That Comic Book Thing

This time last year I decided that instead of writing a screenplay during ScriptFrenzy I would write a comic book script. After all I'm good at script writing and I have a very visual imagination, how hard can it be?

Very.

For the first year I failed at ScriptFrenzy. It was a technical win, you have to write 100 pages and I wrote 100 pages. But they were appalling. The story was intended as a sequel to my Rebel steampunk script featuring the same protagonist and supporting cast but moving on in time.

It was the worst story I'd written in a long time. Now it's easy to say it was a first draft, and that's true, but I write decent first drafts usually. (Not that's brilliant send it out first drafts, but they are usually coherent with good sequences and scenes, good clay for reshaping.)

The story might have turned out alright if I had been in the familiar territory of a screenplay but instead I was in a medium I believed I understood (having read my Eisner and Scott McCloud books). But theory is not practice.

There was another barrier to me realising I didn't know what I was doing: I had worked in print media, magazine production specifically, for many years so, of course, I knew all about printing stuff, didn't I? The first barrier to learning anything is thinking you know it already.

By the end of April (the month ScriptFrenzy takes place in) I was forced to acknowledge that when it came to writing comic books, despite everything I thought I knew, I was clueless.

Fast forward a few months to the London Screenwriters Festival, and a talk by awesome writer of scripts in many mediums: Tony Lee. Who in one hour covered the practicalities of writing for print comics. It was a revelation. You see my knowledge of the print industry was not worthless - I discovered it did have application in the subject but I needed someone who was familiar with the problems to join the dots and show me how to re-apply what I already knew to this new medium.

Consider this: A reveal in a print comic must be the first thing on a left hand page (otherwise a reader will see it before he reads his way to it). And this: you will typically have 22 pages to work with in an issue. That means your cliffhanger must appear on page 22 (it will be a left-hand page). You have no choice. And when Tony said these things, it all clicked together my existing knowledge of print and made perfect sense.

Comic books apply absolute restrictions with no wiggle room which means that unlike a novel or even a screenplay, you cannot wing it. You have to plan every sequence and scene to the very page it will appear on and make sure your reveals appear as the first thing on a left-hand page and your cliffhanger hits on page 22.

I think that's brilliant.

And the consequence of all that is I am converting an existing script to comic form. I have a professional illustrator lined up who loves the script (and, from her comments, sees what I see) so I'm putting together a few sample pages that she'll do some roughs for, just to see whether we're happy with each other's styles. And if that works we'll put together an issue.

But for ScriptFrenzy 2013 I have another feature script to write for the Voidships universe, new time period, new characters and hopefully awesome will ensue.

(And I'm also working on a Voidships novel.)

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What's on the turntable? Hergist Ridge by Mike Oldfield (often considered the poor relation to Tubular Bells being the follow-up but I love it just as much - and Ommadawn which came next.)

End of an Era

My last night in the Reading flat.

Weird.

Financially the flat was good when I was working in Reading, as I was for the first 6 months, but when I was elsewhere and then in London it became less useful.

I have just had my contract extended by 3 days at Paramount Comedy, tidying up some final stuff that'll be Wednesday to Friday next week. Tuesday I have an interview in Sheffield - which would be a nice place to work as I could live at home. Other than that I'll be staying at my parents next week.

I moved out 30 years ago, now I'm going back.

It was in The Goonies (make sure you see the uncut version, especially for the "where to keep the drugs" sequence) that the mother says that she wants to make sure the house is clean and tidy before they knock it down. Not that they're knocking down this house, but I am packing and cleaning tonight.

I've been a good tenant. The landlord had some horror stories - and one of them was enacted in another flat in this building which resulted in the place being boarded up and sterilised before being completely redecorated.

It can be easy to think that, for some people, life is a luxury they don't deserve. "In a moving statement the judge decreed that if truth was beauty and beauty truth then life itself was in contempt of court for being neither beautiful or true, and confiscated it from all those present." (To quote the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy from memory.)

So, what to do about the writing, eh?

I was on the train this evening (would I be anywhere else?) in my last trip from Paddington to Reading, with my trusty notebook...

[aside] I had a note in my notebook to buy a new notebook because I was down to a single unmarked sheet left. I decided I would buy a notebook for work and notebook for writing-related stuff. I found these cool "Pantone" ones which have different coloured covers, although the paper stock is not as good as my usual choice. [/aside]

... and I made a list of all the scripts I have finished, in development, written and so on. Then I rated them in terms of their value (to what degree will they progress my career?) and how much work is needed to finish them. This was with a view to deciding what to work on next.

Monsters and Air come top, of course, they are finished and are good examples which have already progressed my career.

My feature Une Nuit a Paris and (sad to say) Unit X ended up at the bottom. The main purpose for writing Unit X was because someone, with the power to get it made, had expressed an interest. That person hasn't responded to any communication in the past few months.

That leaves: Which?, Tec and Running.

Which? is finished in 1st draft, and short. It has value in demonstrating an ability to write for existing show characters (hopefully).

