HOW TO WRITE A DRAMA SERIES TELEVISION OUTLINE

I am fresh back from an amazing time at The London Screenwriter’s Festival, where I did four things of note:

1/ Run my session ‘Sizzle and Substance’with Bafta winning writer and show-runner Barbara Machin and Series Producer of Holby City Simon Harper, about how to navigate the hinter lands between commercialism and creativity in writing and creating series television drama.

2/ Contribute to the session run by the life force that is Pilar Alessandra about how to manage the work/family/life balance.

3/ Flash my cleavage to about 200 people as I clumsily navigated my bra; clipping on my mic before my first session.

4/ Wish Hollywood Legend Joel Schumacher luck, until I realised who he was and attempted to remedy this by adding, rather breathlessly, ‘but you; of course, don’t need it’.

So it was, all round, a rather lovely time.

But what I discussed, with the Prince of Holby City and the Queen Bee of Waking the Dead; the knotty issue in popular television long-form drama, of how to strike a balance between the art form of story telling and the need to keep feeding the ratings machine, still remains fresh in my mind.

For those of you that weren’t there, I wish to share with you some thoughts.

At the Sizzle v Substance Session, we discussed, amongst many other questions:

* What makes a successful drama series/serial?
The answer in a nutshell is the show that has at the point of its creation, the right balance between fresh, creativity and hard-nosed commercialism.
Scott and Bailey.
Shameless.
Broadchurch.

* What works best – pure art or artifice?
Plunging into the nut bowl again; the answer is a combination of both. All successful long form dramas, (essentially those that are episodic and repeating) need a big fat dollop of juicy story at their centre and living in this world, there must be credible, developed, three dimensional characters. They also need a structure, a framework, the scaffolding in place to hold up the creative components of the drama.

Long-form television drama is that illusive hybrid of hard-nosed commercialism and genuine artifice.

With the need to combine the artist and the artisan in mind, when writing successful television drama, here is a story for you:

Back in 1999 I was asked to Produce Holby City series 2. It was expected of me to turn this show around. Holby was then (and still is) a great show, but it was not getting the projected ratings expected of a prime time drama scheduled in the family slot. So I did what any sane producer would do in the circumstances. I appealed to the writers to give me great story.

Within the medical remit of the show (then solely Cardio Thorasic so any condition pertaining to the upper body and heart) writers had to come up with story lines that made a wide demographic sit up and take notice. Cynically, I said we would ‘wrap the medical around’ the essential drive of the stories I was looking for. That is, those that had an emotional heart (forgive the pun) and truth about them. This, in the most part, worked.

But the best episodes of my series, those that gained a 9 million rating and peaked at 10 million at Christmas, where the ones where I had managed to engineer stories that were essentially medical in nature, but those that resonated wider; caused emotional ripples through a variety of characters’ lives.

The example I can give here is the story about a young girl who, suffering from Cystic Fibrosis, had to have both her parents donate a portion of their lung to save their daughter’s life. The father, it turned out, could not contribute. He was not a blood match. And so this story ballooned from a standard ‘I will save you in this medical emergency because I love you’ to a story about long kept family secrets, betrayal and ultimately a fragile re-union between the girl and her real father.

This is an example of a story that has a commercial appeal, and also an emotional root. The Sizzle is there, (the dynamics between a family at war whilst a daughter is dying) but also the Substance (the story ticks all the boxes of a long running drama with a medical precinct).

It’s a knotty problem this. The dual-need to create something fresh, new, different, creative, from a genuinely artistic, credible foundation and that need to also to make this new thing, this new dramatic idea, into a saleable, water-tight, competitive format.

Writers of television drama, have to be multi-facetted by nature.

They are both the creator, or artist, and then the draftsman; they must draw up a blue print for this drama series; make sense of the original artistic splurgings. Then they don the Plumber’s hat. Because they also need to be a hands on practical sort. The sort who can work out all the interconnections between story lines and know how best to maximise the junctions of all those story pipes laid down.

