The Ravenglass Eye

Ravenglass Eye is part love story of Cumbria and its people, and part horror of what lurks deep within us all. Edie is a Londoner relocated to Ravenglass due to her grandfather’s love letters to her grandmother. Each part of the book is driven by these letters and it’s a good device to link love in the past to the anger of the present.

It’s a slow starter of a book and I wondered where Tom Fletcher was leading me. We had nice descriptions of everyday life in a country pub interjected with a curious animal sacrifice. None of it appeared to be connected at first. Then it hits with a bang as Fletcher twists and weaves the plot and its characters in many dark directions. We have bigoted Little Englanders, immigrants trying to work hard to be accepted and the frictions that certain tabloids stoke between these two groups. It’s not long before murder and the supernatural take us on a terrifying ride through the mountains of the Lake District.

Fletcher builds the tension throughout the book with skill. Edie and the Candle, her otherworldly guide, have a battle of wills. The economic and political frictions tear people apart. It also examines how the isolation of living in a place like Ravenglass causes depression and an austerity of love. This is all set to the backdrop of the notorious Sellafield nuclear plant and the Eskdale weapons testing centre, and the dark expanse of the Irish Sea that stretches out of that coast.

Of course being a Tom Fletcher book we are treated to some fine supernatural horror. The Candle has plans for our world and Edie in her craving to fulfill her potential opens up a doorway to a place darker than Hell. This conflict between good and evil ramps the horror in the final third of the novel.

 It’s metaphysical, Dantesque description of evil aboard are surreal and beautiful to read. Yes it’s bloodcurdling as hell and yes it’s a very dark section of the book. But this jump from a James Herbert style English country horror to cinematic brutality akin to Pasolini is a great asset and Fletcher’s forte.

Buy ‘The Ravenglass Eye’ if you love horror and are prepared to hitch a ride from a cosy English rose garden to the Inferno.

Ravenglass Eye by Tom Fletcher is published by Jo Fletcher Books.

Purchase 'The Ravenglass Eye' at Amazon UK.

Purchase 'The Ravenglass Eye at Amazon USA.

When Good Kids Go Bad. 'Let's Play Games'.

My second story to feature in 10 Days of Madness 'Let's Play Games' is definitely inspired by a book that rocked me in my teen years. Mendal Johnson’s Let’s Go Play at the Adams’. If you've never read the book I urge you to give it a go. It speaks of something utterly dark and repulsive hidden inside the human psyche. It’s something that can escape so easily if the planets of insanity align just the right way.

Of course the cruelty and shock value in Johnson’s 1974 horror novel relies on the people inflicting the violence being children. It's a taboo subject to use a child that becomes a killer in fiction, we've all witnessed the horrific legacy of such cases in reality. Of course the book is based on real life events. It loosely taps into the murder case of Silvia Likens as a basis for the escalating violence and insanity. Jack Ketchum also used the Likens case as the base for his equally disturbing novel, ‘The Girl Next Door’.

Ever since I read Let’s Go Play at the Adams when I was a thirteen year old kid it’s compelled me to investigate the dark nature of such fiction. I must admit I sneaked the book from my brother’s bedside cabinet and put it back after reading a few pages. It wasn't until I was sixteen that I finally found the nerve to read the novel to the end.

While the new millennium brought torture porn to our screens nothing really came close to Johnson’s novel. It’s not about the horrific and debasing events but more about the sliding of man into monster; or in this case children into chilling killers. Other cinematic comparisons may include the French thriller ‘Ils’, Michael Haneke’s 1997 'Funny Games' or even 'Martyrs'.

I have an idea for a novel, or certainly a novella on the back-burner that touches on this theme. Unfortunately I've never found the nerve to sit down and write it. Maybe one day and hopefully soon now that my short tale 'Let’s Play Games' is out there in the big bad world for all to see.

The Thief of Hunger and Other Tales.

Did you hear the one about the mermaid and the crazy genius inventor? No? Well you can today if you pop over to Chris Allinotte’s ‘Leaky Pencil’ and read my story ‘The Thief of Hunger’ for free. It’s part of the continuing Days of Madness that Chris has hosted for the past three years.

This time around Chris has pushed it up to ten days, which includes twenty short tales based on the theme of  frenzy. We've already been treated to seven fantastic and varied tales. With three more today and the rest to follow each day this week there's a lot of quality writing to keep you entertained through this wintry springtime. 

