By Zosia Wand, Ulverston writer:

I’VE just spent a week on a writing course in Ty Newydd Writing Centre, North Wales.

Having enjoyed my novels, psychological thrillers inspired by Ulverston and the surrounding landscape, a TV production company asked me to write a speculative script for TV.

I wasn’t sure I could. Hence the course, with Matthew Hall who wrote the hugely successful, Keeping Faith.

The course was fabulous and I am raring to go with my story and a newly-acquired tool kit with which to craft it.

But these tools are also helpful life skills.

Stories are, essentially about people and relationships and good stories start with strong characters, so there was much discussion of human behaviour.

Writers are, by their nature, observers, but I am of Eastern European heritage and by nature emotional and reactive.

If someone annoys me I am compelled to step forward and confront them. This is not always helpful, to say the least.

Far more productive would be to pause and consider, as a writer, why they might be behaving this way? What do they want from this situation? What is the external obstacle they have encountered? And what might be their internal obstacle?

This is all well and good, but I suspect I shall fail miserably on occasion. Still, I am going to try. If I am only partially successful, l will, at the very least, have gained a little grace with age, and a host of characters to include in future stories.

On another note, with participants who had travelled from Australia and California, as well as far-flung corners of the United Kingdom, we were asked to add a pin to the map on the wall to record where we’d come from.

Keen to highlight Ulverston, I grabbed a pin, only to find one already there!

There was something delightfully satisfying about seeing Ulverston proudly staking its claim within the international literary community.

And, who knows, if this speculative script appeals, our little market town may feature as the backdrop to a future TV drama!

l The second series of Keeping Faith will be broadcast on BBC1 at the end of July.