Paul Abbott - 4

What is the best advice you can give a writer starting out?

New writers tend not to write enough. They spend years writing their first big feature, which is admirable for the purist, but you don't get to know your own voice until you've kicked a script to death and made yourself proud of it. This takes time. Good scripts aren't written, they're re-written.

But to get to this point, you have to get the boring bit out of the way and get to the end first. Then the real writing starts - when you start to have fun with structure and character.

It's true that most writers become writers because they have something to say. But their unique way of saying that thing is what producers are looking for. So the faster you sharpen a style that best suits your emotional energy, (be it an opus or an episode of The Bill), the closer you are to seeing your work appreciated on screen with a cheque in the bank.

The best writers I know tend to juggle a few ideas at once - often for practical reasons. When one script starts looking like it's taking a dive, you stick it aside, pick up the next. Choose a scene you've been desperate to write. It's amazing how the energy from one script can inform the next.

But the most practical advice I can give to a writer is: read tons of scripts, nab them off the free websites (just type 'free downloadable screenplays' into the search engine). They're all over the place, put there for educational purposes. Scan other people's styles - you don't have to like them. Look at the way they communicate their intentions. A difficult piece of dialogue might be set up with copious stage directions; another writer might just seem to pluck intention out of the air with loads of space around simple instructions.

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