edwina shaw

A NEW ADVENTURE

/ Edwina Shaw / Leave a comment
screenplay

screenplay

A few months ago I sold the film rights to Thrill Seekers. I was thrilled, as I’ve always envisioned my stories one day being made into films. Once I was sent the screenplay and read it over, I realised that writing the scripts was probably something I could learn to do myself. It didn’t look so scary after all. Then I went to see Gone Girl at the movies and learned that Gillian Flynn had written the screenplay herself based on her novel of the same name. Not only that, she’d made it onto Forbes list of top-earning authors. That’s one list I’d like to be on, one day.

So, after searching the internet for information and scouring the books on script writing I’ve collected over the years, I sat down to make a start on my own screenplay for Dear Madman. Hmm, it wasn’t quite as simple as I first thought.
Much trickier in fact – a whole new art form for me to explore and play with!

Fortuitously, the QLD Writers Centre was offering a Feature Film Writing Clinic with Duncan Thompson, one of Australia’s foremost screenplay editors and teachers of the craft, and I didn’t even need to be an experienced screen writer to join. I did, however, have to submit the first five pages of my screenplay! With a lot of help from my friends I got that together and I’m in! The course starts in ten days and I’m super excited.

I’m fascinated by this new way of looking at story and enjoying every minute I’m working on my screenplay in progress. I’m back at that absolute beginner stage I remember from when I first started writing fiction over 12 years ago. It feels like PLAY and I’m having a ball. Maybe that’s why they call them screenPLAYS?

It’s also keeping me busy, so I’m not compulsively checking emails to see if the publisher has read Dear Madman yet!

THE DEATH PENALTY

/ Edwina Shaw / 4 Comments
South Brisbane Cemetery

South Brisbane Cemetery

I have spent many hours walking through this cemetery by the river near my home. It is filled with beautiful old fig, fir and gum trees, and birds. But mostly it is filled with stories. Every gravestone tells a tale, not only of woe, but of the life that was led. Little Tommy who was killed on his way home from school. Poor Jane who died giving birth to her thirteenth baby. The family who lost child after child before they reached their first birthdays. Men lost at sea. Grandmothers remembered for their love.

And then there is the grave of alleged bush ranger, Patrick Kenniff, whose execution invigorated the movement to abolish the death penalty.

This movement grew in strength, and in 1922 Queensland became the first state in the British Empire to abolish the death penalty. A few years ago, a plaque commemorating the men and one woman who lost their lives to the gallows in nearby Boggo Rd. Gaol was erected.

Grave of Executed Prisoners

Grave of Executed Prisoners

Recently, as I wrote Dear Madman, this plaque began to bother me. I have always been fiercely against the death penalty, but writing this book lead me to question that belief. The issue is not as simple as I once thought. Perhaps sometimes the death penalty is a relief, not only for the family of the victims, but for the perpetrators themselves. In Belgium this year, a convicted serial rapist successfully fought to have the right to end his life through euthanasia.

What bothers me most though, is that the executed have a plaque commemorating them, often with flowers placed upon it, while the graves of their victims are gone. They are not remembered with a shiny new plaque, but have disappeared into history, forgotten.