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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - A new Yellowknife production company will start offering would-be Hollywood scriptwriters advice on how to sharpen their narrative chops.

Sarah Kalnay and Charles Watson of newly-created PumpkinMuffin Productions are a new future husband and wife team looking to edit and vet the scripts of aspiring screenwriters in Yellowknife. - Guy Quenneville/NNSL photo

PumpkinMuffin Productions, a small business recently started by Sarah Kalnay and her fiance Charles Watson, officially got its licence in July.

The company will charge small fees for reading people's scripts and helping them fine-tune plot turns, character development and everything in between.

"Screenwriters are very nervous about coming out of their little holes, like most writers," said Kalnay, who moved back to Yellowknife from Edinburgh, Scotland last June.

"They don't want to go out in public because they're attached to their screenplays. That's their babies, so they're very terrified of people criticizing it."

PumpkinMuffin's mandate is ambitious: to break writers out of their shell but also charge them for objective criticism on whether their scripts have the makings of good, producible movies.

"We haven't settled on a fee yet, but we don't see it being very much at this stage, she said."

Kalnay and Watson - who both got a certification in screenwriting from Screen Academy Scotland and had a film screened this year at the Edinburgh International Film Festival - have a firm idea of what makes a good script.

"A good script is story," said Kalnay. "You have to have a story in it - and character. Something that's normally neglected in film today is the character arc. Even if it's a small bit, you have to see a change within the story."

Starting your own business is scary because "we're funding it ourselves, but we don't have a lot of (expenses)."

But Kalnay got some help from her family.

"I was actually quite lucky," she said. "My brother, being a really good brother, bought me the space and domain name for my web site on my birthday: pumpkinmuffinproductions.ca."

Kalnay's childhood growing up in Yellowknife gave her the idea for her unique business name.

"Every single name we thought of had already been taken, so I just thought of two names my mother called me when I was growing up," said Kalnay.

"Two we liked before were Afterlife Productions and Embryo Productions."

For a flat fee, Kalnay and Watson will also be offering a 10- to 11-week course with the city of Yellowknife starting in late January, plus free courses for some local high schools.

Watson, who hails from Scotland, said he and Kalnay both bring different sensibilities to the practice of screenwriting - she being more focused on characters and he on story structure and plot - both of which will well serve potential customers.

"The idea of how to structure a screenplay appeals to me more, whereas Sarah is more of a free-thinker," said Watson.

"I'm quite looking forward to getting to see everyone else's scripts here," he added.

"There's probably quite a few people in the North who are good writers, and others who are potentially good writers."