There’s something for every reader too. Check out Richard Godwin’s extreme piece ‘Saturation Point’, Benjamin Sobieck’s haunting ‘EVP’, Angel Zapata’s twisting ‘The Frantic and the Dead’ for example. While my mermaid tale isn't exactly horror, it is a chilling fantasy and quite bizarre. In contrast my upcoming story on Friday, ‘Let’s Play Game’s’ is a brutal violent slice of horror.

"Their tails flicking in curls, shimmering like silver dollar coins dropped into a wishing well". The Thief of Hunger.

Along with ‘The Thief of Hunger’ today, we are also treated to the return of Donald Jacob Uitvlugt with, ‘Trick or Treat’ and ‘A Mythical and Astonishing Woman’ by J. J. Steinfeld.

Please read those and all the other great stories while you can. Because as soon as '10 Days of Madness' is over all stories will be compiled and sold as an anthology. 

Another Notch In The Belt.

Lily Childs Prediction has nested in two new internet trees since she let it fly free. I was lucky enough to win there a couple of times and once at Phil Ambler’s place. Last week I decided to pay a visit to Colleen Foley’s new site and I'm glad I did. My drabble titled ‘The Karmic Wheel’ took the top spot.

Decanted, notch and straddle were the words provided to include in the 100 word story. An image of a new belt notch being dug into leather popped into my head. The tale of desperation grew from there.


I've entered a few of these challenges in the past and while the stories often remain as hundred word vignettes, a couple have grown into full length stories. Even when they are abandoned the exercise always wrenches open the idea gates inside my head. For that alone I value them as a worthwhile challenge.



Here's my hundred word winning entry. 

The Karmic Wheel

Alfie stabbed another notch in his belt with the corkscrew. He was losing weight faster than a supermodel passing the Hall of Mirrors.

He tossed a bundle of oily notes at the dwarf and straddled the Ferris car. Ten languid turns before screaming girls and brave boyfriends ran dancing to the calliope.

He climbed out of the wheel at the top, threw up his belt and pulled it around his neck. One more spin for luck. His life decanted in turns; violence, drinking, unfaithfulness, losing his son.

Then the cancer.

What goes around comes around. Alfie reckoned that was fair.

The Haunted Book

The Haunted Book by Jeremy Dyson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book delivered more than I had expected. It presents itself as a portmanteau connecting stories based around the frame of Dyson collaborating with a local journalist to assemble his spooky column into a book.

It's quite an effective conceit. The idea of ready recorded stories needing to be qualified by a journey around haunted Britain is a mouth watering prospect. The only problem is the framing device disappears halfway through the book and is never really explained.

Not that it mattered much because the second half of the collection is based on an found tome full of old ghost stories. I really enjoyed these. It's a mix between Aickman and James.

I won't list my favourite stories in case it leads to spoilers. One thing I will say is I enjoyed every single one of them. Yes of course some more than others. The only downfall was the fading of the framing structure which sent me reading back to see if I'd missed a few pages.

If you loved ghost stories as a kid or read The Mysterious World books like me then you will appreciate this book. It's clear Dyson has a great love of the supernatural tale and it really shines though.

I give it four stars but in reality It's a four and a half.


Buy The Haunted Book on Amazon
View all my reviews

From Bates to Babes: The Little Deaths Part 2.

In Part One we examined the symbolic use of sex as creation and death as destruction in genre cinema. In the case of Norman Bates it is both, a cyclic journey without end. With the Italian movement of Giallo, which took its cue directly from ‘Psycho’, things got a little more blurred. Sex and death represented beauty. If art is destruction as well as creation Giallo films should have been the masterpiece, or at least a masterclass in the form. The films of Mario Bava, Sergio Martino and the Italian movement’s most famous son, Dario Argento, looked at murder as creation, as painting and ballet, (just look at 2010’s ‘Black Swan’ to see the influences). Though a lot of these films are rightly criticised today, a large number of them were pretentious or plodding, they gave birth to something that would change horror cinema forever.

