Posts Tagged ‘rewrite’

What the failed rapture prediction has to do with your writing career

Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

Not so long ago I was at the London Comedy Writers Festival and as I sat near the front row of a packed auditorium awaiting keynote speaker Griff Rhys Jones to be welcomed onto the stage, I found myself questioning my faith.  I know the odds of writing a script that will get optioned is slim, a script that I will get paid for slimmer and getting a script made… well you get the idea, but in my head I have faith that what I have written is gold. 300 other people in that room were probably thinking the same thing, we all had unquestionable faith in our scripts, but with the odds of success so high, as I sat there I thought either my faith is misplaced or there’s is.

This was the dilemma facing religions this week.  Harold Camping and a handful of his followers (the secretary at Family Radio said she would be back at work on Monday and has continued to make appointments for even the most ardent church members) believed the rapture was going to happen on the 21st May 2011. Of course people joked, mocked and had fun with the improbability of the event happening on that date. However a Time magazine poll reveals that 59% of Americans actually believe the rapture is coming – you’re just stupid if you think it is on the 21st  - even Harold Camping scoffed at people who think the world is going to in 2012 “That date has not one stitch of biblical authority. It’s like a fairy tale.“. In the lead up to the event dedicated followers sold their worldly goods to pay for billboards and travel the country spreading the word only to wake up on Sunday morning to find they had horribly misplaced their faith and instantly rejected their religion… or did they?

So let us exchange the doomsday predication for your script – the script that will make you famous and earn you millions. You have faith in the script and you just need someone to see the light.  You put everything into the script, maybe quit your job, maybe spent out on Final Draft, Syd Field Books, lectures from Robert McKee
and a script writing degree.  You preached your gospel at networking events, did your mail outs to likely converts and entered competitions would lead to an endorsement of your word.

Then the rejection letters come.  You look at it and question… “I do not understand why… I do not understand why nothing has happened.”  Maybe they didn’t get it, maybe they didn’t understand you vision or maybe you are wrong.  Finally you give up on that script, “Obviously, I haven’t understood it correctly” you say. Then you have a choice…

Do you take the path of the followers of Samuel S. Snow, a preacher in the Millerite movement who predicted the end of the world in 1844.  When it failed to happen, the followers disbanded following a slightly less risky faith instead.

Or do you go the route of Harold Camping who first predicated the end of the world would occur in 1994. When this failed to materialise, he didn’t blame God or his faith, he blamed his own errors and set a new date. On Sunday morning many of the followers of Harold Camping and Family Radio were far from giving up, the faithful regrouped and saw the rejection as a test from God.

Back at the London Comedy Writers Festival, 300 faithful sat, many prepared to throw everything at ensuring their faith was not misplaced.  Rejection awaits every one of them and when it comes, will they pack up and leave or double down.  It is a tough call – wannabe writers and doomsday predictors have a sad habit of dying before their faith is rewarded.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in My Writing, Random Shit | 1 Comment »

How to sell your script to the BBC

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

Today I received an e-mail from a newbie at the London Comedy Writers.

“I was very impressed by the high quality of the writing and acting, and extremely depressed when I asked someone, based on the calibre of the readings, how does one make a transition from LCW to BBC to ITV.

The person beside me replied, “Oh, it’s extremely easy.  Just go to Oxford or Cambridge, and when one of your friends gets a job at BBC or ITV, call them up!”

I don’t know how true that is.  I hope it’s comedic overstatement.”

Here is my reply.

As for making the jump from LCW to the BBC.  The person next to you was probably more right than wrong… if you are looking for one easy step.

The chance of you sending a script to the BBC and them making it is tiny if not non-existent.  Think about it as if you were an actor, you would do plays, do commercials, do one lines, student films, short films, go to audition after audition, make contacts within the industry and then when you made it everyone would say “you came from nowhere.” No one, not even writers come from nowhere, they will always have a body of produced work behind them.

As writers we need think more like actors, but as is quite often the case, we writers are perhaps not so pushy, we are use to working alone tapping at our keyboard and not selling ourselves and our scripts. We have dreams of crafting a Lord of the Rings epic before ever producing a short film. We also think that writing is easy, and never learn the craft of good story telling that is led by emotion and not events (it doesn’t help that so much out there is dross anyway).

If you want to write, start off small, with sketches that can be filmed or performed by sketch groups (Messers of Comedy and Stephens and Brooks are two groups that will accept scripts). Move up to one act plays, there are many directors and actors out there desperate to perform since they need the experience too. Once you are getting work seen you can get an agent and then you can get your scripts read by people who matter.  If a script is submitted to a company by an agent it will be read, if not, it will sit on a pile and may get read. An alternate route is to get into Soap, start off as a runner and work your way up through the ranks – it maybe a more reliable root, but perhaps nowhere near as creatively fulling.

I guess the bottom line is you need to write and get things produced rather than letting sit in a draw.  Easy things to get produced are short films and sketches and with modern distribution methods provided by the the net a lot of people get the opportunity to see it.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in London Comedy Writers Meeting, My Writing | 1 Comment »

Red Planet Prize – Dress Rehearsal

Monday, July 26th, 2010

I had hoped to get this out much sooner, but better late than never.  I have before on this blog discussed my own troubles with those precious top ten pages. I have even looked at some examples of great openings.  The Red Planet Prize (and many readers) judge a script on the first ten pages (although a script reader friend of mine says you can tell bad script much quicker than that).  The top ten has to set up the characters, the conflict, the story, the goals, set up the world and establish the style.  It is a lot to ask for and it needs to flow.