If need be, a television writer needs to know how to make their drama series – flush – or actually work.

You are Jackson Pollock – you splash paint around – but you are also required to bring a bit of Escher to the table; clear thinking, good with line, expert at someone who knows how the bigger picture fits together and to know how to disguise; like all the best craftspeople do, the joints, the joins, the ugly interiors of the drawers and secret compartments of the piece you are crafting out of thin air.

So we need structure as well as innovation in our work as writers and producers of television drama.

Those of you that have bought/shared/looked over someone else’s shoulder whilst they read my book on writing for television; not surprisingly called Writing for Television – Series, Serials and Soaps http://www.amazon.co.uk/Writing-Television-Yvonne-Grace/dp/1843443376/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1400840643&sr=1-7&keywords=writing+for+television – will know that in those pages I go into detail about treatments, story line documents and story lines. I go on a lot about using documents and how to do so to make your stories sing as you write your television scripts – I mention the Series Outline, but I do not go much further than that.

I am remedying this here.

How you write a good SERIES OUTLINE for television:

This document is not a dry thing. It is an exciting, vibrant, layered piece of writing that shows, without the use of mirrors or smoke, what your series drama is all about.

It is a microcosm of all your musings; a distillation of the series as a whole. Like the treatment that goes before this, (in terms of your long running story’s development) it condenses the themes, messages, tone, characters, world, main narrative arcs and episode content down to a manageable number of pages.

It is an extension of your idea, but it is not a sentence by sentence, beat by beat description of your series drama.

Do not confuse your SERIES OUTLINE with an EPISODE OUTLINE or, what is called A BEAT SHEET in feature film circles. We use Beat Sheet too now, more often, in television, (trying to keep it real you know) and I like the term because it does what it says on the tin. A Beat Sheet is just that. Story; laid out, beat by beat.

Producers don’t need to see this in your Series Outline.

They want to see and understand and know the following things from your document:

1/ What is the world in which the story is set? Is it an engaging world and how is it so?

2/ Who lives in this world and what are the characters about? What makes them tick? Are these people identifiable? Who will we love? Who will we hate? Who will we hate loving?

3/ What is the content in broad strokes of the first (pilot) episode? What is the content (again, excitingly, enticing told, not beat by beat) of the middle episode and what again, is the end episode’s content? How does this start? How does this series end?

4/ SET PIECES. Producers of tv drama LOVE a set piece. What is the image, the exchange, the moment, the climax of a story line in each of the episodes you are outlining here?
In every episode, in every long form drama format worth its salt, there will be one moment, one image, one sequence that sticks in your mind, while the credits roll and beyond.

Similarly, having read your Series Outline, there will be (if you get it right) at least one singular, memorable moment, or series of moments that stay with the Producer/Commissioner. You need to make sure you have these in your Series Outline.

We are dealing with images, albeit ones told in words; black and white on the page.
Visualise your stories and your Series Outline will come alive and sell your series for you.

There are practical elements to get across in this document too:

1/ Setting 2/ Number of characters 3/ Period or no? 4/ Genre 5/ Episode numbers/format length

Tone. Use the hybrid terminology here. It always works. Sci Fi / Peaky Blinders (that would be an awful show but you get the idea) Downton Abbey/Rom Com (similarly; bound to be terrible, but we know what it is about in two five syllables.)

If, in the development process, you have got to the Series Outline stage, chances are, someone with potential money to make it and a potential route to transmit it, is interested in your idea.

Don’t give them a reason to say no.

Make them fall in love with the sheer story content, the characters, the set pieces, the tone and the overall message of your drama series/serial.

They will, from this moment on, try to make their budget fit your ideas.

Get busy.

Get writing.