Slasher films were Norman Bates mainlining cocaine straight to the brain. A fresh young director called Wes Craven took the noir of Giallo, Hitchcock’s suspense, 1950’s nuclear paranoia and rolled them up into a great ball of outrageous cinema. Though some would argue Michael Powell’s 1960 masterpiece ‘Peeping Tom’ owns that honour. Others may even tell you it’s ‘ThirteenWomen’ from 1932. Though I suspect much of the hype of the latter is largely due to the Hollywoodland suicide of Peg Entwistle. For me personally Craven’s debut film, ‘The Last House on the Left’ is the first true slasher. It’s widely known for echoing Bergman’s 1960 brutal film, ‘The Virgin Spring’ staring horror stalwart Max von Sydow.

Where films like Aregnto’s 1970 work, ‘Bird with the Crystal Plumage’ looks at murder as social problem curable by precise investigation, ‘The Last House on the Left’ shows it for all its grainy brutality. Craven’s debut was released in the same year as the best example of Giallo.  Fulci’s 1972 magnum opus, ‘Don'tTorture a Duckling’ dealt with death and sex as serious themes, setting the template for future Giallo, though none exceeded it.

It wasn’t long before the mystery thriller elements of Giallo and the nightmarish realism of Wes Craven were picked up and twisted. Horror is often like Frankenstein’s monster sat at the lake edge of genre with an innocent little girl; it takes the pure and squeezes the life out of it until it flails into a lifeless body.

The slasher genre had some great films. ‘Friday the 13^th’, ‘Halloween’ and Wes Craven’s other great gift to the genre to that point, ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ disturbed a generation. But a whole batch of Cannibal films, video nasties and anything else the video man had hidden under the counter in faux classic book cases was simply awful. Don’t get me wrong I love those films. They have a soft spot in my heart, even the really bad ones. But the slasher genre for all its faults and all it beautiful glories gave us something unsettling. It gave us a puritanical view and a moral code that horror hadn't really seen before.

Of course we always had the ‘Man versus God’ or ‘Man versus Nature’ films. Hell, we even had Norman Bates style prudeness that sex out of marriage was punishable with death. But with the idea that the college kids smoking a bit of pot, having a few beers, or God forbid getting laid, would all end up hacked up or nailed to a cupboard door was a bit too much. It was as though they took all those puritanical anti-fun propaganda films of the 1930s and tacked them on to horror. Horror became ‘Reefer Madness’ style public information films against all fun.

It took the godfather himself, Wes Craven, to shake things up yet again. Just when his greatest monster Freddie Kruger was becoming a cartoon caricature, Wes kicked horror and the slasher sub-genre he’d been so pivotal in creating into the furnace in the basement. He held up a mirror to the genre and broke the unwritten rule; he made fun of the things supposedly horrific. He not only held up that mirror, mostly and bravely at himself, he smashed the template so nobody could use it again.

While 1996’s ‘Scream’ was another leap in horror it was still obsessed with one aspect of the very origins. It had sexy young women in almost every scene. This was horror for boys to drool over while their girlfriends gripped their shoulders as Ghost Face leapt from hidden places. Sadly the ‘Scream’ franchise and its little sister ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ series fell into the same state as ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ and all the other slasher overloads. Soft core, soft focus and sexualisation seem to be its greatest legacy.

In films like the ‘Final Destination’ series and all the way up to ‘Piranha 3DD’ it’s all about the babes and less about the blood. If you look hard enough you’ll find clever films with great scares, terrifying monsters and more than a splattering of sex either viscerally or psychologically. ‘Hellraiser’, ‘Silence of the Lambs’, ‘The Exorcist’, ‘The Evil Dead’, ‘Videodrome’, Polanski’s ‘Apartment Trilogy’, ‘Martin’, ‘The Devils’, Alien (the whole film is about sex, birth and death), and David Cronenberg's entire back catalogue up to 2002’s ‘Spiders’ and so many more.

Sex and Death Today.

These days you’ll find little thread between sex and death at the cinema. Now and again a film will pop up that reminds you of Giallo, 2009’s ‘Amer’ for example. You’ll stumble on a sexy vampire flick, 2011’s ‘We Are the Night’ and 2012’s ‘The Moth Diaries’ are two great examples. Slashers however have become teenage cartoons, yet I still hold out hope for an original take on the much maligned sub-genre.

So sex and death is the same thing in horror it seems. Or different parts of the same beast. Much like in life I guess. Remember that beautiful French phrase, La petite mort, or The Little Death I spoke of in Part One? It's a metaphor for an orgasm. So you see, with sex we will always envisage the shadow of death lurking behind the bedposts.

   And for me at least, that’s what gives horror its real beauty.

The Little Deaths.

