GRAND PRIZE WINNER – Emily Renée – COUNTERFEIT
What first got you interested in screenwriting? When did you start writing?
I grew up with a passion for writing and when I was younger I thought I’d become a novelist. But once I got hooked onto film, TV, and theatre I quickly realised that my favourite bit of writing was the dialogue. So that became my gateway into screenwriting – though now of course I know it’s so much more than what the characters say! I’m also an actor and I think that has really helped me develop my understanding of what makes us root for interesting and complex characters.
Is there anything you’d like to share about your writing routine? How do you find time to write?
This is such a difficult question to answer because I find that as a freelancer, your routine is always changing so you’re always having to negotiate that writing time. However I will say that I find I write best when I put the least amount of pressure on myself. So rather than setting specific writing goals, I have to trick myself into pretending there’s no deadline or urgency to write and once I feel less pressure, that’s when I hit flow
How many TV pilots have you written?
Counterfeit is the first proper TV pilot I’ve written. Now I’ve got three other TV projects I’m developing but I’m still very much learning about what makes a good, gripping and intriguing TV show. Before that, I spent years writing (not very good) plays and I’ve written a couple of short films and feature scripts which taught me a lot about what makes a screenplay work. But given that I’m an avid TV watcher, I didn’t feel like I was completely starting from scratch when I wrote my first pilot. There’s so much that as audiences we already know from watching stories and it’s about formalising that for yourself and figuring out how you want to use or bend the rules to your advantage.
What gave you the inspiration for this Pilot Script? How long did it take to write?
Honestly, this script went through a few iterations. I knew I wanted to write a family drama that had a crime element to it – sort of a female led Sopranos type show – but it took me a while to figure out what the crime aspect would be. The world of art forgery is something that’s fascinated me for years and I felt like it was something I hadn’t seen properly explored on screen before. I also really wanted to write something set in London that shows different immigrant experiences and how diverse London really is. It took me about two years on and off to get the script to the version that won Shore Scripts.
What do you enjoy most about writing?
Everything! The fact that there are no limits to your imagination when you’re writing – you can literally write about whatever you’re interested in. I love how writing can lead you to interesting research, how it forces you to confront your own presumptions about the world, how it also forces you to be really, really disciplined. You have control over your work but you also have to
hold yourself accountable to making it as good as it can be..
What do you struggle with the most?
Writing can be a very lonely experience and it’s hard sometimes to motivate yourself when you feel like no one’s necessarily expecting you to write something good that people will want to watch. That’s why having a support network is so important and to have people in the industry who are passionate about championing you. I’m lucky to have those things and I try and share my writing (when it’s ready!) with the people I trust because that encouragement is really useful fuel for me to keep going.
How do you feel that the film industry embraces new writing talent?
We all know it’s a tricky time right now when the industry is in flu and if I’m totally honest, I think we could always be doing more to support emerging talent – especially those who come from minority backgrounds or don’t have the financial stability to sit and write endless spec scripts. But that’s why competitions are so, so important because they can provide the platform that you need for people to see what you can do. Also – this may be an obvious thing to note – but having established industry members talk openly about their journeys and struggles can be immensely useful because it shows how no one has an answer to being immediately ‘embraced’ by the industry. Everyone has their own path to get there.
How did you feel when your script placed as a quarterfinalist then semi-finalist and then ultimately as one of our winners?
Completely surprised and really pleased. I wrote Counterfeit for myself, because it’s the kind of show that I would want to watch, so to have it be appreciated by other people was such a heart-
warming and humbling experience.
How did you hear about Shore Scripts?
I was looking to see what competitions were worth submitting to as a screenwriter and was impressed by all the success stories so thought it was worth a try!
What goals do you have for this script and your future career?
Obviously I would love to see this script make it to the screen one day and I’m still developing it alongside my other projects. My main hope is to connect with people in the industry who have similar taste to me and with whom I can eventually make the kind of stories that I want to tell.
What advice do you have for upcoming screenwriters?
Follow the advice that feels right for you and ignore what everyone else is doing. Everyone’s journey is different and as long as you stick to your gut, you’ll end up where you need to be.
SECOND PLACE WINNER – Arden Earnest – COSA NOSTRA
What first got you interested in screenwriting? When did you start writing?
