Stories from screenwriting - Part One
You couldn't write it...
It’s been six years since I closed Final Draft (industry-standard screenwriting software) to take a break from screenwriting. In that time, I’ve worked with teenagers in high school and qualified as a somatic life coach, always intending to go back to writing scripts. But now I’m not so sure.
My screenwriting journey, like so many things in life, began by accident.
Writing stories was a dream of mine from childhood. I used to create comics for my sisters, each one a cliff-hanger serial — typically a girl (with a cruel stepmother )who longed to be a ballerina — influenced by the stories I devoured in Twinkle, “the picture paper specially for little girls”.
Cinema was a rare treat in those days: my sisters and I laughing our way through The Jungle Book and Mary Poppins, and sobbing through Doctor Zhivago and Gone with the Wind. At college, thrillers and horror films left me too scared to walk home. Yet it never occurred to me that someone actually wrote these stories — and it certainly never crossed my mind that one day I might write a film myself.
I studied history for the love of the subject, not with any carefully plotted career ambition in mind. Once my children started school, however, the question of what to do next began to loom. So when I spotted a small article in the local paper about a film company looking for volunteers, it caught my eye. It was out of character for me to act on impulse, but I did. I picked up the phone.
From then on, I said yes to everything — not out of strategy, but out of sheer excitement. One minute I’d be doing the school run; the next I’d be answering calls about auditions or opening emails from actors whose names I recognised. Scripts appeared on the kitchen table, disappeared into bags, then re-emerged again. I’d step into a borrowed office space where people spoke seriously about casting and finance, then step back out into a town where, still, not much seemed to happen at all.
I worked for free because it didn’t feel like work. It felt like being allowed into a world I hadn’t known existed — one where ideas were currency, and where something, just possibly, might get made.
One day, the director confided that he wanted to develop a new idea — a story built on the premise that Hitler had survived the Second World War. Luckily for me, this was a period I’d studied in depth, and I offered my research skills. From there, I helped develop the story, sat in on producer meetings, and soaked up everything I could. When that phase ended, we agreed that he would write the screenplay, while I wrote the same story as a novel.
The screenplay was picked up by an A-list UK producer — and later dropped. It attracted interest from an A-list Hollywood actor for the lead role, who then signed on to another film. I mention this not to name-drop, but to give a sense of the excitement. Eventually, after many false starts, the verdict came back: it simply wasn’t the right moment for either the book or the film.
Hitler, it turned out, was not selling that year.
So far, so disappointing. Except that the good news was I now had a screenwriting agent, a publishing agent, and a commission to co-write another script. So far, so easy, it seemed.
We set off for Cannes on a bright sunny day, jittery with excitement, singing along to Tiny Dancer on the car CD player. We didn’t care that we had nowhere to stay, arriving in Nice confident we’d find somewhere, even if the official line was that Cannes was completely, utterly, not a bed to be had, fully booked. We found the sweetest little hotel in Juan-les-Pins, with lemons growing in the patio garden where we ate croissants for breakfast.
Over the days of the festival, we networked, walking for miles, handing out copies of the script, mingling on the Croisette and squinting at parties on super-yachts while dipping our toes — literally and metaphorically — in the water. We watched glamorous creatures float by as we lugged our heavy pile of bound 120-page scripts up endless hotel stairs, into top-floor meeting rooms and down into basements, meeting anyone willing to meet us.
Exhausted by warm smiles and endless conversations, we headed home.
And waited.
We waited.
We followed up.
We heard nothing. Not one reply. Not even from the unctuous man from the Playboy Channel who held my gaze — and my hand — a moment too long as he assured me he’d read the script on the flight home.
Perhaps it should have been an omen. But what can I say? “Do what you love, and it won’t feel like work,” goes the adage. And we were doing what we loved.
I was now a co-writer, and the learning curve was steep. My fellow writer brought years of experience as a writer, actor, and director. My contribution lay in historical research and an enthusiasm that sometimes bordered on obsessive. I discovered that my organisational instincts — keeping meetings and deadlines from slipping by — were rarer, and more valuable, than I’d realised.
Looking back, I think I brought an innocence to the process. Like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes, I sometimes pointed out things that felt obvious to me but went unsaid by others. These were early days, and I was still living the small miracle of being paid to write, pinching myself that this was happening at all.
And yet.
At the time, I didn’t quite have the language for what I was beginning to notice — only a growing sense that the enthusiasm offered at the start of a project didn’t always match what followed. That momentum had a habit of stalling. That excitement was abundant, while certainty was not.
I remained hopeful. Still convinced that persistence and good work would count for something. But somewhere between the glamour and the waiting, a harder truth was beginning to take shape — one I wasn’t yet ready to name.
Namely, that the whole system was rigged against writers.
In Part Two, I’ll write about what it’s really like to work inside the screenwriting industry, why the odds are stacked the way they are, and what eventually led me me to take a break. I’ll link it here once it’s published.
I’m Carole. I’m a somatic life coach and a writer, currently working on my first novel If you’d like to follow my progress yu can do so in My Novel Year