So this is Burns Night in Scotland then? I spent it sat on my own with a plate and fish and chips ... or a fish supper as it's known up here. Going to the chippy tonight was an education though, haggis suppers available (well they're always available to be fair) but I've never seen wee Jimmy fritters advertised before, complete with broon sauce.

Week 2 of the script writing last Wednesday. Interesting stuff although I can't help feeling a tinge of stupidity having revealed last week that I thought I'd give script writing a go because people had always commented how good the dialogue in my books was. This week the tutor revealed that film scripts was nothing to do with dialogue and everything to do with what you saw, not what people said. So then I came home and continued reading my book containing a series of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock who had this to say about the end of the silent film era (before going on to talk about his first "talkie", Blackmail).

"The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema ... since all that was missing was natural sound, there was no need to go to the other extreme and completely abandon the technique of the pure motion picture, the way they did when sound came in.

In many of the films now being made there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call 'photographs of people talking.' When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. In writing a screenplay it's essential to separate clearly the dialogue from the visual elements and, whenever possible, to rely more on the visual then the dialogue."

So there you have it ... so much for my "brilliant" dialogue. Humph!

Oh, and to find out what I should have been doing instead of eating fish and chips on me tod ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burns_supper