Running, though a bit SF, is mostly thriller (and I do know how to put good action sequences together - even the target producer was impressed when I sent him the first 10 pages, let's just say the opening sequence and the title had something in common). And also has a clearly identifiable protagonist. This gets extra points because there is already a producer who's interested - and he could get me to Luc Besson, but that's another story.

Tec is a "normal" private investigator type show. It has a clear protagonist and the standard genre context means it wouldn't suffer from the "lacks focus" problem that I'm good at. (Which, incidentally, is why Air worked, right from original concept it had a strong protagonist. While Monsters originally had half a dozen "main" characters and took a lot of work to bash into shape.)

So. I think I will do things in that order, finish up Which? then use ScriptFrenzy as my deadline generator for Running. Hm ... 30 - 9 = 21 days to do 90 pages = 30 / 7 = 4.5 pages per day. I'd only worry if it got up to 10 pages per day, that would be hard. But I have plenty of time.

Then I'll dig up the notes I previously made on Tec and put the first episode together.

Target's should always have deadlines, so let's say Which? by the end of the Easter weekend, Running by the end of April (obviously) and Tec (a mere 60 pages) by the end of May. (Which means Tec will be easily ready for the next Red Planet competition.)

That's a plan.

Have you got a plan?

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What's on the turntable? "Four Sticks" by Led Zeppelin from "Led Zeppelin IV" This song is called "four sticks" because the drummer, Bonham, used four drumsticks for this song - two in each hand. Cool.

Patience, Prevarication and Planning

I originally entitled this blog "impatience, prevarication and planning" but I thought having three "P"s sounded cleverer.

I just got very excited because, stuck in Reading again this weekend as the launch of the website is only days away, I have been working on my next work.

This is not my "One Night in Paris" because I got some very poor feedback (the feedback was good, the opinions expressed were unpleasantly accurate) so it needs more time to ferment. Plus the fact my wife made a suggestion last week that suddenly turned the whole idea upside down and would make it super-cheap to produce. It needs fermentation or possibly extended composting.

So I'm working on Air. (snigger)

"Air" is the working title for my kids fantasy TV series -- as I'm still waiting for responses from all the agents and TV Companies that are reading Monsters.

Air is inspired by a 70s TV show called Sky (see what I did there, with the name) and while it has some similar concepts it's a very different tale. Sky was seriously scary but totally amazing, and had a profound effect on me.

But to the point of this blog (finally) I'm very impatient when it comes to writing because I really do just want to get in there and get some words down, let's face it I'm not going to write all 12 episodes, this is just a spec, so 30 pages is something I could just throw together. Right? Wrong. That would be fatal.

I sat down last week and got some ideas into a concrete form, tried to do some planning following the suggestions in Adrian Mead's little tome How to Make it as a Scriptwriter as I like to try things out. I also used the excellent Writing a Great Movie by Jeff Kitchen - don't be fooled, this book is excellent for all types of dramatic writing, and it's the only book on screenwriting that I come back to time and again and actually use as a reference.

All this meant I had to think about the protagonist's dilemma in detail, and then attempt to derive the theme from that. All good stuff, because getting a handle on theme can really provide a depth to what you're doing.

I did all this, wasn't really happy with what I'd produced and then the day job intervened for a week.

I got back to it this evening. Walking back from the day job allowed me some thinking time and I realised how I could structure the whole 12 episodes with overlapping 3-episode plotlines that would result in a sequence that would demand continued watching because so much would happen and keep on happening.

I probably didn't explain that very well, so here's a picture to paint a thousand words...

It's like writing 8 features, 2 x 60min and 2 x 30 min, except that obviously the A plots get more time than the B plots which get more than the C plots.

This might seem very formal but as I began to fill in what the storylines would actually be it all came together very nicely with each plot idea contributing to and complementing the others.

It's all very well saying that I'm going to only write a 30 minute episode but unless I know what's happening in the rest of the series in reasonable detail that episode will be shallow.

As I worked on the plot ideas another thing happened. The real reason I am very pleased with myself: The theme suddenly hit me. Something simple, easy for children (and adults) to identify with and something that has real emotional impact.

Oh yes, I'm a real smarty-pants.

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What's on the turntable? "Live Bed Show" by Pulp from "Different Class". Jarvis Cocker is another great writer, his songs evoke real characters and tell definite stories.

The Sharps End, or, the End of Sharps

I didn't mention the fact that I had completed my BBC Sharps script and zoomed it off on Thursday evening. If you're planning to enter it's too late unless you can deliver by hand (or have access to a Royal Mail sorting office that does collections on Sundays).

I was quite pleased with the result, fairly light dialogue but with a solid drama base. A bit like a lemon meringue pie. I watched the "niceness as a disease" episode of House last night, the case of the week tasted everything as lemon meringue pie.

It's quite funny I suppose: The setting for the story is a community group of people giving up smoking. I smoked for two weeks in my entire life (it was a very stressful time). My parents never smoked, nor my sisters, nor my wife, very few friends I've known for years have ever smoked (except one but he has special dispensation).