I’ve been writing since I can remember, but screenwriting specifically since I was eleven and my parents showed me Die Hard for the first time. I was captivated and immediately looked up the script online, deciding that screenwriting was the superior writing medium. It only took a couple years for my parents to catch on that writing wasn’t just a phase, but a forever bug that I’d caught, and so they bit the bullet and got me Final Draft for Christmas one year.
Is there anything you’d like to share about your writing routine? How do you find time to write?
I write daily, even if it’s just jotting down research facts or loglines. I thrive on deadlines, real world and self-imposed. Some of my best work comes when I’m under pressure, so I try to embrace that as much as possible.
How many TV pilots have you written? What gave you the inspiration for this Pilot Script? How long did it take to write?
COSA NOSTRA is my most recent pilot, and one that is very close to my heart as it honors my Sicilian great-grandmother and some of the lengths she went to survive in New Orleans amid crime and prejudice. I wrote this over several months while in class at my alma mater, the AFI Conservatory.
What do you enjoy most about writing?
I easily get lost in anything I write, sometimes sitting for what feels like half a day. It can at times be a struggle to find inspiration as a creative, but when the juices flow, it’s an indescribable magic. I live for that feeling.
What do you struggle with the most?
I’m always working toward creating stronger characters, especially trying to round out all the intimate details and idiosyncrasies that make them read as true and real as possible on the page. I’d love to master that one day..
How do you feel that the film industry embraces new writing talent?
In my limited experience, I feel like the industry really tries to identify original voices – people whose writing you read on the page and go “wow, I’ve never seen a style quite like this” or “this reminds me of x writer and I haven’t read anything like that in years”. I really do believe it’s about conveying your voice on the page as much as possible when you’re starting out.
How did you feel when your script placed as a quarterfinalist, then semi-finalist and then ultimately as one of our winners?
Placing in Shore Scripts was an incredible surprise and very validating as a writer. I knew that even if I didn’t progress further than quarterfinalist, that at least someone had connected with my story and voice, and that made me more confident in my abilities.
How did you hear about Shore Scripts?
I first heard about Shore Scripts in my undergrad at USC, and when I wrote this pilot a few years later, I felt compelled to submit.
What goals do you have for this script and your future career?
A writer’s dream is to have their work made, so I would of course love to see COSA NOSTRA one day become a series. Few mafia stories have been told from the perspective of the women and I think it’s time that changed.
What advice do you have for upcoming screenwriters?
I’m still very much an upcoming screenwriter, but if I had to give any advice, I’d share what I tell myself frequently, especially when in a rut: “patience and persistence”. Doing the work and reminding yourself that the journey can, and probably will, take a minute, but that every step is in the pursuit of becoming a professional storyteller.
GRAND PRIZE WINNER – Chris Watt – SOUTHBANK
What first got you interested in screenwriting? When did you start writing?
I started writing, in a serious capacity, around the age of 15. I had been doing a lot of school plays and had become very dialled into the way a script was presented. Unlike a novel, it has to be so specific and to the point and the medium really appealed to me, but as my first love was cinema, that meant a natural progression from stage play to screenplay. I always loved the fact that, as a screenwriter, you are the very start of the process. The 90s were a great time to be into screenwriting, as there were publishing houses that would release major screenplays as books you could buy, so throughout my teens I was starting to learn the craft by reading Pulp Fiction, or Chinatown, or Withnail & I. This was pre-internet, and I feel that was to my benefit, as it meant you had to be really interested in something to seek it out. Everything’s so accessible now, which means fewer opportunities to discover something for yourself.
Is there anything you’d like to share about your writing routine? How do you find time to write?
I’m not sure there is any great insight to be gained from my routine, except to say that having one is essential. Routine and discipline. I’m up at 6am every day, and will work until around 5pm, but that doesn’t mean I get a huge number of pages done. Some days it’s 2 pages, some days it’s 10, but even if it’s 1page, that’s 1page more than you had at the start of the day. You have to take that as a win. I’m very lucky that I also work as a screenplay consultant. I’m a freelancer, so I schedule a block of any working week to write just for me, and make sure I stick to it. It’s harder for those in a situation where they have less time. That was me, 5 years ago. Working a day job that meant I had about 4 hours of any day to write, so I had to make the most of those 4 hours.