All this sex is killing me.

If you ask people to explain the subtext of horror most would reply the genre is a metaphor for death. Or to be more precise, the preparation of death. I mean it’s obvious isn't it? All that stabbing and hacking. All the falling from roller-coasters and being chased by masked men wielding blood soaked chainsaws.

Wait, let’s stop a minute and pull away for a moment and think about this. Yes murder is obviously about the stalking reaper lurking in our shadows, just as torture is about the stresses and pains of life. But what place does sex have in all of this horror business? Well the French have a nice little euphemism for orgasm, La petite mort, or the little death. Sex and death may not be obvious bedfellows, but they never seem too far apart.

So let me spin the TV in your direction and show you some examples of what I think it all means, or at least why I think it’s there in the first place. You may be surprised, you may be shocked, but I guess you’ll just think I'm as mad as old Leatherface.

"The art of creation is older than the art of killing." Edward Koch

From the very origins of horror cinema the themes have included pursuit and murder of beautiful women. Not to mention recreation. In the 1910 version of ‘Frankenstein’ we first see man as God. The devilish doctor creates life without needing to bother with all that messy sex business. No, he prefers stitching together a jigsaw of stolen cadavers that have been marinating in amniotic fluids. Nice work if you can get it.What about ‘The Island of Lost Souls’, ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, ‘The Mummy’ and the constantly thinning ‘Frankenstein’ franchise? See a pattern emerging? This is about science creating life, or reanimating it at least. But there’s a problem in all of these, they all go horribly wrong. In the pursuit of scientific creation without sex we end with a hell of lot of death. And this is only horror up to the 1930’s!

Okay let’s jump forward a few decades. The 1950s and ‘60s continued the roll out of the tired tropes and dull franchises. We did see the emergence of the creature feature that the paranoia of falling A-bombs produced. Dracula was still hanging around and zombies still did their soft shoe shuffle. But these were remnants of a horror past. Their identities now represented penetration and infection.

Steve and Norma accidently built a BBQ and ate burgers as the bombs fell.

Yet something stirred beneath the nuclear paranoia and drug induced Cultural 

Revolution. The master himself, Alfred Hitchcock brought horror to the mainstream in the first year of the flower power decade. He didn't use monsters, zombies or vampires; though in many ways Norman Bates was all of these things. With the cinematic release of ‘Psycho’ horror became not only mainstream but intelligent. Of course it still had the jumps and scares to make your terrified date hold you close in fear. It also had the power to keep you awake long after the salty taste had faded from your tongue that night. From the popcorn I mean. Go clean your dirty minds.

Tall Tales.

He's behind you.

I went into this film expecting some lame Slender Man cautionary folk tale. It didn't disappoint, or rather it did because that’s exactly how it set up its stall. It was a tick box yard sale of horror cliché. Spread out on the previously used table we found a desperate small town, dark woods and an assortment of inhabitants clinging to the edges of society. Throw in a group of missing children, a bogeyman and box them up ready to store in the shadows of the damp garage at the back of your mind.

Then it did something that’s lacking too much in genre films these days. It surprised me. It didn't hang around and shock me like a cheap gag (stop being paranoid ‘Cabin in the Woods’ I don’t mean you) I do but don’t tell it. It wasn't some inward meta-analysis or tacked on twist. It was the essence of urban legend.

No, not Cab in the woods.

It achieved something films like ‘Cabin in the Woods’ tried and failed to do, (go back asleep Cabin we mean a different film) we don’t mean a different film. It found the root of horror. Not the root of horror films, which was done to perfection in the first ‘Scream’ film, it poked around for the horrors that lurk in the recesses of our minds. It examined our ideals and drove a shovel deep into our morally flawed society. It did this to discover where these scary tales are born.

‘The Tall Man’ isn't a perfect film; it’s not even a perfect horror film. In fact fans of Pascal Laugier's previous horror masterpiece, 'Martyrs', may not agree with his new approach. It has some solid performances, notably Jessica Biel, and some genuinely scary scenes. It has a message about who we are and how we treat each other. All of which could explain why so many horror fans poured cans of hate on the film then exposed grinning faces in the sulphur light of struck matches. Yes I have just listed some of the same things that annoyed me about ‘Cabin in the Woods’. 

Stop! In the name of blood.

