Scriptwriting Workshop for Beginners with Stephen Walsh

Course Summary:

Participants will be introduced to the basic building-blocks of story and script, which they will then use to complete a short screenplay of their own over the course of the eight weeks. The course will be conducted in a conversational, workshop format, with participants strongly encouraged to offer feedback on each other’s works-in-progress as they develop their own approach to telling their own stories and writing their own scripts.

Course Outline:

• Week 1: General introduction. What is a script?
• Week 2: Finding stories from which to create scripts.
• Week 3: Workshopping the ideas generated by the participants.
• Week 4: Thinking visually.
• Week 5: Story structure.
• Week 6: Characterisation and dialogue.
• Week 7: Editing and second drafts.
• Week 8: Conclusion. Reading the drafts created in the class. Planning the next stage of the participants’ writing journey.

Course Outcomes:

By the end of the eight weeks, participants will have a working knowledge of the basic toolkit of writing for the screen. They will also have developed and written a short screenplay.

Stephen Walsh has written for film, television and comics (with one or two digressions into theatre along the way). His work has encompassed both fiction , How Harry Became a Tree, starring Colm Meaney and Cillian Murphy) and documentary Patrick Kavanagh, No Man’s Fool. He has taught screenwriting classes and conducted script workshops at Irish Writers Centre, Filmbase, Trinity College in Dublin and Cartoon Saloon in Kilkenny.