I went to the Screenwriters Festival in Cheltenham, a sort of four-day conference set up with the aim of establishing a community of screenwriters here in the UK.

A number of big-name screenwriters spoke during the four days, including  Diana Ossana, Bill Nicholson, David Hare, Anthony Horowicz and Michael Goldenberg.

The consensus seemed to be that if you wanted to break into writing for film, you needed to start in TV or in the theatre, but that you should think twice about film-making as a career because it's a long, difficult path getting a film made, and you're likely to get fucked over along the way.

I was struck by how few original big budget screenplays get made - most are adaptations of literary books and short stories.

I was there to cover it for the Writers' Guild - you can read various posts about it on the Writer's Guild blog here and on my blog here.