Yes okay I do mean you Cabin sorry. Now shut up and go fuck yourself, (by which I make a better sequel). So I can understand the hate. The same hate gore fans spat at Wes Craven’s ‘Scream’ for example. A lot of people feel horror should be straight, no tangents, no meta-trickery and certainly no intelligent observation of the real world. 

At first I thought ‘The Tall Man’ was a tedious horror and then I thought it wasn't horror at all. By the end I realised it’s the most chilling sort of horror film. It was one where all the stories originate, real life.

Blu-ray and DVD release 11 March 2013 UK
Blu-ray, DVD and Instant Play available now. USA

Lessons From The King

I've always been a big fan of Stephen King. So when he released a How-to book for writers at the start of the millennium I rushed out to buy it. Only it wasn't a How-To book at all. It was more a How-I-Do-It book with a memoir to boot.

At first I was a little disappointed at the casual almost conversational approach to 'On Writing'. Where were all the bullet list, the Dos and Don'ts block texts? It did't take me long to realise I was gaining more from this book from the shelfful of typical 'pointing finger do it this way or don't bother writing' books I had previously bought.

Many writers use this book as their Bible, even many none genre writers such is the insight to the craft. So here's a little infographic I found on the internet that has silted away some nuggets worth shining for your own writing life.

13 Lessons Learned From On Writing by Stephen King

Print it, pin it above your desk, tape it to your notebook or use it as your background wallpaper. Hell even wallpaper your bedroom with it if you want. Or read it and let it sink in. Either way I'm sure you'll find something worth taking from the King of Horror.

Street of Crocodiles.

Street of Crocodiles is a puppet film that starts with a human, a caretaker of a lecture hall. His only contribution is to wind up the puppet box and lean above it dropping his saliva into the dust of the marionette world bringing it to life. He’s God, the great caretaker, his spit the life force of the discarded toys. Inside we find a Heath Robinson labyrinthine world powered by cotton reels and corroded sentient screws. The puppet master snips a spindly man from his restrictive bonds allowing him to travel through the streets in search of a Victorian doll child that guides him with mirrored light. Once he's cut from his umbilical string his journey seems pointless, being born is the only reason he’s alive. There are no ultimate goals or destinations to reach. The world is mechanical and dark.

Conducting with needles.

Through dusted windows the labours of the subterranean puppet world are viewed, from engineers with golf ball bulb heads trying to revive light in others, to tailors stitching together raw slabs of liver and maps to make new men. Cartographers of the body, the routes fused with the marionettes yet the course is circulatory, the destination the departure point. A line of travel that traces only borders. These architects of demarcation scurry around with empty egg cup heads. Literally these are brainless geographical engineers dividing new bodies of land with yellow lines in place of green.

This short film doesn't have any obvious plot and at times it feels like the Quay Brothers simply wanted to construct a series of grotesque vignettes in the tradition of East European stop motion as a curiosity piece. But as a whole the feeling of despair, of being boxed in, in being reliant upon gods and masters who send us on journeys with only fractured reflections of reality to guide us feels like the world around us. The haunting sounds echoed throughout by Leszek Jankowski musical montage only heighten this sense of segregation and despair.

Lessons from the toy box?

Streets of Crocodiles is dusty and dirty. It’s unconnected even though every part of its world is joined together. It relies upon loose screws and hastily constructed maps of parchment stitched together to function. It could be about conflicts in the Middle East to the threat of fascism. It could be about hierarchy and class, politics and power. It may simply be about how humans exist on this boxed in planet we inhabit. I personal tend to think it’s the latter while whispering cautions about all the former possibilities. This short film could be viewed as an existentialist treatise or a siege horror. No matter how you look at it or what you take from it Street of Crocodiles will stay with you long after viewing, possibly into that workshop of horrors, your nightmares.

Eight Legged Creeps.

I'm an arachnophobe. That’s to say I'm terrified of spiders, I mean really terrified of the creepy monsters. I have a personal war against the critters that stretches back as far as I can remember. I've no idea where it came from or if indeed I was even born with the condition. Either way, if it has eight legs I’ll scream like a schoolgirl catching a glimpse of Justin Bieber and develop a heart rate that would beat Usain Bolt if it could strap on a pair of running shoes.

So why did I write a story about giant human eating spiders that invade our planet and seem almost impossible to kill? Good question and I have no real answer except one winter morning I saw frozen spider webs clinging to the rusty railings of our local church yard and had an idea. As a writer the ideas come and I have the choice of developing them or tossing them into the recycle bin at the back of my mind (collections now bi-weekly due to brain council budget cuts).

