Over the next 7 days as things ramp up towards the London Screenwriters Festival at the phenomenal Regents College, I’ll be preparing a special (text-only, sadly) LOWDOWN looking at how you can get the most from your weekend and the biggest bang for your buck.

Day 1 – Get Organised

With 7 days still to go, you’ve still got time to get your business cards designed, printed and sent out to you. Granted, it’ll be speedy-shipping, which will cost you a little more, but you really can’t underestimate how important having good – or any – business cards can be.

There’s loads of great, cheap websites to get your cards produced and you don’t need anything flashy or glossy. Try places like Vistaprint or BestPrinting, both of which allow you to design your own cards online and upload your own image.

A quick tip for card design: leave space on the back side for people to make notes about you and your projects. When you’re meeting the hundreds of other delegates at the festival, you’ll find some of them stick in your mind and others, well, wont. But if you keep track of people and their projects you stand a better chance of enhancing your networking after the fact.

Whether you use a standard template (not the best idea, but better than nothing) or create your own, business cards are essential to your LSWF experience. The last thing you want is to be in a situation where people are asking for your details and you have to scribble them on the back of a fag packet (after emptying out all of your smokes) or a page hastily ripped out of your notepad. Not a great impression.

And talking of notebooks – buy two. Just looking at the lineup, you know that whatever you’re going to be taking in you’ll going to be taking copious notes on everything you see (or at least you should be!).

With you notebook, buy yourself a PACK of pens. You’ll be wanting AT LEAST three, if not more, because you don’t want to be scuppered by empty pens.

That’s today’s mission in preparation for the festival, then: get online and order your business cards if you haven’t already, and pop down to your local stationary store and kit yourself out for copious note-taking. It’s for your own good!

Day 2 tomorrow will look at how to choose your sessions and workshops.