Author of comic sci fi and fantasy

Month: August 2016

How to Beat the Blank Page…

…Well, don’t have one in the first place.

No, not a trite answer, despite how it sounds. The trick is to always have ideas. Always let the ideas flow. They’re like butterflies and you have to catch them. And then you have to squeeze them into little boxes to make them look pretty to other people so they’ll go “Hey that’s pretty neat” and not recoil in horror at the half-crumpled dead insect you have in your hand.

Butterflies
It’s not cruel if they’re just in your head.

Okay, maybe I took that analogy too far.

Let me explain.

An idea for a show or a movie usually comes in two forms – an image or a “what if…” It comes out the blue, WHAM, and suddenly you feel like you have a great idea for a movie/tv series You see it in your head, or you imagine a situation – and your brain quickly extrapolates it out – you think “I want to see that movie!”.

That’s your butterfly. Catch it.

Because that is exactly how you want people to feel when they read about your show in the paper or online. You want them to feel the way you did at that moment. Because at that moment it is a great idea for a movie.

Basically in writing you start with a brilliant, perfect idea then stretch it into 30, 60 or 110 minutes without fucking it up.

But a great movie or TV show needs to do lots more than just be one great scene or image. A great script has to do lots, lots more. But, you need to catch your butterfly and write it down.

Yes. Have a notepad with you. Or something like Evernote. Or iOS Notes. Capture what you thought.

Have a notebook. Yes it's an order.
Have a notebook. Yes it’s an order.

Now you need to fit in the presentation case, or if the dead butterfly with the pin in it analogy is upsetting you, you need to create a lepidopterarium, or butterfly house, and yes I did have to look that up.

I’ll talk more about that in the next post… but in the meantime, here are the key takeaways.

  • Carry a notebook with you
  • Learn to recognise story ideas
  • Learn to catch them in as few words as possible…

Back soon
photo credit: Pencil, books, and notepad via photopin (license)

photo credit: Specimen via photopin (license)

Capturing Your Screenplay Idea in One Line – Part 2

 

More on Loglines…..

In the last post I mentioned a couple of expert approaches to one-line summaries. Well here is the second expert:

The late great Blake Syder, author of (among other things) Save the Cat. If this isn’t on your reading list yet, it ought to be. What Save the Cat covers (among other things) really well is all of this stuff about finding your genre (and Blake Syder has some great story genres too which I might briefly touch on in a later post but anyway you really should read his book).

What Mr Save the Cat proposes is that you need your logline (your one-liner) to do 4 things to win over your audience. It must:

  1. Have a sense of IRONY
  2. Create a compelling MENTAL PICTURE
  3. Give a sense of AUDIENCE and COST
  4. A great TITLE

(These actually aren’t that different from the previous post, but they’re looking at it from different angles. They’re the same thing in a different co-ordinate system if that means something to you (i.e. you like graphs).)

Some of these speak for themselves. I won’t go into great detail here because Blake Syder does it much better than me. What I will do is spin his excellent movie-based versions of this into something a little bit more series based:

Irony or  “The best person to be the hero of a story is the worst person to be in that situation.”  – because they will face the greatest challenges by being there.  A mild-mannered chemistry teacher becomes a hard-baked drug dealer. The youngest son of a mafia family tries to break the cycle of revenge but is drawn in when the father he loves is gunned down. An off-duty cop coming home for the holidays finds himself caught up in a siege. A man who hates other people finds himself running a hotel. Two hopeless underachievers find themselves the last remaining humans in the universe… Of all the people to be in this situation…

Why this is important is it focusses on character (HERO). And it focuses on a situation (GOAL). And the less well suited, the better. (CONFLICT)

So would you rather watch a sitcom about

– A survival expert who finds himself marooned on a desert island with only another SAS member for company? or

– A survival expert finds himself marooned on a desert island with a group of bickering committee members from a small town rotary club?

Worst situation for this person.

Next is the need for a compelling mental picture. What does this mean? It means I say it and you SEE it. In my experience, the key to this is detail. In fact, in most writing the key is detail. I’ll cover that in a post later. (get used to that phrase). I don’t say “island” I say desert island. Bickering. Committee. Rotary club. All writing is poetry. Choose what can only be described as visually explosive words.  If you don’t have that level of detail, what you have is the following:

A generic man who hates monsters finds himself trapped in a vague location being chased by a monster of some kind.

Yeah. You don’t like that do you? So be crystal.

A sense of audience and cost – this is effectively dictated in your description. Things like LOCATION can be expensive. Think of places YOU can take a camera. Then think of what it would cost YOU to get there. Want to shoot in your flat/house/office/bar? Easy. Want to shoot in New Zealand. Or on another planet? Gonna cost ya.

Audience also includes CAST and GENRE. Lots of young people being hacked to death in between having sex? That’s a younger audience. Lots of old people talking about how getting old is shit. That’s an older audience. Talking dogs with famous handsome men and women in the lead and in-jokes for the grown-ups, that’s a family series. Movies. TV Series. Same same.