It’s not as though I considered it good therapy to tackle my fear of spiders. I have no desire to rid myself of the curse as the only effective method is aversion therapy with the damned things. In fact writing the story ‘Exit Bags’ for the May December Publications anthology ‘Spiders!’ only reinforced my fear. 

Yet for once the scuttling hairy backed ones did me a favour. I wrote what I consider to be a really good story that was bought and published. Yes I did feel itchy writing it. I felt scratches when editing it and I even saw black dots running along the floor of my dreams. But I like it and I hope you do too. So please check out my story ‘Exit Bags’ and the other twelve stories in this fine collection edited by the talented TW Brown. 

Buy Spiders! in paperback or Kindle version from Amazon UK 

Buy Spiders! in paperback or Kindle version from Amazon USA

The Well

The Well by Peter Labrow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of the most useful devices for any horror writer is the trap, or the closed room story. It's been done so many times and is still effective. Peter Labrow uses it in his debut novel with a clever twist. If I was reading a short story about two teenagers trapped in a well away from anybody they knew and no chance to escape I'd have licked my lips. But a whole novel about it? Well I was curious.

Obviously Peter’s gift for writing a multi-layered story ensured this was no single thread arc. The kids in the well was peg on which he hung some very interesting and well-crafted subplots. These took the novel into crime, horror, supernatural, domestic and historical avenues. All of which were balanced perfectly to keep the story ad momentum moving fast.

This is a thrill ride of a thriller and a heart racing horror. Witches, telepathic children, predators and ancient pagan curses all combine to build a story that will leave you with sore thumbs in this fast adrenaline filled page turner.

The only criticism I would point to is the dénouement could have been a lot leaner. But given the many strands that had to be tied up I can’t really see how else he could have written it. However that minor detail apart, this book kept my interest right until the final sentence.

If this is what Peter Labrow can do with a debut I can’t wait to read his future novels. 

Buy 'The Well'

USA Customers

View all my reviews

I Took the Long Way Home.

I like the idea of The Hero's Journey. I've read the Christopher Vogler book,

The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, I've read essays by Joseph Campell and I've hit so many websites talking about the structure that I feel like I've been on the journey myself.

Well of course I have, we all have. We've all had to overcome adversity, found love, lost love, battled our demons, taken a leap of faith and all the other aspects of Campell's monomyth theory. We do it in our personal lives and careers. We do it in our examination of ourselves when growing up, and if your'e over thirty, re-growing up. 

There is on thing about The Hero's Journey I could never really come to grips with however. It always felt too rigid to me. This may be the cause of it falling out of fashion in recent years. Though Hollywood still seems addicted to it. Well if it worked for everything from Star Wars to Harry Potter who can blame them?

I pull this lever, my jet-pack will takes me home.

I've structured stories using this plan then gone all native and pantster on my next piece of writing. I always felt like I needed to escape, to free my self from the bondage of the thing. The problem is I kind of accidentally structured the novel I'm writing using the Hero's Journey template. And it feel right. It feels like I'm writing a true novel, one that looks at all the half finished manuscripts in my drawer like they are delinquent children.

So how will I cope? Where will with this retraining structure take me?

Well these question have not only kept me awake but also forced me to abandon this novel several times. Then one sleepless night I had an epiphany. I look back now and realise it was simply an awaking to what everybody else already knew. Maybe I was so blocked in my anguish and fear of failing at yet another novel that it held back free thinking. But I reached the answer just in time.

I can continue with this template and adapt it. "What, did I hear that right?" Yes you did. I said I'm using a version of the Hero's Journey. I'm not adhering to the strict structure. If something needs adapting or changing to suit the story then I'll do that. I like the arc the Hero's Journey offers. I like the way it forces us to think about the characters and their personal arc too. But maybe I want things to be more organic while retaining that rainbow of the journey.

Coincidentally, or through synchronicity, I had a stab at writing a two page screenplay for a short film competition. While looking for tips to refresh me on the art I came across this Powerpoint presentation on Big Spaceship on how to write a screenplay that utilises the Hero's Journey, while expanding it for the good of the story.



It was exactly what I needed to read. I hope you like it too.

How to Write a Screenplay or Tell a Better Story

View more presentations from Victor Pineiro