Paws and Prose: Setting Up Narrative in Iron Wick

Iron Wick was a script I worked on for my dissertation in my undergraduate. I used Final Draft, which my Dad had brought me for my christmas present. This post is an updated, refreshed article of one I did nearer the time. I hadn’t been blogging as long and hadn’t found my blogging style just yet but now that I have, I wanted to come back and update this post.

One of the things I loved most about working on this project was what I learned through the research. As you may have noticed with my other projects, Death’s Hourglass and Seas’ Game, I like historical fiction (often mixed with fantasy).

Creating Place Using Research

Iron Wick was set in Birmingham during the height of Britain’s industrial revolution. Things were moving fast. Businesses collapsed. In my narrative, one of these businesses was a chandelier shop, so I researched into candle making. I couldn’t find anything specifically about how candles were made in the nineteenth century. But I did find a book that briefly explained the history of candle making. I also found many books on kindle unlimited that gave instructions on how to make candles. I played the creative license card and mixed the information together to try and make this scene as authentic as possible.

It would have been hard to see the actual way candles were made at the time without having a time machine (if anyone knows how to contact the Doctor, do let me know) so it was necessary to get creative. However I feel that the information I did find out, such as the sperm whale candles, would have made it seem real to the audience and keep them engaged through a sense of place.

Another way I added to the sense of time and place was by researching current events. The narrative implies that the main character’s mother is heavily pregnant. Through conversation it’s clear that the mother wants to name the baby Charlotte, should it be a girl. During the time the narrative is set, Princess Charlotte Hanover had recently died from eclampsia alongside her baby. It also foreshadowed what was about to happen to the mother herself.

Here’s some of the books I’ve looked at for the research:

• Candles The Ultimate Beginners Guide to Mastering Candle Making in 60 Minutes or Less
• The Brief History of Candle Making
• Britain: 1750-1900s

Going to old sites for inspiration

During the industrial revolution, there were several hamlets, mills and other infrastructure that helped in the production of metal. As I live in Birmingham, I was lucky enough to be close to one such place: Sarehole Mill. Sarehole Mill has been around for six centuries so far, so it predates the revolution, but predating it is why it was important at the time. It was leased to Matthew Bouton an engineer largely responsible for steam engines, alongside James Watt. He also had another factory near Birmingham, Soho (which I also visited). Both Sarehole Mill and Soho were used to produce various kinds of metal around the time.

I also went to Abbeydale Hamlet which gave insight into the conditions of the hamlet and how dangerous it was to work in one. These visits helped me gain enough detail for the time period to give a sense of place that my audience could identify and be emerged in.

Making Decisions with the help of Final Draft

Sometimes, when working on a project, it’s hard not to have alternative outcomes for scenes. In this project, one of the issues I had was deciding how the protagonist’s father became bankrupt. I toyed with the idea that a ship with supplies sunk, a factory had become bankrupted, and another outcome, which is that the hamlet burned down.

Before my visit to Abbeydale Hamlet I had only considered the first two. However Final Draft has a great feature. As the Protagonist’s father was learning about the event through dialogue, I was able to use the Alternative Dialogue option.

Alternative Dialogue in Final Draft enables a writer to give each character multiple dialogue options in a scene, switching between them using the click of a button. The benefit of this is that it allowed me to think about it, have it noted down, see it visually, all at once, without the danger of overwriting. Once I had made my decision, I was able to delete the unnecessary dialogue. It meant that while I was thinking on it, I was able to write the rest of the script without the decision gnawing at me, and without forgetting. Five years on, and I still think that it is a marvious tool.

The setup of Iron Wick

At the time of writing my screenplay, I was reading Save the Cat by Blake Snyder. It has a simple, easy to understand, layout for anyone wanting to understand screenplay narratives and while it’s not the only screenwriting book I use, it is still one of my favourites due to Snyder’s beat sheet. This includes setting up the theme.

Finding Iron Wick’s Theme

Here, think of theme as the kind of journey that the character is going to go on. The thematic premise. Home alone is a good example. Kevin tells his mother he doesn’t want to see the family ever again. Kate responds with: “I hope you didn’t mean that. You’d feel pretty sad if you woke up tomorrow morning and you didn’t have a family.”

It is this dialogue, hidden in the scene, that reveals the journey Kevin is going to go on. By the end, he learns he needs his family. Through my characters’ dialogue, I foreshadowed the death of the protagonist’s mother through the mention of Princess Charlotte.

Catalyst

The catalyst is the inciting incident. The part that changes the character’s life, calls them to the adventure. They can ignore the call or embrace it. If it is the former, they’ll soon be forced on the path. For Iron Wick and the protagonist, Benjamin, the catalyst that changed his life was losing his parents. His mother’s death sent his father in grief; the business failed and the father was taken to debtor’s prison while Benjamin was left with the baby. He’d have to learn to survive while looking after the child. Unable to find any other suitable work, he finds himself working in a hamlet run by a tyrant employer.

Further development of Iron Wick

I would say the script still needs work, but I am still happy with how it turned out, even five years later. I enjoyed working on this story and hope to return to it one day to improve it. Some of the research I did at the time of writing the script was fascinating and I would love to revisit it, maybe write the rest of the series.

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