But what about Breaking Bad! (I hear you cry) He’s over forty! And loads of 16-34 year olds watched that (we think, if only Netflix would release their viewing figures!) It’s about a man having a mid-life crisis.

Yeeeees. And it’s about hard core drugs. And violence.  You decide. Let me just say, it’s not May to December. Who the audience is, is very useful to a producer or commissioner because THEY KNOW WHO THEIR AUDIENCE IS. So we’re back to ORIGINALITY VS FORMULA…

Nail your audience, include it in the description somehow. Use cast, use THEMES…

Finally Title.

Read titles. Decide which one’s you like. They’re full of clues. There tend to be two ways you can with this:

To the point, with a hint of cleverness. This is a titles that focuses in one aspect of the show, as well as telling you something about the attitude to it. (Scrubs, Cheers, Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Six Feet Under, Phoneshop). In this category often a double meaning can add something (Trollied). But be careful. Not everyone loves a pun as much as you (or me)

Wild and intriguing. (House of Cards. Breaking Bad. Mad Men).

If you choose wild and intriguing you have to be able to hand someone the reason for the title in the first introduction to it. It’s called Breaking Bad because it’s about a mild-mannered chemistry teacher who “Breaks Bad” or goes off the rails. It’s called Mad Men because they’re the Ad Men of Madison Avenue. Make it wild if you like, but you must be prepared to explain it. Quickly.

Titles come last because you can always change them. That isn’t an excuse to come up with a shit title then write the words (Working Title) behind it. If you’ve created “Chateau Lafite Rothschild” then don’t expect to sell it with the label “Yellow Fizz (Working Title)”.

So that’s the Blake Syder Break down of what he calls the “logline from hell”. If you haven’t read his book – I would urge you to do so.

But come back here soon too please!

Next up…

Themes…(probably)

Happy Writing!

 

Capturing your Screenplay Idea in One Line – Part 1

Of course you can’t compress your idea into one line, can you?

Well here’s the bad news. You’ll have to.

At some point someone is going to ask you to summarise your project in one line. Usually with a 140 character limit. This is a recent thing stolen from Twitter but at least it stops writers creating the kind of tortuous sentence that leaves a reader gasping for breath even if they haven’t read it out loud, just to make sure they’ve covered everything.

So, you might as well do it up front.

For this, I take the advice of a couple of experts who definitely pointed me in the right direction here.

Firstly here’s a great technique for catching your ideas in a form that makes them juicy and enticing.

It’s from advice by the marvellous Stephanie Palmer. Stephanie writes an insider blog on the business of being a screen writer and offers great advice to about how the system works. This is mostly the US Studio system but more and more these days the UK recognises this as a good way to work. Only without the studio system they have over there.

I would urge you to check out Stephanie’s Site  – Good in a Room. Not now obviously! Bookmark it or something. Thanks.

Anyway Stephanie says you should capture your idea in the following form, which is a little bit how you would describe it to anyone else:

My story is a [GENRE] called [TITLE] about a [HERO](in a situation) who wants [GOAL] despite [OBSTACLE].

(full glorious post here ). Same rules on running off. This is the important bit here:

Do this for every one of your ideas. Write them all down. Then look closely at them. Does it have a clear genre? Medium ?(TV, Film, Radio) AND Genre? (Comedy, Sitcom, Family Drama, Crime Drama). Does the title MAKE SENSE with everything else? Do you have a single LEAD CHARACTER? Of course if it’s an ensemble piece the HERO can be a group… Do they WANT something tangible? Are they properly OPPOSED? Is there going to be some, or better LOTS, of CONFLICT (which is basically the single most crucial thing EVERY story needs.)

If you have made good decisions about all 5 elements here – chances are you’ve got something you want to write! If not – you have a problem. You won’t know it yet, but if you have a weak element in these 5 areas then your story will be flimsy and will fall apart in the writing, the explaining or the selling.

Here’s a (bad) example:

My story is a show called “Chocolate” about a group of people working in a call centre.

Okay, here we go.

That's right we're going to tear it apart

That’s right we’re going to tear it apart

      1. Show? What is it? Theatre? TV? Reality TV? Is it meant to be funny.  Am I meant to laugh? Or be scared? Be better than that. Give me detail. Detail is what brings something visually to life. All writers have to be POETS. You have to learn HOW TO DESCRIBE SOMETHING VERY SPECIFIC IN AS FEW WORDS AS POSSIBLE. Use what I call visually explosive words. Be as specific as possible. Identify brand. I learned this reading the pilot screenplay for Breaking Bad but I should have learned it much sooner. Find it online. Read the action – Vince Gilligan calls out VERY SPECIFIC things we SEE. So distilled detail is what we’re aiming for here:

        My story is a TV sitcom called “Chocolate” about a group of people working in a call centre.

      2. Title? Chocolate? Why the fuck is it called Chocolate? “Oh because their lives revolve around talking about their favourite chocolate.” No good. It needs to be clear why it’s called what it’s called, without having to offer up an explanation. It’s needs to change to something more relevant. How about “Call Me”? So now we have:

        My story is a TV sitcom called “Call Me” about a group of people working in a call centre.

