“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.

We quickly identified the problem with the script being related to not seeing a particular character’s point of view.  The original solution was to give her more of a voice, however this just led her to looking at the action and having some kind of emotional response to it.  She wasn’t really being active and she had no problem to solve or lessons to learn.  We took the story out of the script, writing each beat up and then tried to figure out the story based on what we already had. When that failed to bring about results we started to explore what stories we wanted to tell with the character. We threw up ideas, from the predictable to the bizarre, we looked at her wants, her needs, what we wanted her to learn and what dilemmas we wanted to place before her. Ideas that worked tended to be dull, ideas that were exciting were struck down for not being emotionally driven.  Often the stakes at risk were not big enough or emotional enough. For example do we really care if someone loses a job they don’t really like?

We often talk about how our scripts have to be the best that they can be and that ‘good’, is not good enough, but we have been at this for so long that we are rapidly getting to a point where we need to wrap this thing up. We had pretty much spent two weeks trying to figure this story out with all the false leads thrown in front of us until finally yesterday after another day of writing up possibilities on the board I started to think of the quote – “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”. Maybe good is good enough. I dismissed it just as quickly as I could no longer ignore the problem we had exposed, it had to be solved and a plaster was not going to cut it. Stuck with not even a hint of the right direction to go in, I suggested we go for a walk.  Group breaks are not something we tend to take, mainly because we are never ready at the same time, but standing at a dead end we all agreed.

On the walk we discussed what wasn’t working and why we couldn’t crack this story.  We boiled it right down to the most basic story.

Act I – Perfect world

Act II – Shattered world

Act III – Repaired but new world

Understanding that, we tried to elaborate on these ideas and things quickly started falling into place.  We got back to the whiteboard and threw up the ideas and started to flesh things out.  We ended up using many of ideas the we had discussed over the previous days, but we identified the wants the needs, we knew the moments of choice and stakes for the first time seemed high.

We are still not there.  The second act still needs more exploration and elaboration, but we certainly have a beginning, middle and an end.

Of course we will rack our brains for reasons why this took so long.  Were we too tied to the story, or the restrictions of the plotlines that follow in future episodes? Were we too close to the characters or the script? Did we talk too much, did we get to complicated, too abstract, did we not take breaks to allow our minds to process information? Were there too many cooks? Who knows. When we nail that story lining will be much, much easier.

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.