My group Script Advice Writer’s Room is great resource for writers of the big and small screen. Writers all actually; there are poets and novelists amongst us – writers who write or radio, theatre as well as television and pen screenplays. Join me and them, here https://www.facebook.com/groups/237330119115/

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THE BBC WRITERS’ FESTIVAL 2014 – From a Writer’s Perspective

I asked Jayne Lake; writer, twitterer, facebook member of my group Script Advice Writer’s Room and all round good egg, to pen me a blog about what she took from the BBC Writers’ Festival 2014. Here it is….

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The fifth BBC TV Drama Writers’ Festival came to Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, a one-time Victorian wheat store transformed into uber-cool lecture rooms and rubber clad studios for arty types, it’s industrial strength air con much needed – by me.

Kate Rowland and her team sprinkled fairy dust over the unrivalled schedule, I made a point of selecting all the available sessions about ‘women on the box’. Apart from the short notice withdrawal of doyenne Sally Wainwright, this year’s strong female line-up would not disappoint.

Keynote If Content is King, Where’s our Crown? – Like an entertaining fruit and veg wholesaler Tony Jordan outlined established and newly forming markets for drama output and gave us his rally call to feed the ever-hungry story beast. A community of writers drawn together to listen, learn, share and contribute, we are all connected, he tells us ‘[by] story struggling to tear itself from our souls’. Feeling a smidgeon taller, I floated off to my first sesh, my life’s goal to: ‘create something extraordinary’ tucked under my heavy-duty bra strap. Can-do-will-do-stuff indeed.

Developing Your Character – Writer Danny Brocklehurst discussed his writing process behind Exile and disgraced journo Tom Ronstadt (John Simm) – a character who returns to his backwater hometown to discover his once brutal father in the grip of Alzheimer’s. It’s the way his character relates in any given moment that hooks his audience Danny argues. There is a mystery to solve – why did a once beloved father violently banish his son? But whilst plot is crucial, for Danny character always lies at the starting block and at the heart. In Barbara Machin’s long-runner Waking the Dead the emphasis shifts. Character is the ‘elephant in the room’, what’s not said speaking volumes about protagonists the audience comes to love over time. Her characters develop in ‘slow burn… [they] occupy a deeper emotional place… [big] event moments allow new and exciting chinks in character’. Danny talked about writing self-indulgent ‘physical’ directions in the first draft to inform himself as much as anything else. Subsequent drafts stripped back to allow the actors and director to do the work. Someone asked Danny and Barbara to name memorable leading female characters in British drama. Time was up, a session for next year, or the year after, perhaps.

Women in TV: Unfinished Business – Head of Drama Scotland Chris Aird chaired a superb discussion on women in TV. Pier Wilkie and China Moo Young (Director/Producer-Director) and Sally Abbott (Writer) talked about working at the BBC and in the independent sector, giving anecdotes about obstructive others and critical selves. Sally described her early battles with self-confidence until a cathartic light bulb moment freed her from a creative cul-de-sac. Although her juggle with deadlines, kids and a rescue dog is not easy, she knows the value of her own voice now and rightly excels in it with the support of her family.

Pier Wilkie talked about the huge financial pressures on drama production. When she’s looking to hire the stakes are enormous, she needs ‘experience’ first. Conversely women can’t get experience as writers, producers and directors unless someone is prepared to take a financial (and I might argue here) conscious punt on an unknown quantity. There was a rumbling anxiety in the room – won’t moaning about inequality alienate the powers that be? To be valued in the industry, women need ‘an assured and calm and measured’ outlook – nothing divaesque!

Do women only write ‘domestic’ or are there any opportunities in genre? A mixed response from the panel but isn’t domestic writing just screaming babies, preeclampsia, dirty nappies? Is it that little show with nine million viewers Call The Midwife or maybe it’s Pier’s much acclaimed BBC 3 Murdered By My Boyfriend – both dramas depicting the stuff of life and death and everything in between. More next year on what women write/want to write. Maybe.

