Martin Nel

I studied Comparative literature at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg with the aim of teaching literature. I also studied German, Dutch Afrikaans and English literature as majors. My sub-major was in Drama and Film studies. In all of these endeavours, it occurred to me that the nature of the narrative is really a universal phenomenon in that it is primarily about story and archetypes.

I've been a middle school English language and literature teacher for over twenty years. I've worked in Europe and South Africa and am often tasked with teaching creative writing and composition. In the literature part of the teaching, I have often included the structure of story and the basics of character (and archetypes) in order to instil skills that lead to the analysis of story and plot - and the important difference between the two. I've taught both at the senior and junior levels.

During my tenure in Europe, there were often questions about Africa. Students were often fascinated with the mysteries of Africa. It is largely this experience that led to me writing an action-adventure novel that drew on some of the still largely unknown myths and legends of southern Africa. I also turned this novel into a screenplay that I am now refining.

I recently completed a screenwriting course at ReelWriting where I became more intimately acquainted with the many components of a screenplay structure.

I previously worked as an online journalist and copywriter, experiences that proved to be valuable in creative writing.

I am fascinated with the action-adventure and thriller genres because I consider these to be very early forms of genre (that we see in the oldest narrative, Gigamesh).

My fascination with the notion of "beats" and "plot points" and increasingly think that these may be an indication that the brain's processing structures may be why novels and films work in the way that they do. It is an intriguing notion that narratives such as Gilgamesh, Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, Frankenstein and Tarzan the Ape Man are all connected across time and space through this neurological capability of the brain to be wired for story and that little has changed in over nearly five thousand years of telling stories.