Wednesday, November 04, 2015

WRITING AND SELLING THRILLER SCREENPLAYS WITH LUCY V HAY

LUCY: "I haven’t seen one (a thriller screenplay) I’ve liked as much as this since JK sent me UNTITLED HITMAN THRILLER (aka REDEMPTION aka ASSASSIN) back in 2008. That’s a loooooong time and I’ve read a loooooot of these scripts in-between!!!"


Once I had regained consciousness and picked myself up off the floor I congratulated myself on a job well done and got on with the second draft. It's not easy to please Lucy so I was pretty ecstatic that she liked my spec thriller ELEVEN. But it wasn't by luck I got this response, or by accident, but by design.

You see in 2013 Lucy wrote a book called WRITING AND SELLING THRILLER SCREENPLAYS, published by Creative Essentials and I reviewed it for my blog just before Christmas (find the review here). So when I sat down to write my first spec screenplay in four years I decided to use the brilliant advice in Lucy's book and write a kick-ass thriller.

OK, so now you might be thinking if I followed her advice in the book of course she's going to like the resulting screenplay. The thing is everyone else who has read it, in its various drafts, has loved it too. This is because Lucy knows her stuff and her knowledge is not only born of watching thousands of hours of film and TV, but from her work as a reader over many years for both established and new writers. She knows what works and what doesn't.

To celebrate the completion of the final draft of ELEVEN, I've managed to get hold of a free ticket to Lucy's two day WRITING AND SELLING THRILLER SCREENPLAYS workshop at Ealing Studios on the 28th and 29th of November, which I'm going to give away to one lucky writer. All you have to do is Tweet me with your thriller longline as illustrated below:

@DomCarver 'Enter Longline Here' #comp

You have until 9 AM on Tuesday 10th November to get them in and the winner will be announced by midday. Any entries received after this time won't be counted, nor will entries not following the template above. My decision is final. So there!!!

Good luck everyone.

Happy writing!

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