“You can’t wait for inspiration,” Jack London reputedly said. “You have to go after it with a club.”

Sometimes writing feels like that. A duel, or an ambush. Or trench warfare. The club thing is about right – sometimes writing feels like you’re on an iceskating rink blindfolded with a club in hand, aiming for a piñata that may or may not be suspended somewhere over the ice. This all sounds pretty indulgent; honestly, I know that writing does beat unblocking toilets for a living (I've done both, although sometimes the similarities between the two are remarkably similar).

Melodrama aside, writing is a clean job of work, but it isn’t easy. Sometimes it feels like no one could possibly understand how frustratingly tedious, dithering, and confidence-sapping it can feel. Writing is an art of confidence, where you embark on a journey sure you have a story worth telling. But almost from that first chapter until the final copy edit, the rest of the process – for me at least – is fraught with doubt. Does this make sense? Is this passage too long? Is this chapter too short? Is this character too derivative? Is this point of action believable/exciting/bowel-heavingly dull? You fret that every word you write is adding to the pile of monstrous disease you’ve already created which will reveal to your family and all you hold dear the truth that you are a talentless fraud. And it is a fear you must bear alone; your loved ones want to be confident that the time you’re spending with your computer is productive. Besides, no one likes a whinger.

Late last month I had the pleasure to be invited by the angels at Screen Australia to join a writing masterclass run by the Script Factory’s Lucy Sher and Justine Hart. What a wonderful, helpful experience! This was my second workshop with the Script Factory, and – like the first one – it affirmed that all projects go through long, painful, doubtful gestations. This recent workshop was called Wrestling the Redraft, and was specifically about analysing screenplays and – hopefully – steering a course towards effective next drafts. It was helpful for me on an immediate level because I am working on screenplays right now. But it was also helpful to me as a novelist, and for a lot of different reasons.

Stories are stories, whether they are screenplays or novels. Neither are easy to create, because both rely on a) a great idea, b) great characters, and c) carefully applied craft. There is no universal template against which you can hold your work and say – 'Aha! There is the bump, if I just take off a few hundred words here, it will be perfect.' But there are commonalities between the great stories, and common approaches to effective storytelling. There are questions you can ask yourself along the way to check if you are, indeed, heading North, or are looping in diminishing circles toward quicksand.

The content of the Script Factory workshop is more-or-less covered in Lucy’s great book ‘Reading Screenplays’ – I recommend it for anyone who wants to write stories, short or long, for the screen or the page. But one of the pearls that stays with me – and has done since the first workshop in 2010 – is the Script Factory’s summary of the three act structure:

Act 1: Make it matter. (Give us a character with a problem we care enough about to follow.)

Act 2: Make it messy. (Compound the protagonist’s complications. Conflict is what interests us.)

Act 3: Make it meaningful.

This last is the bit that resonates with me. Make it meaningful. Any story can be meaningful. I recently watched ‘Alien’, the superlative grandfather of sci-fi suspense films, and – yes – it is meaningful. Its a brilliantly told story with jolly good frights, but It also affirms our hopes about human resilience, as well as our suspicions about corporate greed. It doesn’t matter the genre; sci-fi, comedy, horror, western, rom-com, gangster … they can all be made to have meaning, and work on a level that will stay with us after the last page is turned or the last frame flickers.

How to do that is a story for another blog day.

Hemingway once said, “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” Writing is hard. Re-writing is hard, too. The process becomes that little bit easier when you remember that it’s supposed to be, and easier still when your writing a story that, to you at least, means something.