In this meeting of the London Comedy Writers the main issues saw the principle dilemma of the script not being readily established, we were introduced to characters, but we had no idea what was at stake. In another script there was a rush to get so much information in that the lack of planning showed up, we were bombard with scenes that would have played better being shown over a larger sum of pages.  This is often what happens in a unplanned first draft when all the ideas are bouncing around trying to get onto the page.

The best example came from Robin Bailes‘ “Empire”, this was possibly one of my favourite things I have seen in the group in a while. In his first ten pages he fully established a world, what was at stake in the episode and set up the themes for a whole series. The flaw in the script was weighting of the stories, it was unclear who the main character was and what the main story was.  Since one character was so extrovert and controlling he tended to dominate the scenes taking focus from a character who had higher emotional stakes. For a successful script we need to be able to move beyond the mcguffin and identify what the emotional journey is, what does that character have to learn and what do they stand to lose if they don’t.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in London Comedy Writers Meeting | Comments Off

10% insperation – 90% re-write

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Thinking we cracked the story at the end of my last blog post, it still took a few days to bash the story into shape and get a consensus from the holy trinity that makes up the writing trio.

Finally it was over to me.

Armed with an all new storyline fleshed out with emotional ins and outs I sat down to tackle the new A-story a gusto usually reserved for a last minute mid-night cram session. Throwing the other plots to the side I concentrated solely on the main story that had proven to be such a bitch to get right in the previous weeks.The first step was to take the last draft and throw it out. Start on page one. Start on a blank page. Starting rebuilding the script from the foundations up.

Thankfully, far from being daunting, it was liberating, I was free to explore new areas, new sides of characters and all new scenes. The fact that the re-writing went so fast and so effortlessly is always a good sign, suddenly characters that just reacted to events were now motivated to change them.

Taking the weekend to do other things I returned to the script fresh on Monday morning and read through what was now a faster paced, more emotive script. It was also a script that had about 10% of the last draft remaining in it. Having worked on the script for some months and thinking it was close to what it needed to be, it can be a daunting prospect but throw so much away. What made this easy was knowing that the script is better for it. I know these characters so much better now and just by putting them into a scene I know what they will do.

There is still a bumpy road ahead and there is every chance that many lines I have written will be dropped in favour of better ones, but I am pumped and ready for action. Speaking of which…

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in My Writing | Comments Off

Questionable Character

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

After all the work we put into developing our series, we are still surprised by the revelations we have and the mistakes we made.  First we had to re-write a major A story in episode 3, episode 1 needed re-constructive surgery on the first ten pages and the main character in episode 2 was woefully underwritten.  Since I have already blogged about episode 3, today I will turn to episode 2.

Episode 2

On reading the new draft we were struck by how absent the main character was in the script. So we went back over the pages tracking what the character did and how he was feeling in each scene and how he moved the story forward.  Taking those story notes a redraft was done and we still had the same problem. Using Final Draft’s statistic feature we were able to identify that that main character was talking for about 10% of the script, while his friend clocked in at 20% of the script.  Imagine Robin over shadowing Batman to that extent and you understand why this is an unacceptable situation. Now we started to question whether we had a bigger issue, did we need to rewrite the storyline or were we missing something.

Before sitting down to write all our storylines we spent many weeks crafting well rounded characters.  Sadly for you, our technique is a trade secret that shall only be released when I am drunk and good luck trying to understand me then. However, put basically we try to explore what the character would be like in different situations. So meeting someone for the first time would he be cocky or shy, when things are going well what are the things the character does to ensure that state. All of that provides a great tool when writing, but a problem arises from characters who are more introverted. For the character in question we had used words like ‘shy’, ‘avoid’, ‘ wet’, ‘doesn’t speak up’, ‘good listener’, ‘doubting’, ‘sensitive’ to describe him; many of these words are very inactive making it difficult for us to do much with the character. So we went back to drawing board  to explore ways we could make him active.  So ‘avoidance’ became ‘avoidance by distraction’, ‘doesn’t speak up’ became ‘ struggles to speak up’.  Then knowing the character is heavily defined by his imagination we looked at how that manifested itself in good ways bad ways.  So his imagination when used for good becomes ‘enchanting’, when used for bad it becomes  ‘makes a crisis out of drama’ or he becomes a ‘romantic fantasist’.  All these new words gave us more character to play with making him drive the plot rather than just getting pulled along by the louder characters.

So all that sounds easy, but what you miss is how much we fight over words. ‘Enchanting’ for example was a big battle, we came up with words like ‘captivating’, ‘enrapturing’, ‘magical’ but none of these words said what we wanted.  The idea was that character’s imagination is not for show, but people are drawn to him.  The other words suggested hinted at manipulation, we didn’t want people trapped by his imagination, rather we wanted the mesmerised, they could leave any time, but they don’t want to. Take that debate and now apply that to every word we came up with and you start to understand why takes a day… or not.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in My Writing | Comments Off

Graham Does Writing is proudly powered by WordPress, Install WordPress. web hosting
Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).

Privacy Policy