Vol 1 | Issue 25 | ISSN 2979-8744 (online)

HUGE thanks to Luke Lyon-Wall for looking after the newsletter last week , I can confirm there are no bumps or scratches! And I thoroughly enjoyed reading about Chekhov's grenade.

If you want to see me use Chekhov's Banana, do check out Heidi Dies – a script I developed with OutWrd and the amazing Dominika Scott-Jones earlier this year.

It is a truth universally known that in comedy, when a character walks towards a banana skin, they must slip on it.

A few weeks ago, I promised you a newsletter about something that had almost made me throw in the towel... and I had no idea that laying on what felt like my death bed these past two weeks would exacerbate that! So, here it is.

And, in true Helen fashion, since then I've had another revelation, done a script reading course, questioned several of my life choices and come out the other side with approximately 400 more questions than I started with.

So grab a cuppa.

Recently, I had an experience with an agent that left me feeling pretty shit.

I'm going to be careful here because I'm not interested in naming names or recounting private conversations. I also really don't want to become that person who has an industry meeting on Tuesday and writes about it on Wednesday.

But I do think there's something useful in what happened.

Fundamentally, I was presented with a choice where I felt I was being asked to put a commercial contract before a relationship.

And I chose the relationship.

Perhaps that's not the decision that will get me earning top dollar fastest. Perhaps another writer would have made a completely different choice. That's fine.

But I've spent years building relationships with people, I've helped people, people have helped me, I've tried to be useful, generous and decent while also slowly building a career. That work is really important to me.

And by work, I don't just mean the writing.

I knew what my boundary was and I stood behind it because I know the kind of person I want to be in this industry. And I am savvy enough to know how to manage that.

What bothered me afterwards was the feeling that my judgement hadn't really been trusted. I felt I'd been seen as a “new writer” and, therefore, perhaps as someone who didn't yet understand how these things worked.

There’s that industry misconception that new writers = young writers again.

I am a new writer in many respects: I don't have a broadcast credit and there are huge parts of this industry I'm still learning about.

But I'm not a new person.

I'm 41 years old. I've had jobs, careers even. I've raised children. I've worked with businesses and clients. I've negotiated. I've made difficult decisions. I've got things wrong. I've learned from them. I know myself reasonably well by now and I know what my values are.

Being new to the industry doesn't suddenly erase all of that. And I think that was what sat badly with me.

There was also an assumption that by not choosing one particular route, I'd chosen to go it alone. Those of you who've been reading this newsletter for a while can probably guess that isn't remotely true.

I have so many irons in so many fires I'm amazed I haven't burned the house down. I'm not doing this alone; as I keep saying, it takes a village.

Then came the gut punch… just as I was feeling fairly confident about trusting my own judgement, something else happened that made me question it.

Bugger.

I've spent the last few weeks doing The Script Factory's AMAZING script reading course, and it's been brilliant.

It's also made me wobble. Though not because I've suddenly realised I can't write. I know I can write; I've short films and commissions to support this.

The uncomfortable realisation has been much simpler: I need to spend more time on my work.

And that's not the first time I've had that note. Exactly one year ago at the Kay Mellor Lab, my mentor, Lisa Holdsworth told me to knuckle down and focus on the writing. And I rather arrogantly, thought I could do both.

Those of you who know me know I do a lot: I have my day job. I write. I teach. I read. I judge. I go to events. I do schemes and labs. I meet people. I write this newsletter. I work with other writers. I've become pretty good at finding synergy between all of those things so that one feeds another.

But have I always prioritised the actual writing enough in the way it needs prioritising.

Stay with me here because there's a revelation I plan to unpick before the year is out.

A few years ago, I heard agent Julian Friedmann speaking at London Screenwriters' Festival.

He said something along the lines of: if you're not reading 50 scripts a year, we don't want to know as an agent.

I've remembered that ever since and thought I understood what he meant.

Writers should read scripts. Obviously. Except I don't think I'd really understood why. I thought I understood that too!

Something Justine said during The Script Factory course finally made that penny drop for me...

There's a difference between learning how to write a script and being able to produce a script that makes somebody at a production company go: Holy fuck. Yes, yes, yes.

Your script can be good, have a great idea, your characters can work, the structure can work, be tonally right and be properly formatted. People can enjoy reading it. It can even place in competitions and get you onto schemes.

And it can still not be that script. The one that makes somebody want to pick up the phone.

And this is exactly the spot I and many, many other writers have found themselves in. Asking themselves WHY there is such inconsistency in the industry, WHY does a script work here but not there?

That's quite a sobering realisation when you've spent years learning how to write scripts.

And this, I think, is where the reading comes in. When you read enough scripts, particularly professional scripts, you're developing your understanding of what exceptional actually looks like on the page. You're calibrating your taste as much as emboldening the rules.

And if you don't know what brilliant looks like, how the hell are you supposed to recognise whether your own work is there yet?

We, as writers, must believe our work is good. If we don't believe in it, why should anyone else. But humility is something that I am continually reminded to have whenever I get feedback.

I can justify a note about character or structure, but I can only do that from one perspective. And that is of the writer. Not of the people who have to make it or schedule it or find money for it.

And believe me when I tell you I sincerely thought I was considering all of these perspectives already.

I've also come away from this Script Reading course with a much greater appreciation for professional script readers and editors. And I feel duty bound to be more careful about stating that I am a script editor. I am, yes, but I could only take a script so far with my limited production experience.

