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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.

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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.

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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.

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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…

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Is Good, Good Enough

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

I was hoping to write a article that followed up on my previous blog that covered the importance of the first ten pages, but what at first seemed like a simple correction rapidly began to unravel.  The more the thread was pulled the bigger the hole became until the spine of the script collapsed and I was faced with the prospect of massive re-writes.

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.

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Tessa, Adam and webisodes

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

This week at the London Comedy Writers we read the first 5 episodes of Brett Snelgrove’s webseries Tessa and Adam.  A simple two hander exploring the relationship between a Brit boy and a Dutch dame.  A strong enough premise, but one that needs to focus more on who the characters are rather than the situations they find themselves in.  A key difference is a recurring sketch and webisode will be depth of the characters. I would write more about Tessa and Adam, but Brett has written an excellent blog on what he got from the meeting, so you should read that instead.

Instead I will look at the debate about the nature of a webisode and the hell it is.

It is hardly surprising people don’t know what exactly a webisode is, despite the term being around for over 10 years Websters only got around to acknowledging it 2009.  Basically put a webisode is a  single episode of a series that first aired over the internet, either streamed or downloaded. If you have a whole bunch of webisodes then you have yourself a webseries. It is generally accepted that a webisode will have runtime of 4-15 minutes, but I suspect that this will continue to increase as web TV gains in popularity. Reasons for the short length at the have been to do with budgets, YouTube limits and bandwidth (ie the speed it takes to download an episode). Broadband is now standard and streaming full length shows is no longer a problem, you only have to look at the popularity of BBC iplayer to see that. YouTube now allows longer videos and there are other sites that will stream and host material. Finally cost. This use to be a barrier in creating good quality shows, but digital technology is now much cheaper. For £10,000 you can buy yourself better equipment than is used currently on many mainstream TV shows. Mobisodes are the same thing, although originally coined  as show for mobile phones the prevalence of the internet on phones has rendered this a thing of the past.

The next thing you have to understand is that a webisode is a broad term, it is basically a TV show on the web.  This means a webisode can be drama, comedy, documentary, hosted, political, animated and even reality.

Knowing this, this should free you up in your writing.  The web provides a massive opportunity for people to break through and get noticed.  Distribution which has been for so long a barrier creatives has now been shattered. A BBC3 show will be considered a hit for topping 2 million viewers.  Meanwhile this episode of Fred has a staggering 37 million views, what makes this more shocking is that Fred is currently the second most subscribed YouTube channel in the world and you have probably never heard of it, much like the number one channel Nigahiga. This shows that your videos don’t need to go viral to be a success, you create characters that people like and then tell interesting stories, the audience will find show if it is what they are looking for.

Hopefully we will be seeing more webisodes in the future as this is an exciting medium ready to be exploited.

So in parting I will leave you with a few different series that are floating around on the web.

You Suck at Photoshop – masquerading as tool to teach photoshop you can enjoy the host’s life fall apart over the series.

The Guild – Streamy award winning sitcom.

Gemini Division – Produced by NBC as exclusive online content the sci-fi drama stars Rosario Dawson and a ton of product placement.

Hardly Working – What goes behind the scenes at College Humour.

Red vs Blue – Now starting up on its 11th season, this web series follows 2 opposing soldiers in the Halo universe.

DJ School – ComComedy launches their first webseries, with hopefully more on the way.

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Ides of March

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

So with time to catch up on what we wished we had done over Christmas tonight we all exchanged scripts which makes for some interesting reading and a reality check.  As the agreed deadline approached the heads bowed and the laptop keyboards received more abuse than they had in weeks.  “Can you guys touch type? Because I totally can.” was one of the few utterances in otherwise concentrated silence.

Deadlines do work damn it.  Maybe we should have hourly deadlines to encourage this frantic pace.  For the first time in a long time all three of thought we did a good day’s work. Yay us.

Not only that, we are also talking major deadlines for completing this thing. We are now publicly stating this thing will be ready in March.

Tomorrow morning we will sit down and have good read. Hopefully we will see a great story arch spanning 3 episodes and we will know we are one step closer to closing the gap on the structure issues and we can move on start putting in the gloss and sparkle.

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January 2009 – A Flashback

Monday, January 4th, 2010

About one year ago we returned from our Christmas break, December had been a relatively unproductive month, but before we parted we set some homework.  It was light homework, basically each of us had to write up in detail one storyline. Now the hard work had already been done, the story had been fleshed out into bullet points, so it was just a case of expanding on that.  When it came to Monday morning I panicked, I had done nothing.  I quickly sat down at my computer and tapped away so I would have something to show.

When we all met up I handed it over knowing it was piss poor, but something that could be built on.  Damn, someone had written it all up, but phew someone hadn’t. For me that was a turning point, I felt I had let the team down by not putting in the required effort, the fact that others had put less effort in didn’t help either.

So out of frustration a couple of us sat down and crafted a contract jam packed full of our hopes and dreams for what working in a group should really be like. Some of the stuff sounds crazy and may only have relevance to one of us; seriously “refreshments that match people’s requirements” relates to soya milk, hows that for picky.

