Fantastically useful, true and best of all very amusing. This comprehensive and succinct insider s guide is told with characteristic clarity and laced with excellent practical advice. If you want to write, read this first. Tim Whitby, producer. Have you ever said, I d love to write a script, but don t know where to start ? Or watched the latest binge-worthy Netflix series and thought you could do better? Do Drama explores the how and why of writing drama, not as an instruction manual, but as a lively conversation with one of Britain s most prolific and successful screenwriters, Lucy Gannon. She didn t write her first play until she was 39. By sharing what she has learned over three decades of writing primetime drama, she will help you to: Write your script from the first scene to the last Create vivid characters with a personality and a past Develop storylines, structure and write a treatment Understand how the industry works; take the next step. Writing drama is not about education, class or cleverness, it s about your deep desire to tell stories, to create characters, finding the humour alongside the pathos, to delight and enthral millions. There is no golden path into production. But the world is hungry for talent. You are the talent. So, what are you waiting for? Scene 1

'The Amazingly Astonishing Story' is Lucy Gannon's memoir of her first seventeen years. The daughter of a soldier, she lived a peripatetic early life but settled in the north west. Here, a young child, she suffered the death of her mother and was cared for by an aunt. Escape beckoned when her father remarried and the family moved south, but Lucy and her two elder brothers soon find out that they have swapped one difficult situation for another. The boys flee by joining the armed forces and Lucy is left to deal with a stepmother who mostly ignores her in an attempt to live her own life with Lucy's father. Lucy's escape is school, where her abysmal grasp of maths is mitigated by a flair for writing. Despite her talent, and her love of school, she leaves at sixteen for the Women's Royal Army Corps, unable to escape the low expectations of her family. Vividly told, 'The Amazingly Astonishing Story' is a classic story of a working-class girl growing up in the fifties and early sixties, where what might be possible and what actually is seem incompatible. A strict Catholic upbringing, sexual abuse, a father torn between his daughter and his new wife, a precocious and imaginative young girl, mean that Lucy Gannon really does have an amazing story (including a chance meeting with the young Beatles in the school grounds) as she breaks boundaries and strives for the freedom to be herself. Reminiscent of Jeanette Winterson's 'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit' Gannon's memoir is an assured story of her childhood and of a slice of Britain in the 50s and 60s.