Spotlight.
Lorna Tetteh King
INTRODUCTION
Lorna Tetteh King is a Ghanaian-Scottish screenwriter and a graduate of Screen Academy Scotland. Her short script "Exotic" won the Glasgow Short Film Festival pitch competition in 2019 and she was selected for the prestigious Less is More Scottish residency 2020 run by Le Groupe Ouest. Her short script "Her Midas Touch" was developed as part of the BFI/Screen Scotland Sharp Shorts scheme. It earned several laurels at competition, including reaching the Top Five scripts in the Shore Scripts Short Film Fund 2020, and is due for release soon.
Lorna wrote a pilot under commission for Sky as part of the Young Films Foundation 2021/2 and for ITV as part of the Disabled Writers in Development program. She's currently working on a pilot as part of the Little Chicks Emerging Writers scheme with Abi and Dorcas Morgan and Sue Gibbs. Lorna is represented by Steven Russell at Collective Talent.
INTERVIEW
How did you get into your creative practice? What initially inspired you?
Funnily enough, my maternal grandfather and his brother were fundamental in shaping a newly independent Ghana’s creative industry and practice. But growing up, that was really never shown to me as an option. Our family were made up of academics and I think I thought my grandfather was just a special case. It certainly never occurred to me that I could also be a creative! So my way into it was actually being a really voracious reader since kindergarten. Reading was the first thing I was able to do completely independently and that was what made me love it. Then when I was twelve, I wanted to be a novelist. And I tried, but if course I was terrible! And without the proper encouragement, I just figured I would always be the reader and never the writer and left it alone.
Kept on reading. Then at twenty four, I was hired as an extra for two weeks when THE AVENGERS was filming in Edinburgh. But they kept cancelling me and then said they no longer needed me. I had quit my job at a pub for this! I got so angry and said to myself “If I’d written it, they couldn’t do this to me” and I wrote an awful, terrible play, finished it and kept writing until I got better. Then I got accepted onto the MA in Screenwriting at Edinburgh Napier in 2018 and I’ve been writing since then. With writing, you can never get worse than your previous draft. So keep going.
What themes do you tend to interrogate in your creative practices?
When I started writing, families in crisis were what I naturally gravitated to. Take that however you will 😅 The play I wrote after the AVENGERS debacle was about a woman who’s mother died when she was a child and her father completely lost himself to the grief and neglected her emotionally. On a surprise visit, he discovers she has a fiancée she lives with he never knew about and he realises the depth and consequences of his neglect. As I came to understand the shape of story and universality found in specificity, I actively put in themes that are important to me. Disability justice is incredibly important to me in my work, especially neurodiversity, as I discovered my own neurodivergence through writing! The concept of found family tends to be the lens through which I tell whatever story I feel compelled to tell.
What is your favourite project you’ve ever worked on and why?
Gosh, my favourite project has to be THE WEDDING that aired on BBC Scotland in 2022 or 2023? Six 10-minute-long monologues from six people at a Black and Scottish wedding. I’d never written such a long monologue, and the challenge was actually a lot of fun to take on! I was well supported by execs and I got to be on the set for a few days of the weeklong shoot and a radio interview! I wish there was a way we could do something like it every six months or so, a great way to take a risk on newer writers and train up crew members!
What advice would you have for creatives of colour looking to get into your creative practices?
Respect your craft and keep doing it. In spite of institutional racism, the cream will always rise to the top. But you have to be able to stand by your work, and you can only do that if you know you’ve done THE work. Also, NETWORK. Networking isn’t a nice option, it’s a necessity as a creative. How will you get your work read or even critiqued by peers (and no matter how long someone has been in the industry, you have peers at every level) if they don’t know you exist? The longer you remain in the industry, the more you realise you really just want to make art with folk you actually want to spend time with. Folks you will become very close with. Any job you take home with you, you have to work with people you like! Lateral networking is more important than networking up towards established names. Sure someone might give you a chance and it doesn’t hurt but you come up with people on your level. In two decades, you will be the established set. So never despise small beginnings.
What are you currently working on?
I’m currently writing my own TV show as part of a scheme called Little Chicks Emerging Writers, working with Abi and Dorcas Morgan and Sue Gibbs, and script editor Ollie Grieves. It’s called THE CANARY and it’s about a financially desperate nanny who agrees to work for a notorious crime boss to look after his daughter; how far will she go to protect the wee girl and not compromise her own morals? I’m exploring the concept of a Faustian pact and how far an ordinary but desperate person will go to get what they want. The nanny is a neurodivergent Ghanaian-Scot who actually aspires to be an opera singer and needs to pay the remaining balance on her tuition quickly or lose her place and the crime boss is very morally dark grey but has a secret love of classical music and really wants the best life for his daughter. Very excited to see how far this goes!