Screenwriting: in the realms of the unreal

How do we know what's real and what's not? Can we trust our own minds? Perhaps this world we think we live in is simply an extraordinary illusion. Perhaps our normal world is turned on its head by some extraordinary events.

The strange, horrific, unreal and supernatural are some of the most gripping genres in film and television. They're also a hotbed of fascinating philosophical questions. Filmmakers and viewers are snapping them up, so if you have a strange tale to tell, the time to write that script is now.

Highly visual and with a huge box of writers' tricks to choose from, these scripts that challenge reality are great fun to write. Horror, the supernatural, ghost stories and other worlds all come under this banner. You probably want to write something like The Sixth Sense, Enter The Void, The Shining, Don't Look Now, Inception, Being Human or Whitechapel (TV). Maybe even stories with a fantastic twist like Groundhog Day, It's A Wonderful Life or Life on Mars.

On this 9-week course from Skriva Writing School tutored by a BAFTA-winning screenwriter, you'll learn how to:

• Create the perfect central character for this kind of story
• Generate fear and uncertainty in your scenes
• Use your personal culture and beliefs in your script
• Write visual and psychological tension into your script

Skriva Writing School is a new independent creative writing centre located in the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Centre on Palmerston Place in Edinburgh. Through his Sherlock Holmes stories, Conan Doyle was one of the most popular and accomplished novelists and short story writers of the 19th and 20th Centuries. He is also one of the most heavily adapted writers on screen. Outside of his famous detective creation, Conan Doyle also wrote horror, supernatural, adventure and historical works. Skriva is delighted to offer special short courses related to his work, alongside its full-length screenwriting and novel writing courses.

The course runs weekly on Monday evenings, 6.00 to 7.30pm for 9 weeks from 6 May to 1 June 2013.

Level of experience: some screenwriting experience desirable, but not essential. Contact the tutor via www.skrivawriting.com for further information.

By the end of this course, you should have developed an outline for your feature-length film or TV story and begun writing the script itself. You'll have the option of joining Skriva's main screenwriting course if you want to continue working on the script with the same tutor and following it to completion.

About the Tutor The workshop leader for this course is Douglas Dougan. Douglas is a screenwriter and producer who runs Edinburgh-based Fluid Eye Productions. Among their credits are the BAFTA award-winning Run, Tony, Run!, Mono (BBC Three Film Award), Flap, Waiting for the 42 and Half Way Home. Douglas began his career writing for series television at BBC, Channel Five & ITV (Casualty, Family Affairs, Doctors, The Bill). He also works regularly as a script editor and script consultant on UK film and television productions. His credits as a script consultant include the multi-BAFTA award winning dramas Margaret, Small Island, Five Minutes of Heaven, Occupation, Killing Bono and Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock & Roll. Douglas has over 10 years’ experience as a teacher of screenwriting and film. He set-up the screenwriting programme at University of Edinburgh and has taught there since 2003. He is currently writing a 3-hour supernatural drama for television.