Do We Need Treatments? – A blessed rest from all this angsty feminist malarchy! Bryan Elsley’s entertaining take on the writer’s roadmap, he argues we need treatments to encapsulate the semi-coherent ‘idea’. The first draft treatment is the ‘what if’ document, the blueprint created by the ‘organized magician’ within. This is the place where Bryan feels most confident but for the production company the fully worked version is the solid thing that says this is ‘our property’, our development ‘asset’. Bryan’s advice is that the exec wants pure story. Some shot based treatments work well but may be too directorial? The exec’s bus or tube ride is a finite thing so as a guide; fit your story into his/her journey to work. A narrative based approach enables a quick read. For series treatments each ep should imply a defining event best embedded in its title. Set out the arc, the movements and connections between the episodes. Name characters with a brief description and how they relate to one another. Write the ‘out’, or in other words: Why you are the writer for this project and where your work sits in the market. Clarify the thing that is worth the money creatively and spiritually, then reduce the entire document by 10%! Don’t reference other shows – your story is ‘unique’. Be illusive. Tonal. Box clever.

Keynote The Two Tones – Tony J in relaxed conversation with Director General Tony Hall who affirmed his commitment to creativity, diversity and risk taking across drama at the BBC. Did you know that, despite his previous gig at The Royal Opera House, Tony Hall’s a real man of the people now he’s binge watched Happy Valley? Yay! The ‘Two Tone’s’ conversation flowed, Liverpudlian roots and regenerated accents made them blood brothers right? Tony J slipped comfortably back into expletive heavy. Tony H didn’t seem to mind and I felt assured this effusive, passionate bloke liked what we do and he wouldn’t let us down.

How I write – Sarah Phelps’s research task for BBC 1 six-parter The Crimson Field was gargantuan, not least because much of what we think we know about The Great War is so misshapen by the ‘heroic lies’ of history, mediated accounts of the men and women on the Western Front. Sarah’s main resource came in the form of Lyn MacDonald’s The Roses of No Man’s Land, a contemporary account of the women who volunteered to serve in the medical tents not a stones throw away from the trenches. So much material was handed over to Sarah that she was oftentimes overwhelmed, she made hard decisions about what to read and what to include whilst still staying true to her raw writers voice and trying to keep her sanity! For an hour Sarah had us spellbound as she recounted anecdote after anecdote about these brave women and men’s lives, many of whom found themselves transported from their genteel Edwardian British society into the bloody heart of the first world war. Off by heart, Sarah concluded her talk with Thomas Hardy’s 1916 poem In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’. Beyond moving.

Face to Face with Abi Morgan – I wanted to know every juicy detail, who, after all, wouldn’t want her life? Abi left university and got work imputing data about the building she worked in. Aside from the computer, she was entirely on her own in this empty office block; her employers didn’t seem to care what she did or how long she took to do the job. She wrote her first screenplay and didn’t input data. She got paid. For FIVE YEARS. It was great, she achieved tons. She was horrendously lonely. Today Abi has a partner and two children. When the children were small she worked from home but they’re older now, more distracting. Abi is currently working in an office at Kudos. Undisturbed. Abi’s working day is from 9 – 7. Sometimes this is filled to busting writing and sometimes she gets distracted by Solitaire Blitz. Yes! Yes! Yes!

Abi writes what she finds ‘profoundly moving’ and advises writers to ask of themselves always: ‘what is this story about?…[And] give something of yourself’. Have an outline, keep poetics minimal, tone is paramount. Abi doesn’t read back her early drafts she just clicks ‘send’! An audible incredulity (on my part covetous!) spread amongst the audience, this writer obviously is self-aware, majorly confident (not arrogant, I did not find her so) and brave. In the Q&A someone asked what work she was most proud of writing? And I was knocked sideways by her response…. introspective for a moment: ‘pride is something I find hard to associate with what I do’. What!? With such an influential body of work behind and undoubtedly in front of her how on earth can this possibly be? I may have misunderstood my heroine here but why the hell shouldn’t she be proud of what she’s achieved? It seems that women writers, even at the very pinnacle of the industry recoil from publicly blowing their own trumpet. Love her.

