It’s always good to enter a writing competition or two.   If you are the sort of writer who needs deadlines to produce their best work, then a competition gives you just that. Also, your work will be read and appraised by professional people and who knows, that tempting money prize could be yours at the end of it!

Final Draft; the script writing sofware folk, have announced their screen writing competition.   Opening this month and closing in June – plenty of time to get your opus in.  I think their website is worth a look too.

http://www.finaldraft.com/products-and-services/big-break/

Good luck!

I have started writing in a notepad again after years of going straight into Final Draft or celtx or the Amstrad from way back when. This is more to do with not wanting to carry my laptop around with me all the time but it has led to a reconnection with a style of writing.

Using a computer meant that I would always, always, always start a writing session by re-reading the previous sessions words. Writing on to a notepad instead relies much more on carrying a sense of what I’d written in the previous session into the new session. It has led to interesting transitions between scenes and moments in scenes. I used to write in a much more ‘cut/paste’ way where the challenge of having to connect scenes/moments led to a more poetic sensibility in the work. I would get an idea for a scene and then write it and not worry overly about where or how it might fit. Trying to ‘force’ it to fit led to the creative collisions which was good. Writing from Treatments and writing on a computer has resulted in less of this style of writing. I’m really enjoying it at the moment. I am not doing it exclusively but mixing and matching so when I transcribe the scene I then continue on the computer.

read this article about the difference between Pen and Computer.