Growing Your Idea: From Thought to Script with Paul Duane

Course Summary

This course is aimed at people who have some basic creative writing skills and are ready to try to turn an idea for a film into a detailed outline or script.

We will cover such things as interrogating your idea to make sure it has the right potential, creating your characters and conflicts, structuring the story so it doesn’t run out of steam, figuring out your ending and making sure it is organic with the story.

As Paul’s experience is with TV drama, feature drama and the horror genre, these areas are of particular interest.

Course Outline

We will focus on the discipline of taking a vague idea for a film and how it can be turned into a detailed and compelling piece of scriptwriting, and also how to tell if your idea might not be suitable for film before you waste too much time on it.

Each participant will have the opportunity to deliver a short description (300-500 words) of the project they intend to develop during the course.

Participants will be invited to update their work every week to share progress with the whole class and for detailed feedback from Paul.

Workshopping will take place in class week to week with individual written feedback at course end.

It is recommended that John Yorke’s book Into The Woods be read if possible, before beginning the course.

Course Outcomes

Participants will have learned to empower themselves to take their ideas and put them on paper in a disciplined and structured form. The main intent is that everyone will have a finished piece of writing by course end – even if it isn’t perfect, as long as it is finished, it can be rewritten and improved upon.

Booked out? To be added to the waiting list for this course, please email info@irishwriterscentre.ie.

Paul Duane has been making films for thirty years. In 2014 he was on Variety’s annual 10 Directors to Watch list.

His films, which include Barbaric Genius, Best Before Death, Natan and Welcome To The Dark Ages, have received Grierson & IFTA nominations and have screened at festivals such as Edinburgh, Telluride, Lumiére & Pordenone.

He also co-created the award-winning drama series Amber and Secret Diary of a Call Girl.

His most recent film is the folk-horror feature All You Need Is Death, and he is currently prepping his self-penned Irish horror film Para to shoot in 2026 with Finepoint Films (Kneecap) and XYZ Films (Mandy/The Raid).