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Fading In
Hell Is
other writers
By Andy Conway
I feel almost embarrassed to confess this. But I used to I’d have been the most popular person in the city, but a screenwriter?
hate other writers. Forget about it.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. Jealousy is an emotion many writers So it was great to be back at Cheltenham last month to catch up
are all too familiar with. It comes with the essential insecurity of with screenwriter friends I’d made last year, several of whom I now
the job. Other writers were always a personal affront to me. I hated share mutual feedback duties with. We support each other as
their successes, revelled in their setbacks. writers and, perhaps more importantly, have a laugh together.
Becoming a screenwriter forced me to get out there and network. Perhaps the most special moment came when I interviewed Barbara
I made friends with directors, producers—people who would be Machin for my podcast. Writer, producer, showrunner, she created
useful. But never other screenwriters. the hit TV series Waking the Dead and is now one of the major
players in UK television drama. Her keynote speech on the first
And then it all changed. morning of the festival was a rousing rallying cry, and I was
desperate to bag an interview with her. We tried for two days to
I got an invite from Shooting People to run their Screenwriters’ find a half hour and kept being bumped again and again. There
Network bulletin and almost overnight found myself talking to was literally not a minute of her day that wasn’t accounted for.
ten thousand screenwriters every weekday. Not ideal territory for a
literary misanthrope. The special moment wasn’t the fact that we managed to find thirty
minutes to talk, but what happened after our interview was in the
And then I teamed up with the Cheltenham Screenwriters’ Festival can. I expected her to rush off to her next engagement. Her mobile
last year and found myself becoming its unofficial cheerleader. phone was already ringing with people trying to find out where
Suddenly it seemed terribly important that we screenwriters had a she’d got to. But she ignored it and asked about me and my own
focus for ourselves as a community. writing. She didn’t have to. There were far more important people
to talk to. But she is obviously a writer for whom Hell is anything
So there I was, with five hundred other people, all of whom were but other writers.
either screenwriters or people who wanted to meet screenwriters.
And I felt stronger as a screenwriter for being in such company. And that’s what it’s all about. As screenwriters, we exist in an
Cheltenham is the only festival in the UK devoted to screenwriting industry that largely sees us as an inconvenient necessity, that treats
and it has made us look at our career and for the first time feel us for the most part like shit. If we don’t support each other as
professional about it. writers, then there’s no way we’ll ever change that and get the
respect we deserve from the rest of the industry.
It was telling that after Cheltenham last year, I went to the
Edinburgh Film Festival and quickly realised that no one there God, maybe even one day people at the Edinburgh Film Festival will
gave a flying fuck whether I lived or died. If I were a distributor, think a screenwriter is someone worth talking to. Imagine that. n
80 By Filmmakers. For Filmmakers.
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