  • WORK HOURS
    • The day starts at 10.30 and finishes 5.30.
    • Lunch break is 1 hour.
    • Breaks are permitted and rightfully needed, but shouldn’t get out of control.
  • HOME OWNER RESPONCIBILITIES
    • Sets the schedule for day.
    • Keeps order and times breaks.
    • Takes notes (as best as situation allows).
    • Provides refreshments that match people’s requirements.
    • Provides 1 meal a week.
    • Makes sure that everyone synchs up at end of the day and that notes are cleaned up and e-mailed that night (after all, they don’t have to spend the next ½ hour getting home)
  • SEMANTICS AND DISAGREEMENTS
    • In the case of ongoing disagreements someone may call “Semantics” in order to get the point resolved.
    • Disagreeing parties must listen to the mediator who will give each person time to express there point before making a ruling.
    • The ruling does not have to be agreed to, but must be honoured and respected so the process can move forward.
  • DEADLINES
    • Mini deadlines must be set on a regular bases.
    • Deadlines must be agreed on by all parties
    • All parties must do their best to reach said deadlines even if this means longer hours or homework.
  • HOMEWORK
    • On occasion homework may be set, either to help reach goals or because independent work must be set.
    • Homework must be presented without excuse.  Even if the work is incomplete it must still be handed over to fellow writers so they can keep up to date with the progress.
  • WRITERS BLOCK
    • The primary aim is to keep writing and keeping hitting deadlines. Even if work ends up not being great it must still be carried out so that least there is a base to build on.
    • When all seems lost the writers should call a “fuck it day” where they get out do something totally unrelated to the script to clear their head and have fun.
  • NETWORKING
    • We must build and maintain contacts within the industry, this includes writers, directors, producers, agents and actors etc..
    • This is also linked socialising and seeing screenings, talks and other networking opportunities.
    • Maintain a database of contacts, what we know about them, what our relationship is and how suitable they are to the project.
  • FUTURE GROUP PROJECTS
    • The ground work for future projects must run in the background of the writer’s mind.
    • Keep notes of any new ideas or expansion of old ones.
    • This should over time build into collection of treatments that are ready to go if requested.
    • Future projects must never come at the expense of the current project.
  • EARNING MONEY AND SIDE PROJECTS
    • While the project is important, earning money and fulfilling other creative outlets should not be ignored.
    • There has to be an understanding that time may have to be taken out for work.
    • These dates should be stated as early as possible to aid with future planning and forewarning of any extensions should not be left to the day.
    • There should be a clear understanding of the stake in any creative outlets and what everyone’s roles is how they are expected to be involved and treated.  Unlike the main project where everyone has equal footing side projects can be weighted differently, but never outshine the main project.
  • CONSEQUENCES and REWARDS
    • Failure to meet any of the above criteria will be met with a negative mark
    • MVP awarded to anyone who has gone above the call of duty will result in a positive mark.
    • At the end of the week the writer with the best rating gets to pick his/her choice for days at their own house.  Second place gets to pick two days and the loser gets what is left.
    • Trading for days is also allowed at the discretion of the individual writers.
  • SOCIALISING
    • In order to remember why are doing this we must do things other than work.
    • Orange Wednesdays – seeing films on regular bases.
    • Seeing theatre.
    • PS3 tournaments.
    • Sunday Roasts
    • Playing games.

All in all I think we stuck to most of this and it really helped solidify our commitment to each other and the project.  We met up again today after our Christmas break and it will be interesting to pull this out and reaffirm our commitment to one another.

Looking at the contract now it still embodies my hopes for the project and our working relationship. anyone who says that working other people is easy, are filthy filthy liars. It is hard work, you need to swallow your ego and when everyone has an opinion that is hard to do. You need to take the time to understand what is happening their lives and know that perhaps getting this monster done is not the most important thing in the world.

A year on we are still hard at it. Looking back at the trails, tribulations, fears and tears I can say that it was worth it. Although we may fight, bitch, argue, back stab, hair pull, these are a couple of my finest friends.

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New Year’s Revolution

Friday, January 1st, 2010

So December with all its glittering Christmas distractions made the end of the year slightly unproductive, which even when looking at what we have created over the past year it was still a downer way to end the year. Although I could blah on about last years regrets and missteps, I think that sort of thinking is so the Noughties.  We are in the… Tennies(?) now.

So here is the deal, the coffers in the kitty are low and I am really looking at 3 months to make this series happen. Don’t worry I am not so deluded that in those three months I think we will finish everything and sign a lucrative deal for 5 series with the BBC.  However, I do think we will finish the scripts, get real readings done, put together a kick ass pitch document and blitz anyone with money, power, vision and talent.

So this means no more slacking, focus all the way.  To help I have brought on a mentor of sorts.  He has one role and that is to demand pages everyday and slap me round the face when they don’t come.

In our small group we have often mentioned this lack of an authority figure as one of the problems we have had in not getting work done at a pace we feel we can realistically achieve. We look at the days where we have been mega productive and ask why can’t we do this everyday? The bottom line is we are our own bosses, and unfortunately we are the bosses you would love to have.

Want to start work late because it was cold outside? Fine.

Need to leave early to get ready for that dinner date at 9? No problem.

Want to sit around and play computer games? Excellent idea, we need to take a break from all this work anyway.

All of that aside, it takes a lot of discipline to do what we have done on spec. We could have rushed this through, but then it would be the same sort of stories and characters we started this to avoid. No one is paying us wages and yet we have found a way to scrape by to fulfil our dreams of being writers.

So roll on the Tennies and may they be far more productive and lucrative than the Noughties.

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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.

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