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At a screenwriting seminar in September, Olivia Hetreed emphasised the paramount importance of a well-structured story. With reference to her own recent adaptation of Wuthering Heights, she showed how a script’s effectiveness will hang on a series of key decisions over when and how to tell the pivotal events of your story.

So first you have to find out what your story is, which is not always as simple as it sounds. You have to break down the journey from the opening event (e.g. the arrival of the child Heathcliff on the moor, rescued from the streets of Liverpool) to the conclusion, and even an open-ended story will still have a designated conclusion.

This helps you to order your material and narrow down the exact story you want to tell. That’s not to say that other events from your story-world won’t add colour and depth to your script, only that they will not provide the spine of your story.

For instance, my new play Closed concerns the arrest and subsequent legal processing of a terrorist suspect, but I made a decision early on that his story would not be my story. Rather I would follow the fortunes of a government whistleblower and a political activist who combine to leak sensitive information about the arrested man.

The suspect himself is not seen, and there are many dramatic events in his life – his violent arrest, his incarceration, his trial – which don’t form a part of the story I have chosen to tell. There are clearly many other stories which could be told from my chosen material, my story-world: I have opted for one of them.

And once you know what your story is, you can decide how to tell it. You decide which parts we will see, through whose eyes, in what order, and in what manner. You needn’t start with the start, the opening event of your story. Good stories rarely do. It may be more intriguing to dive into a subsequent event and show the opening event later, or not at all. The opening event could be merely referred to by others, a subject of conjecture.

In Closed the opening event is the government minister’s suggestion to his special adviser that it would be politically judicious and morally justified to leak ‘closed evidence’ relating to the terrorist suspect. This sets in train the whole sequence of events that culminates in the eruption of a national scandal, but I felt it would suit the play’s style for this part of the story to stay hidden from view.

That way it becomes a questionable or even deniable event, and the audience is deprived of certainty. The telling of a story is a constant balancing act between revealing and withholding, creating intrigue while avoiding confusion. If the audience sees too little they may lose interest, if they see too much they may not care to know more.

Some styles of story-telling, such as the thriller, are more reliant on this tightrope act than others. But gaining a good understanding of the structure of your story will help any story-teller to walk the high wire.

You’ll excuse me a brief hiatus from updating the website, as I got married last month! A busily wonderful time, and for anyone that’s interested we’ve got a little wedding highlights video we’re rather proud of.

Now I’m back to work, editing the new play I mentioned a few months ago. Editing is often thought of as the weary slog that follows the creative burst – some perspiration to balance your inspiration – but I feel this is unfair. A good edit can be every bit as creative and rewarding as the initial act of writing.

I think this misperception comes from the sense of pressure that hangs over every word when you’re deciding what to keep and what to cut, the idea that you may have to change everything, and that your work will never be done. And perhaps also the pernicious thought that a good writer would simply get it right the first time. Not so. A proper edit is really the triumph of your writing process, revealing the hard edges of your work to make it shine. It’s the chance to make sure you’re saying what you really meant to say.

A few simple rules can help get your editorial ball rolling. The following thoughts are drawn from my recent experience editing the play, but they can easily be extended to other forms of writing.

To start with: take out any words you don’t need. This may make your work shorter but, almost always, shorter is better. The words you don’t need are getting in the way of the good bit. I’m not saying you should get rid of any elaborate language: verbal dexterity is often quite necessary to deliver your point or particularly in drama to say something about the character using those words. Different characters have different ways of making themselves known, or of failing to.

The advice is really to find the purpose of your words, and be ruthless. Does that line reveal something about the plot, about a character or about the relation between two characters? Does it create an essential setting or mood? Could the line be shorter and still make its point? Could that point be made through action instead?

Many times when I’m reading through my work I’ll come across a line or a phrase that troubles me. I’ll look at a sentence and feel there’s something not quite right with it without being able to say why. I might then tinker with the sentence, change the order, substitute some synonyms, but invariably the breakthrough moment comes when I say to myself, ‘actually, do you need that sentence at all?’ There’s a tremendous sense of release that comes with ridding yourself of a bad line.

Your edit is also your chance to jump between the level of close detail and the wider structural level. If you’re only agonising over individual lines you’re not stepping back to feel the shape of the whole drama. As best I can, I will take the audience’s point of view and ask myself where the peaks are coming, and do they feel right? What is the effect I’m trying to create on the audience through the dramatic shifts?

One question that always arises for me from the structural perspective is: can I start further in? Do I need my opening section at all? Often the writer is desperate to set the scene in the opening pages, or there’s a process of warming up, preparing for the real action. All of which is of far more value to the writer than to the audience.

By all means use these pages to help you get started with your first draft, but the edit is where you can let them go. From the audience’s point of view a little disorientation in the opening scene is a good thing, it hooks their interest. They are stepping into a conflict already in progress – the world of the play exists before the audience’s window into that world opens.

If you start a little further into the action you can exploit the natural human propensity to try and catch up, to fill in the blanks, to want to take sides. Trust that your audience will understand what is going on, and you can deliver the detail along the way.

Next time I’ll follow this train of thought with some observations about editing dialogue in particular. How can you make sure your characters are speaking believably while still saying the things you need them to say?