Keynote Unstoryfiable – Documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis believes story is in mortal decline, news on a continuous loop, nothing resolves. Google, Facebook, Twitter and Cisco reducing everything to a manipulated, homogenous stream, the worlds financial markets unelected and unchecked. Curtis calls this the ‘algorithm loop of news, power, money, media and [subsequently] STORY’. I understood in principle where this guy was coming from, I felt for him – for us, but rather than be gloomy I should go do something about this heinous state of affairs shouldn’t I? I mean I should write something… write something really ‘extraordinary’.

Adjusts bra strap. Clicks send.

Thank you Jayne for sharing your experience of the Festival with the Script Advice readership.
Contact me: http://www.scriptadvice.co.uk for help with your television writing and buy my book on the subject http://www.amazon.co.uk/Writing-Television-Yvonne-Grace/dp/1843443376/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1400840643&sr=1-7&keywords=writing+for+television

THE AMBER BLOG – How To Break The Rules And Get Away With It

Amber Ending Has Viewers Red With Rage: How Not To Break The Rules!

I have Charles Harris, writer-director and director of Euroscript, on my blog today. Charles has made award-winning programmes for TV and cinema. His blog is at http://www.charles-harris.co.uk

You may have noticed a great noise on social media over the ending of RTE’s successful mini-series, Amber, which finished on UK TV last week. And here’s a massive SPOILER ALERT. Because many people took great exception to the ending of an otherwise powerful four-part series about a missing teenager, while others (the producers included) defended it strongly as being a refreshing change, and to discuss it properly I’m going to have to refer to what happened and what didn’t happen. So, if you haven’t finished the final part yet, you may not want to read the rest now.

For those of you who are still with me, Amber broke one of the fundamental rules of crime drama. It didn’t solve the mystery. In episode one, 14 year-old Amber Bailey goes missing, sparking a nationwide search, and episode four ends with no further understanding of what happened to her.

Red with rage

Cue general outrage. One reviewer was “red with rage” at the non-ending. http://www.sundayworld.com/top-stories/columnists/daragh-keany/amber-ending-has-me-red-with-rage Many viewers felt they’d invested four weeks in the story, only to be cheated. Many asked for their licence fee back, one asking RTE if they wanted to pay “in one lump sum or weekly or monthly payments”.
However, cast and crew defended the lack of ending as being refreshing, with RTE tweeting “So Amber was never found. This is the reality for many families. Sometimes there are no simple answers.” http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/twitter-erupts-over-vague-amber-ending-as-stars-defend-it-for-being-real-to-life-29943468.html
True. But only half the story. Because a TV series is not real life, and a drama makes a contract with the viewer. That contract says there will be an ending to the mystery. If you break that contract, you risk having your head chewed off.

Can’t you be fresh and different?

But, hang on a minute. Surely there’s room for fresh and different endings. Does everything have to be fixed and formulaic in TV? Surely there are screen stories that don’t have a neat ending?
Yes, no and yes. The great Kurosawa movie Rashomon told the story of a killing from four angles, and never said which, if any, was true. The TV series The Shield ended without bent copper Vic Mackey getting arrested. The true crime story Zodiac didn’t end with the killer getting caught.

But here’s the thing. You can’t just cut out the expected ending and expect the audience not to get annoyed. It’s like shoplifting in front of the closed circuit cameras and expecting not to be caught. You have to be a bit cleverer than that. This is where RTE and lead writers Rob Cawley and Paul Duane made their mistake.

