My first run at Twisted50 by Thomas M Pritchard

After the inevitable race over the finish line, my first submission for Twisted 50 2024 is in.

A few years ago. I volunteered for the London Screenwriters Festival. At the time, I was a struggling film student and found myself helping out with the Final Draft tent over the weekend. I loved dealing with the buzz and excitement and I met some wonderful people. I was all ready to make it an annual thing but the following year I was wrapped up in shooting a couple of my own student films. The year after I was gone. Not dead or anything, obviously. But I’d packed my bags to leave London and headed home to Wales. I’ve STILL, for my sins, not been back to experience LSWF since, but this year found that it was still having a bit of a lasting effect.

I was struggling to find drive and passion for my writing early on this year for a whole variety of reasons, and so I reached out to a lady I’d met at LSWF but not spoken to in over a decade. Lucy Hay is a writer and script editor who runs bang2write.com, If you haven’t visited that site then I recommend you do, and she offers support and education for writers via the Band2write academy. So I joined.

Still with me?

B2W has been an amazing experience filled with some pretty fantastic people, and in one of our groups…Twisted 50 came up. Twisted 50 is a collaborative collection of short horror stories that is now on its third volume. The idea is great! You submit a short horror story under 2,000 words, share it with other writers, give and receive feedback, and the top 50 stories get published! Now, I haven’t got a drop of horror experience in me aside from a vaguely eerie Faustian tale I wrote with a couple of friends in film school. But why not give it a crack?!

The experience has been fab! My first drafts always feel like a total mess, and this was no different. I was writing in an unfamiliar genre, knowing it was going to be read by a bunch of writers who, in my mind, were massive horror buffs, and I was terrified my work would be torn to pieces. I bit the bulletined chucked my first draft online warts and all, braced for impact. I don’t know that all writers are nice to other writers. In fact, I’m positive that is not often the case, but the feedback I received was great. People were friendly and supportive; they picked out the things that I already knew needed to be changed, but they also pointed out things I would never have picked up on. It was a breath of fresh air!

The knock-on effect is then the excitement to go out and read other stories! It’s built into Twisted 50 that to be involved, you offer at least two reviews on other people’s stories, and I read some great ones! Apocalyptic clown madness, a delirious fever dream (that sat nicely alongside my own), and a cut-throat almost Mad Men-esque tale with a nasty end. Really great stuff.

As someone who doesn’t usually write prose and never writes horror, Twisted 50 has been a priceless experience. I’ve stretched muscles I didn’t know I had, learned from writers who are wildly talented, and got the bug for writing in a way I never have before. I don’t know what happens after the final draft is sent off. What I know for sure is that competitions, collaborations, or experiences like this are what I’m going to be hunting for going forward.