How many TV pilots have you written?
SOUTHBANK is my first attempt at writing a pilot script, so to have it win is the best encouragement I can think of. I have two or three other series outlined and I’m in the process of writing a new pilot, right now, based on a proof-of-concept short film script that I want to develop. I’m also interested in diving into the hour-long format, something I can really flex my writer muscles on. It’s a great time for the long form drama, and while I’ve worked mainly on feature film screenplays, I’ve started to gravitate more to tv, as it allows for more depth and exploration of character and subject matter.
What gave you the inspiration for this Pilot Script? How long did it take to write?
The idea for the script came, like most good ideas, from real life. A few years ago, I received an email out of the blue from Facebook that I had been made somebody’s ‘Legacy Contact’, a term I’d never heard of. And so, when I looked it up, I realised that this person had chosen me to be in charge of their social media account, if and when they passed away. I was surprised mainly by the fact that I hadn’t been asked, they simply assumed that I would take on that responsibility, but also, I was taken by how 21st century an idea this is, and it felt like an interesting hook for a story. What if you were made the Legacy Contact for someone you had forgotten about? Someone you had always seen as a casual acquaintance, or, in the case of the plot of SOUTHBANK, a relationship that had only lasted a few months, many years ago, that you barely remembered. It’s rare to find a hook that doesn’t feel familiar, that feels like hasn’t been done before, so I decided I had to get it written before anybody else did and the main bulk of the writing took about two months, followed by constant tinkering to get the structure right. That was something I realised very quickly about writing for tv, over writing for film. Structure has to be tight, you have to keep moving forward quickly, as an audience isn’t going to stick around if they aren’t engaged. Unlike a movie theatre, where you have to get up and leave, you can simply click a button and skip channels.
What do you enjoy most about writing?
It’s like therapy and I have always loved the fact that I can take any issues or subjects that I want to explore, and use writing as a means to do that, creating characters that I can make conduits for my own concerns or my own passions. I often joke that my characters lead a far richer life than I do, as writing is a very lonely, solitude-based profession, but the rewards of seeing any of my work being enjoyed by an audience, or hearing that somebody related to my work in some way, is all the validation that I could ask for. I write with the audience in mind, I write to find those relatable elements, as they allow you to take your story anywhere you can imagine.
What do you struggle with the most?
Imposter syndrome. It’s something that never goes away. Every morning, I sit down at the laptop and stare at the blank screen and get that immediate sense of dread, that feeling that my voice isn’t good enough, or that I have nothing to say that anybody will resonate with. But you have to use that as fuel, as a means to push forward. I like to take a negative and shape it into a positive. Like anything in life, writing is a series of problems, and every problem has a solution.
How do you feel that the film industry embraces new writing talent?
It feels like a double-edged sword. Especially with the streaming services that now dominate, there feels like a crying out for new writers all the time, and yet the accessibility to get your foot in the door simply isn’t there. Unless you have a track record, work produced or representation, it’s incredibly difficult, and even with one of those three elements there is still no guarantee. But there are a number of facilities for new writers, that aim to help get their work on the desks of the right people (Shore Scripts is a great example of this) and the industry has changed so much over only the last five years, that the key, it seems, is to simply try to keep up.
How did you feel when your script placed as a quarterfinalist, then semi-finalist and then ultimately as one of our winners?
I have been submitting to Shore for the past ten years and had placed as finalist or semi-finalist a few times (my feature screenplay MORGAN’S WAKE was a top 5 finalist two years ago). But SOUTHBANK being my first attempt at writing for TV, I was just delighted to be a quarterfinalist. It meant that the script, at the very least, worked. But receiving the news that I had progressed to Semi-finalist felt like the pinnacle. I was sure, given the other brilliant writers I saw in the same placement in my category, that this was as far as it would go, and I was more than happy with that. Receiving the email that I had won the Grand Prize, however, was a little surreal, and it took a few days to sink in that I had finally done it. It is a huge opportunity, I know it is, and I am nothing but grateful and encouraged to keep working hard, to make sure the win wasn’t for nothing.
How did you hear about Shore Scripts?
I heard about Shore Scripts through a colleague who suggested I take a look at screenwriting competitions as a means to up my profile a little, and what stood out for me was that the prizes were actually of real value to anybody looking to have a career as a screenwriter. There are a lot of screenwriting competitions out there, but very few offer the kind of help that can get a writer’s work into the hands of the right people, the way this one does.