How to break the rules and get away with it

So how do the others do it? If you’re going to break the rules, you need to (a) know the rule exists in the first place and (b) work hard to defuse the audience’s objections. Here are a few ways the great writers do it:

1. Tell the audience up front.
Rashomon, written by Ryûnosuke Akutagawa and Shinobu Hashimoto with Kurosawa, tells you right at the beginning that this is a perplexing mystery. The film starts at the end, and is told to us in flashback by a woodcutter and a priest who tell us in advance that the story is a confusing one that tests the priest’s faith. When that turns out to be true, we are not surprised or annoyed – it was what we bought into from the first.
Indeed, the whole story is about the impossibility of ever knowing the truth. In the same way, it wouldn’t have been difficult for the Amber writers to have made the impossibility of closure a central motif of the story all the way through.

2. Give the audience something better
We know that the story of Vic Mackey in The Shield is not going to end well. However it would be too neat for him to be killed. Too limp for him merely to be arrested. And too disappointing for him to get away scot-free. In event, what happens to him is worse that being arrested or killed would ever have been. (If you want to know, watch the series – it’s great. Or email me!)
Rashomon too would be too neatly tied up if we were ever told what really happened. The mystery is better.

3. Make sure there is a climax even so
Zodiac was based on the true story of unsolved serial killings. However, while it can’t tell us who the serial killer was, it can build to a satisfying emotional climax, which it does.
The big mistake the producers of Amber made IMHO is not so much not giving a neat ending as not giving us a climax at all! There is an attempt at a climax, when the distraught father risks his freedom to track down an Eastern European crime ring who’ve been kidnapping Western teenagers and using them for sex.
However for some impenetrable reason (artistic? financial?) the entire climax happens off-screen, while we wait for a phone to ring. Four dramatic episodes end with a damp squib.

The problem with Amber is not that it has an unconventional ending, it’s that the director and writers don’t know how to sell an unusual ending to the audience. Overall the series is excellent (aside from a rather silly subplot in episode three about a mobile phone) and well worth watching if you haven’t.
But a bit of understanding about how to break the rules could have made it historic.

If you enjoyed this article you can follow Charles at
Website: http://www.charles-harris.co.uk
Twitter: @chasharris
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/charlesharris008
LinkedIn: uk.linkedin.com/in/charlesharris01/

WRITING TO GET NOTICED: FIVE WAYS A WRITER CAN STAND OUT IN TELEVISION

 

 

 You have been writing for a while now;  honing your craft;  you are serious about being  a professional writer, one who gets paid for the scripts they produce and you have decided you want to be a Television Writer and As Soon As Possible.

There are doors in your way.

All of them closed right now.   And non open automatically.

Doors worth passing through are like that.  Doors that open automatically do so for a reason.

 

 

Supermarket doors want your money. Shopping Arcades make getting in, and spending money easier by whizzing open with lightening speed, sensing your approach ‘come in, who ever you are, come in come in’.

 

Televison doors are much more selective.

In my book;  Writing For Television; Series, Serials and Soaps I go into more detail as to how you can garner the skill base you need to get through that shut door and into a busy drama production office and so on to a show as a writer, but here for ease and quick reference, I set out the TOP FIVE WAYS to get seen, heard, and commissioned in television.

1/ BE TRUE TO YOUR OWN PERSONAL VOICE

I will take it as a given that you are writing every day.  You need to do this like breathing.  The writing muscle needs consistent and dedicated work outs to keep it in shape.  The way you look at the world, even at the most everyday things, is where your strength as a writer lies.  Only you can tell it how you see it.  So keep doing that every day.  And finish what you start.

2/ GET NETWORKING

There is no longer any excuse for any one of us to hide our talent or to shy away from the public eye.  If you want to be a professional writer working in television, you can be as retiring as you like in your personal life, but you owe it to your creative ability and desire to furnish yourself a healthy writing career, to be as open and as communicative as you can possibly be.  Getting the most out of the social networks available to us as switched on writers is key to getting heard and getting noticed.  There are people out there that can help you begin to push on that door, so make sure you connect with not only like-minded types on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace etc, but also have no fear in asking to connect with producers, script editors and established writers.  In my experience, most people, even if they are quite high up the television tree, are approachable and open to making contact with writers that are serious about what they do.  Just make sure you do the contacting with politeness and grace.

