"You break a story. You crack a story. You wrangle a story" Or in my case, you cower in the corner, loading a tranquilliser gun with shaking hands, as the story rampages around the place, trampling your roses... Seriously though, finding out the story is, for me, the hardest part of the process. I tend to start with a one page outline, write on the fly and then pull everything together in subsequent re-writes. But the one thing I am discovering as I trawl this blog, is that there is no one "right" way to write a script, but there are many many "wrong" ways to do so. This knowledge in itself, has proved tremendously helpful.

Lydia, I suspect all writers have all experienced 'cowering in the corner'... or wailing into the night... or beating head onto desktop. That's because story is finally an organic thing, it has a life and will of its own, a pulsing heart and a stirring soul. That's all great, of course... if we can tap into that vitality as it can vitalize our writing. But it's also one big reason why there is no right way to write. Stories resist objectification. Biopics are probably one of the hardest stories to write because people's lives do not generally fall into three acts, or have a definable number of plot points, or have themes that yell out at us. Well, stories are GENERALLY that way, too, at least they exist like that on some level. It's our choice, really, what type of story we shape. A thin one or a rich one, a superficial one or a multilayered one. The story is waiting there for us. It's up to us to go into it and... well... find the animals. So I suggest all of us, myself included, take a deep breath right now... set our jaw... fingers on keyboard... and dive into the story we're writing today, knowing the story is there. We just need to find it.