{"id":10,"date":"2004-01-08T17:25:41","date_gmt":"2004-01-08T17:25:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/idiolect.truth.posiweb.net\/notes\/?p=10"},"modified":"2004-01-08T17:25:41","modified_gmt":"2004-01-08T17:25:41","slug":"writing-for-radio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/2004\/01\/08\/writing-for-radio\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing for radio"},"content":{"rendered":"

I normally think of myself- in a rather surly way- as a non-fiction man, but something obviously snapped recently and i’ve decided to write a 15 minute radio play. I think the turning point was listening to something on Radio 4 and thinking “I could do better than this”. Time to prove it! But first, some preparation.<\/p>\n

The BBC – of course – has some good resources for writers in their Writersroom<\/a>. Including this fantastic tutorial by Jon Ronson <\/a>on finding and following a story (he mentions that being scruffy can be useful. Score!)<\/p>\n

The BBC gets 10,000 scripts a year, so better get the formatting right<\/a> and submit it correctly<\/a><\/p>\n

There’s so much advice on how to write that i decided to read it after i’d actually got the thing written (although finding out that 15 minutes is very approximately 2000 words was good to know). I might still try and get David Mamet’s Writing for Radio<\/i> (in A Whore’s Profession<\/i>, 1994) because a friend recommended it and Mamet’s a god.<\/p>\n

The cacophony of instruction on the Craft reminded me of this article in the Independent <\/a>from a few weeks ago which busted a few myths about the hoops you need to jump through in preparing your script for Hollywood<\/p>\n

This is the secret of how to be a screenwriter. You have to set two tabs. You set one tab setting an inch or 2.5cm from the left margin. You set the other tab a couple of inches or 5cm in. The first tab marks where the dialogue starts. And the second tab is for the name of the character speaking (always in capitals).<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s it. Apparently.<\/p>\n

Reminiscent in spirit to my favourite quote about writing, by Kingsley Amis<\/p>\n

The Art of Writing is the art of applying the seat of one’s trousers to the seat of one’s chair<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I normally think of myself- in a rather surly way- as a non-fiction man, but something obviously snapped recently and i’ve decided to write a 15 minute radio play. I think the turning point was listening to something on Radio 4 and thinking “I could do better than this”. Time to prove it! But first, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5KQtW-a","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}