What goals do you have for this script and your future career?
My goals are to get SOUTHBANK into a place with a production company where it can start being developed. I always envisaged writing every episode of (at least) the first series myself, much as Andy Wolton has managed to do with his show Trying. I have the entire series mapped out, and I know where I want the whole thing to end, so it would be incredibly exciting to move beyond the pilot, into the real meat of the narrative.
I would also love to find representation off the back of my work, to have the right people working with me to shape the future of my career. I’ve always aspired to write for film AND tv, and I have just as many feature film specs and treatments, as I do ideas for new shows. I’m a storyteller, I don’t want to be pigeonholed, and I want to try my hand at every genre going, as long as I can come up with a great story. I’m not sure there will ever be enough time to tell all the stories that are waiting inside my head, but I would welcome the opportunity.
Basically, I want William Goldman’s career!
What advice do you have for upcoming screenwriters?
It sounds cliche, but I always tell them to never give up. I graduated from film school 23
years ago, and it took 2 decades to get my work read by the right people and get my first option, but I never stopped working towards doing this for a living, and I consider it a blessing that I had those 20 years to hone my craft. The writing is much better for it.
SECOND PLACE WINNER – Kate McCoid & Ben Hyland – BUMP
What first got you interested in screenwriting? When did you start writing?
We’ve both been obsessed with cinema, TV and as a result, storytelling from a young age. We wrote separately for several years on short film scripts and have progressed onto longer form projects like TV Pilots and feature films. Our collaborative writing partnership came later.
Is there anything you’d like to share about your writing routine? How do you find time to write?
We have quite conflicting schedules so we have workarounds. Bouncing ideas on WhatsApp or adding notes on a shared online document. Writing for us isn’t simply the process of opening up the scriptwriting software and getting words down. It’s a process of finding different ways to plan, build storylines, and develop characters. We find that this way, the writing part comes much easier and it’s less time-consuming because the script is essentially already written across multiple documents. We’re just taking those jigsaw pieces and making a beautiful picture.
How many TV pilots have you written?
As a team we’re very new. Bump was the first pilot that we’ve written together. We have two pilots with series outlines written and a third pilot in development. What gave you the inspiration for this Pilot Script? How long did it take to write? The initial concept came from Kate and we’d been bouncing around characters and story beats for a few months. The writing process for the pilot itself was super quick. Largely because of all of the conversations that built up to opening any scriptwriting software. We felt like we’d already written it through our conversations so it only took around a week for an initial draft. Then of course tinkering and finessing over several weeks thereafter.
What do you enjoy most about writing?
For us, it’s writing interesting characters and putting them in impossible situations and seeing how they react. Especially the tone we try to navigate with drama and humour makes writing such a fun experience. Getting that balance right is walking a very fine tightrope and it’s a real buzz when it goes well. Of course, when writing comedy, having a writing partner is a joy. Can we make one another laugh? It’s quick and punchy and we can be nimble with new ideas.
What do you struggle with the most?
The reality of writing in a partnership is that both of us need to be fully invested in a concept. We both feel like we need to be as excited as the other with new projects/ideas. At this moment in time we’re looking for a new project and pitching each other ideas until we find one that sticks.
How do you feel that the film industry embraces new writing talent?
Time will tell. We’ve perhaps entered the industry at one of the most difficult times in modern history but we’re embracing new connections and enjoying the process of meeting new people.
How did you feel when your script placed as a quarterfinalist, then semi-finalist and then ultimately as one of our winners?
QF – elated. Semi Final – ecstatic. Winner – WTF.
How did you hear about Shore Scripts?
We honestly cannot remember but we’re ‘shore’ glad we found it. Apologies for that.
What goals do you have for this script and your future career? What advice do you have for upcoming screenwriters?
The pilot has already given us some attention and meetings in the UK and with the help of the Shore team we’ll hopefully have some meetings in the US. We’re gonna take advantage of every opportunity that comes our way. Our advice would be to just write. It’s the only thing you have complete control over at this stage of your career. Keep an open mind and say yes to opportunities that come your way. Embrace your uniqueness. Write stories that keep you awake at night.
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