The First Sift
We've now read the first ten pages of all of our 495 entries for the Writers Academy. As you can see, we all sit in a room together (Readers, my team and I) with "The Pile". It is a gruelling, nerve-wracking, but also hugely enjoyable three days. Thank you all the writers who entered for their brilliant imaginations, jokes, characters, heart-stopping moments and emotional hits.
We can't give individual feedback to every script that doesn't get through, but we do all compare notes at the end and try and get a sense of some general observations.
We always try and spot trends - but this year that was really heard. The scripts were more varied than they have ever been - which is encouraging. Some mini trends did emerge though: gambling, bullying, suicides, Taliban metaphors, kids gangs/street talk, graphic sex talk, characters called "ASBO" and MPs. Make whatever you want from that -we drew no sensible conclusions.
Unfortunately, there was a worrying lack of decent female lead characters, or indeed female characters overall. Why this should be noticeable less than in other years is disturbing.
Unlike previous years, when the theatre pieces have stood out as the most interesting creatively, there were many more really ambitious TV screenplay samples. Hurrah!
We now have 157 longlisted scripts - each of which will get two full reads from members of the Drama department. We will be shortlisting these down 30 at the beginning of July, so I'd better get reading.....
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