling stories share an underlying structure, no matter their format or genre. So what do the great storytellers of film and TV drama have to teach those who work in factual entertainment, current affairs, history/science/the arts, and documentaries – anything, in fact, that’s non-fiction? A new course explores what you can take from dramatic structure to create factual stories that resonate deeply with an audience.
How many times have you begun a script with dreams of grandeur, only for it to peter out, and end up half written with no direction? In the first of two Q&A sessions, students taking John Yorke’s Storytelling for Screen online course talk to tutor, director and editor David Roden about the importance of script structure, the necessity of passion, and Jackie Collins’ secret to success.