3/ GET UP TO SPEED

Don’t get found out.  Make sure, before you send your work out to people you have made contact with, that your script delivers the polished professional look that will be expected by the industry in general.  So it really is worth investing in a reputable script editing professional or script development exec (like myself!) to make sure your work cuts the mustard.  A professional script editor will be looking not only at the essential creative elements of your script (narrative, structure, characterisation, dialogue, tone, pace etc) but also will obliquely have noted in the first read, whether the layout meets the industry standard.

Layout, scene headings, scene description, page count, all these details are not what will get you a commission, should they be beautifully and correctly present in your script, but they will stop you being commissioned if they are not there at all.

So get your head around the nuts and bolts of script appearance and stick to the rules of script layout.  No point trying to re-invent the wheel when the wheel has been turning smoothly in this way for decades.

4/ BEAT THE ZEIGEIST

Television drama feeds off ideas.  Dramatic stories form the vital food group all television production and broadcasters need.  So the journey to the door, which we endeavour to open, begins with your idea.  Make it a commercially savvy one as well as being a creative and interesting one.

Television drama producers want to make money, appeal to a mass audience, deliver quality on time and to budget.  No one wants to lose money and fail the ratings war.  So ideas must be boyant, strong, and have a rock solid human appeal.

There is a reason why there is a steady stream of ‘precinct’ dramas like Holby City and Happy Valley on television.  Although these two examples are obviously clearly different creatures, they are formed from the same gene pool.  Their DNA is similar.  A format you can return to.  A strong set of characters to which we can relate.  Both prodcedural (one medical, one police) both informed and infused with relatable characters and cracking story lines that have immediate resonance and impact on a wide ranging audience demographic.

Often the strongest dramas on television are those that cover tried and tested ground but come at the subject from an oblique angle.

In television it is all about the angle.

In Broadchurch, Chris Chibnail cleverly focused on the impact the suspicious death of a child had on the community that child lived in.  In Last Tango In Halifax, the relationship between two oldies (not the most original idea) was explored to perfection by Sally Wainwright as she cast an unforgiving light on the pre-conceptions of the families involved.

If you are coming up with ideas that you then frustratingly see on screen; celebrate, don’t get bitter.  You are doing it right.  You have tapped into the Zeitgeist.  You just have to keep doing it because you will, eventually, be one step head of it, and that is just the right place to be for a television writer.

5/ RELIABLY DELIVER

So let’s say you have done what you once thought unthinkable, and walked through the door and a television person (script editor, producer, development script editor) is asking to see your work. This is now the time to shine.

Only deliver what they asked for.

Do it before they expect it, but once done, do not chase until at least 2 weeks have elapsed. Then do so politely and with an open mind.

If you said you were going to deliver a treatment with your script then make sure you have done.  And make no mistake here, treatments in television are not the chunky tomes they sometimes are in the film industry.  Keep your treatment (your selling document) as succinct and as interesting as you can.  I like to say 6 pages maximum.

Once comissioned, keep up the momentum.  You need to be the writer the industry see as both consistently good and reliably dependable. Be the writer everyone wants to commission.  No point in being tricky, difficult, vague or generally rubbish at meeting deadlines.  Be the good guy.

I hope you get to open those doors – the ones that are presently closed to you.  Use my book and blogs, get professional script editing help and keep honing your craft; remember – you have the key.

Pre-order your copy of my book here – out in June published by Kamera Books

http://www.kamerabooks.co.uk/creativeessentials/writingfortelevision/index.php?title_isbn=9781843443377

Contact me for help with your scripts http://www.scriptadvice.co.uk

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Happy Writing!

SHORTENING THE ODDS

‘The spirit of times’ – Zeitgeist.