Hero? Who’s it about? What sort of people are they? Focussing on one character makes things clearer so why not pick a twenty-something woman. Why her? Well perhaps a reverse engineer from the title – call me? Maybe she’s looking for love and ends up fantasising about the lives of the people she talks to.

My story is a TV sitcom called “Call Me” about a day-dreamy twenty-something girl working in a call centre who fantasises about falling in love with the people she talks to.

Now she has a goal (to find love) and there is sort of a conflict between reality and fantasy – but it would be even better if there’s a tangible real world antagonist… How about her (…who would be the worst person..) – a sleazy office manager? Or a love-lorn friend. I’ll pick the latter as it feels less likely to be uncomfortable.

My story is a TV sitcom called “Call Me” about a day-dreamy twenty-something girl working in a call centre, who fantasises about falling in love with the people she talks to while managing her love-lorn friend.

(And the more astute of you will realise this is more than 140 characters so if I only had the Twitter pitch I could use the following (you can drop the title because you’ve usually given it, and arguably you’ve already mentioned the genre:

Sitcom about a girl working in a call centre who fantasises about falling in love with her callers while looking after her love-lorn friend.

or

Sitcom about a incurably romantic girl working in a call centre who fantasises about falling in love with the people she talks to.

Both sell the idea – but capture it for yourself using the single sentence rule above.

Either way – which of the following can you SEE?

Sitcom about a girl working in a call centre who fantasises about falling in love with her callers while advising her love-lorn friend.

vs.

Sitcom called “Chocolate” about a group of people working in a call centre.

And the most important thing is to capture the most inspiring version of this idea… one that when you come back to it, you’ll immediately think “YES I WANT TO WRITE THIS NOW!”

Start with a simple idea… then surround it with the right elements to make it burst into life.

Do this, do this for every idea you have.

Save them in the one document so when you think you’re running out of ideas, come back to them. I currently have over 60 of these… From ideas for horror films to one-off TV dramas to situation comedies.

Don’t have blank pages… have stacks and stacks of butterflies, all safely captured in such a way that shows off their beauty in the best light….

Right, I’m off to write a TV Sitcom about a day-dreaming girl working in a call centre who fantasises about falling in love with the people she talks to, while tending to her love-lorn friend.

🙂

How Do I Know I’ve Got A Great Idea For a Show?

You don’t.

Here’s the truth: No-one does.

As brilliant screenwriter and guru William Goldman once said – “No-one in Hollywood knows anything”.

People think they do otherwise they wouldn’t spend millions of dollars/pounds/bitcoins making what they’re convinced is a hit movie or TV show. They just wouldn’t. Every penny invested in making a movie or TV show is done so because someone thinks it’s going to make them lots of money.

You’ll have realised that “making lots of money” isn’t the same as “being a great TV show”.  And there’s the problem. Unless you have an idea that someone thinks is going to make money, it isn’t going to get made. This is true of publishing, theatre or any other form of writing.

So if no-one knows anything, how do you give your brilliant idea the best chance of getting made?

Well, here is the curious dichotomy of the creative world. And it all comes down to the following:

Originality vs Forecast

I’ll unpack that statement.

One one side, audiences (and producers and commissioners) love originality. Who doesn’t? A new character we haven’t seen a million times before, a new setting, a glimpse into a world that we have no idea about, a new moral lesson about the world we live in now, a fresh perspective. We yearn for new experiences. The novel (as in new) is exciting! If you are going to write – YOU have to write. You have to write AS YOU. You have to write ABOUT THINGS YOU CARE ABOUT, about places YOU KNOW ABOUT. Your job is to come up with brilliant new ideas and stories from your imagination. NEVER FORGET THAT. This is yours.

On the other side, if someone is going to lay several million pounds on the table to make a TV Show or a movie then they better have some idea it’s going to work.

How can they possibly know that?

Well, this is where formula and forecasting come in. And here are the main rules:

  1. Things that were well received before, stand a good chance of being well received again. (hence Sequels and Franchises)
  2. Movies and TV Shows that follow certain formulas and tick certain boxes tend to result in higher audience satisfaction and therefore viewing figures/sales (more on this in later posts)
  3. Movies and TV shows that can be summed up in a single line that makes the listener or reader SEE that movie/show (and like it) are more likely to get eyeballs in front of it. (just as you felt when you had your idea).

And the rest is marketing. Stars are marketing. Big posters are marketing. Don’t worry about that now.

So suddenly your best chance of success is to be both amazingly ORIGINAL and DEEPLY PREDICTABLE. Or, if you prefer, RELIABLE…

How?

It starts with the idea. The idea needs to tick a few boxes to even get of the starting block. Here is what it needs to do:

  • Post itself in a GENRE
  • Have a great TITLE
  • Give a sense of CONFLICT
  • Have a sense of IRONY
  • Hint at the AUDIENCE

In one line.

How?

For this one, I’m going to turn to the experts…. You can read about it here.

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