Swara Bhaskar, who plays Salman Khan's younger sister in Sooraj Barjatya's upcoming drama, Prem Ratan Dhan Payo, was fed up of the roles she was being offered and decided to write the kind of role she would want to play. “Something meaningful,“ asserts the actress.

Mirror has learnt that Swara has turned writer with her script, Split Ends, one of the thirteen final contenders in the Asia Society India Centre New Voices Fellowship for Screenwriters 2015-2016, running with the theme, 'Making Heroine the New Hero'. She wrote the first draft of the gritty love story in 2011 and has reworked it over the years. Filmmaker Sriram Raghavan has played mentor, helping her nurture this script. The story is set in the Hindi heartland and draws extensively from her own extended family.

“I will be locking in on a producer-director by December and plan to act in the film,“ says Swara, adding that though her hands are full with acting projects, she takes breaks to attend script writing, theatre and acting workshops. “The final script, I realised, has the potential to be narrated as a full-length feature. I have a timeline in place and hope to begin casting for the roles by the end of the year,“ she says.

Swara, is looking forward to an eight-month writing programme, beginning with a five-day workshop by filmmaker Anjum Rajabali. There will be a second workshop in February 2016. “The greatest gift of this initiative is that each participating fellow receives Rs 2 lakh as funding for their project,“ says Swara, who plans to write her second full-length feature, a yet-to-be-titled, comedy-drama.