I have spent a fair amount of my career ‘in Development Hell,’ or what the Industry terms the position a Script Editor or Development Producer finds themselves in, whilst working on ‘a work in progress’ project.

Hell is a place of insecurity. Uncertainty. Too many variables. Not enough time. Too much time. Waiting. Yes. That is the worst one.

Hell is Waiting. And it’s hot in here.

A Script Editor/Development Producer – working with a writer from the (relatively) secure position of their office in Company A or Broadcaster B, finds development hellish because they will be trying to get their project above the parapet of other emerging projects on the development slate of their company.

This slate has to be competitive; lean and mean. No money here for wastage. No money to be spent on projects that do not:

* Pack a brilliant story punch
* Deliver a resonant, relevant message
* Showcase our best actor names
* Showcase our best emerging acting talent. The ‘new faces’. (But when I say ‘new’ I mean the faces that are not too new; just new enough to hit the Zeitgeist)
* Support the writing talent of our best loved writers
* Support the writing talent of our new, emerging writers (and when I say ‘new’ I don’t mean so new know one will care; I mean writers with enough of a following within the industry to hit the ‘Zeitgeist’)
*Deliver to a specific demographic
* Makeable on existing budgets

From the point of view of a Development Producer, taking on a project whether it is in treatment form or already a fully written script, is a risky business. There’s so much to get right. With very little room for error.

So the odds have to be shortened by the Script Editor/Development Producer.

How do they do this?

Getting money for Development out of anyone these days is hard. Harder than ever before. To extract Development money enough to pay for a treatment from those with the purse strings, takes a fair amount of creative thinking, diplomacy, artistry and (it has been known) whinging.

The Treatment is the beginning of the process. At a given point, (and this point varies) the treatment will need to be optioned – to ensure the idea is the property of the company in question for the duration of its development.
Once the Treatment is done and the script stage reached, the Development Producer must find more in their skills stash to extract the big(ger) money – the money for a script.

This is another outlay with no guarantee that the company will get a return on its investment.

So, it’s little wonder then that the projects allowed to sit on the Development Slate must be understood at least, to be commercially and creatively viable for commission and ultimately production.

The projects most comfortable on this slippery slope of development, are those that hit the Zeitgeist.

It is an often heard complaint (if you hang around with television types; producers, writers, directors, agents) that there is too little risk taken in television commissioning and too much playing safe.

Risks are exciting, risks separate you from the crowd; so much sexier to be a maverick; with your creative camp swirling about you, forging new ways to tell stories; a role model for emerging creatives. But this can be a lonely position.

And one that gets rather cold and rather brittle after a time.

So what’s the answer?

That word again. If you can, it serves to hit the Zeitgeist.

I imagine a fair amount of you reading this, if you work in or around the creative industries, has had an idea replicated, aped, copied, snatched, nicked before your eyes, by another creative who has gone the whole way with it.

Your idea. The one you had about (fill in the blanks) is now there, on the telly, or the radio. You had that idea. You should’ve moved quicker, got it writ and got it seen. Got it owned. By you. By means of your paper trail. It Should’ve Been Me. As the song goes.

Well. I say, worry not. Cut the whine. Pat yourself on the back. You have hit the Zeitgeist.

That’s why so often, you will see a show/tv/play that you honestly believed was your idea alone. Because if you are at all commercially aware; if you resonate with the common experience, if you are teller of stories for like-minded people to hear/see/talk about, you will at some stage in your developing career, hit the Zeitgeist.

And that is when I say you are ready. To get serious. Keep at it. Television needs writers like you.

You help shorten the odds.

GETTING INTO SHAPE – TELEVISION WRITING PART 2

My guest blog for the marvellous screenwriting site Euroscript is now up and live. Part Two goes into script writing, and script editing in more detail. The journey of a storyline on a tv drama draws to a close….
http://euroscript.wordpress.com/