I swap scripts with other writers all the time. I value that enormously and I hope I always will. There are also places where you can pay £20, £30, £50 for a report, and that can absolutely have its place.

But there is something different about working with somebody who has spent years developing the craft and judgement to challenge your work properly. Someone who isn't afraid to pull it apart.

Someone who can see what you're trying to do, recognise where you're not quite achieving it and help you make the thing the best version of itself. That skill is astronomically valuable.

Which brings us to the slight problem.

Actually, two problems.

Good script editors and professional readers aren't cheap and there's a reason for that.

You're paying for someone's time, but you're also paying for the years they've spent developing the knowledge, craft and judgement that allows them to look at your script and tell you something useful about it.

I'd love to have every script professionally edited before I send it anywhere.

Can I afford to do that?

Nope.

And I suspect quite a lot of you can't either.

I've started to look at this a bit like going to the dentist. It's likely to be painful, you're probably going to come away feeling like you could have done better, that you should have gone sooner, its costs more than you expected, but is ultimately essential if you want to keep all your teeth.

So maybe I should try to find a way to book myself in for a check-up with a script one or twice a year.

This is the one I'm struggling with more.

Writing takes time.

Good writing takes more time.

Rewriting takes even more bloody time.

And lots of us are trying to find that time around a full-time job. Children. Parents. Caring responsibilities. Illness. Money. Travel. Houses that apparently need cleaning occasionally. All the other things involved in being an actual adult.

Even writers who are working professionally have their version of this.

If you're beavering away writing Casualty, EastEnders or Emmerdale, you're writing all day. You might finally have the money and the credit we emerging writers are desperately trying to get, but where does the energy come from to then develop your own thing?

Time and energy are finite.

Amazingly, some people do manage it. They find that zone, they protect the writing time, they find the money for the script editor, they get the work down and they make it brilliant.

I keep thinking about a saying I heard once: people from disadvantaged backgrounds have to work twice as hard as those who didn't.

But I need to park that, because just reading it makes me feel exhausted. And in certain cases, this is true. But I bet there are people reading this who don't consider themselves from a disadvantaged background who feel like they're up against it too.

We each have our own Everest.

To give my writing career what I need to I need to give up the day job.

But to have the creative headspace to do this, I need to pay the bills.

I am in the gap right between reality and my expectations. And this is where I need to start to compromise.

When I really thought about the amount of time and energy I'm putting into both of my careers, I had a fairly horrible thought.

Do I actually have the stamina for this?

Not resilience, that's entirely different. I've written about resilience before and I don't think that's my problem. I believe I can do this; I know I can do this. I can take rejection, I can get knocked back and get up again, I can think outside the box and work around barriers. I've proved that to myself enough times now.

This is something different: It's stamina and resources.

Do I have enough hours? Enough energy? Enough money? Enough brain space?

Can I keep doing all of this while also giving the writing the time it needs to become the kind of writing that makes somebody go, holy fuck, yes!

I'm not going to give you some inspirational answer here because I don't have one.

As I said, we each have our own Everest.

But if the last two weeks of laying prostrate and teetering on the edge of oblivion has reminded me I need to start pruning away the things that are stealing time away from what will propel me forwards.

And reminded about the saying:

I don't want to be a corpse. I want to reach the summit. And so to do that, I need to park all the lovely sugar-filled fluffy synergising things I fill my time with. Newsletter excluded as it’s 80% calcium.

Still here.

I'm 41. I've come this far and I'm going to keep going because I know how much I would regret it if I didn't properly try.

But I think I've had a wake-up call.

I've spent a lot of time learning how this industry works. I've learned how to find opportunities, build relationships, pitch, network, apply for things, talk to people and get myself into rooms I couldn't get into a few years ago.

That's all valuable. But ultimately, when somebody opens the script, none of that matters if the work doesn't stand up.

So perhaps the next stage for me is about protecting the things that allow me to make that work better.:

Perhaps that's why the agent experience and The Script Factory experience have ended up colliding in my head.

Both have made me think about what I'm protecting. I'm protective of the relationships I've spent years building, but I need to become just as protective of the time I give my writing.

I don't have more hours in the day. I don't suddenly have a pot of money for script editing. And I certainly haven't found the magical solution for balancing two careers, family, life and writing.

I don't think I need more resilience, I need to make more time.

Why am I confessing to finding my chosen career path a struggle? Why am I admitting to re-evaluating my work and my place in this industry? Because we all do it and we all do it; frequently. It is so isolating when you feel that pull and you experience that moment of, "Is this worth it?"

Is all the research, drafts, pitch documents, treatments, networking, social media, CVs, portfolios, conversations, festivals, submissions, rejections: all of this unpaid labour for the potential of that one thing that will launch a career and make this convert your work from being unpaid to paid worth the sacrifice of time and money?

I want to call it out because when you're doing all of this work unpaid, you've got to really back yourself. You have to be absolutely sure that you are doing everything you possibly can to succeed. Moments like this are like hitting the bottom of the pool. A lot of people just let go. There are very few of us who push back up and go, "No, let's do this."

It is a cyclical process. This won't be the last time I reevaluate my life choices and I know that this is the same for you too, whatever role you take on. This post is a reminder of just how universal these thoughts are and also what we can do about it.

What revelations have you had recently that have felt like a fork in the road? Let me know.

Helen

Next up… WTF is Talent Anyway?

© Helen Tompson 2026 | Feel free to share this newsletter with other writers. If you'd like to reproduce or quote larger sections, just drop me a message first.