My first attempts at writing a story happened back in 2005 or 2006 whilst living in London. The city was expensive and I was looking for some way to bolster my earnings.
I joined a book club and tried to read as much as possible, to get a feel for good story-telling. My first story was a memoir, taking a chapter from my own life and trying to add emotional layers, mostly based on memory. It was more a short story and the feedback I got from an editor was not at all what I wanted to actually bring across, so I dropped the subject, not knowing in which direction to go.
Several months later, I took another shot this time in the horror/suspense genre, inspired by a PC horror game I was playing at the time that crept the hell out of me, and a camp-fire story I heard years earlier whilst in college in Ecuador. Suffice to say, it was shit. Nothing made sense. In my focus on suspense and terror I had completely ignored things like character development, pacing, themes, set-up and pay-off. The dream of becoming an author went on hibernation.
Years later, back in Germany, the idea of writing movie scripts popped into my head while brushing my teeth. A combination of my passion for movies and my aspirations of becoming a writer.
The idea for my script also emerged fairly quickly. I wanted to write something about Simon Bolivar and the South American wars of independence. I had always missed a Hollywood Blockbuster on this subject and dreamed about putting these fascinating characters on the big screen.
The path ahead would remain bumpy, but the seed was planted…
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