So what right do I have to write about people wanting to give up smoking?

My mother's family are hardcore Londoners, and when I was younger every single one of them smoked. Whenever we went to visit we entered an atmosphere of tobacco. I've always been a people watcher, I saw the way people handled cigarettes, pipes, and roll-ups.

I always ended up with a nasty headache from breathing air heavy with cigarette smoke. And yet, the smell gives me some comfort. Scarily enough I realised a few years ago I was a closet smoker even though I never bought a pack (except for that two weeks). How does that work? I breathe deeply of other people's smoke. Laughable really. But an intense smoke-filled atmosphere still makes me sick.

So I have some experience of the matter. Plus the fact that smoking is an addiction just like any other, and that was the theme that I worked to in my script. Creating characters where the outer conflict of trying to give up smoking reflected an inner conflict of what they were really addicted to.

So, we shall see.

I didn't get any additional reading of this script partly because I ran out of time, although the actual writing only took a few hours. It only took a few hours because I did my planning, even down to the scene level.

I decided on the setting first (since that was the part that was prescribed by the "opportunity") then I populated it with people who might want to give up smoking, although one character was actually my wife's idea. Then I took the three main characters and constructed their inner conflict to mirror their outer one.

Finally I spit up the scenes very mathematically with #1 character getting most of the time in the story, #2 getting half that and #3 getting half again. So we have A, B and C plot lines, one clear leader and the others. Knowing how long the script needed to be (30-35 minutes) and knowing that scenes needed to be around 2 minutes each I could allocate actual page counts.

Of course, when I came to write it other scenes occurred to me and often scenes would be shorter than the plan. This is fine, after all we don't want 15 scenes of exactly 2 minutes each. That would be silly. Also how the supporting characters influenced the main plots became clear and a new character appeared that I hadn't thought of originally.

This was all good. And it meant my first draft was almost spot-on.

I then read through it and tidied up bits (there was one thing I wrote later that needed to be mentioned earlier, for example) . There was one scene I disliked when I wrote it and I realised that I was actually repeating stuff that had been mentioned in a previous scene. So I ripped that out and replaced it with something much better, which then played into an extra scene I had written later on.

All three plot lines intermingled and played off against each other. The characters were good, each had his/her own voice (I hear the characters talking as I write but, let's be clear, I don't write what they're saying, they say what I'm writing); the scenes feed nicely one to another, there's tension, there's action, there's humour. Yup, I like it.

(And I should add, the script will easily convert into a stage play so if the BBC don't want it I know what i can do with it.)

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What's on the turntable? "Toss the Feathers" by The Corrs from "Forgiven not Forgotten"

Paying your way

So, the job paperwork is complete, and so is the flat rental paperwork hopefully.

The flat rental form (Tenancy Application) is an interesting document, it's essentially an insurance form for the landlord. It's purpose is to determine whether I, as the tenant, am who I claim to be and whether I can actually pay.

This is actually the problem: I run all my business through a limited company, and the accounts are completed only up to 2006. At this time income was very low. Although my accountant did have the opportunity to say "your profit has doubled" between 2005 and 2006. This is not, however, saying a lot. But, by my estimates, my profit at least doubled again 2006-2007 and then they'll be doubling again for 2008.

But there's no documentary proof. However I can prove that my income for the next six months will be out the roof. Which will hopefully be enough.

It is my intention to catch up on my accounts, using the income from the new job, and get all my accounts properly in order. I suspect I'll get slammed with tax bills, but I'd rather be honest now than pay even more later when the Revenue men catch up with me and are less friendly.

Of course it was a double shock and a half when I found out how much I had to pay for this flat. I didn't really think it through: one month in advance, and one and a half months as deposit. Ouch. 2.5 x the monthly rent up-front. We can just about scrape this together.

Meanwhile other bills mount up, my membership of the WGGB is up and I have to pay them the annual fee. You pay a tithe on your income from writing but there's a minimum below which you cannot go. I made no money from writing last year. So they get the minimum.

No ScriptFrenzy writing yesterday, but my calculations were off. Even if I'd written nothing so far I'd only need to do 4.5 pages per day to win. So I'm probably on about 4 pages/day.

But I'm in a tizzy about what to work on:

Monsters: TV series which I intend to send to the BBC Writers Room , it's pretty much ready but I want to spice up the dialogue which could take a few days.

Movie Treatment: As described yesterday, needs a lot of re-working to get the plot into something that's actually working properly. But while there's no strict deadline on this, the longer I take the less likely it's going to be accepted.

ScriptFrenzy: 4-5 pages per day

Sometimes you need to sit down and evaluate these things. Particularly when there's so much other stress going on, and moving house is considered to be one of the most stressful things you can ever do. Even though it's only me moving temporarily.

So I suppose I need to write some ScriptFrenzy pages and then work on Monsters before someone comes up with the same idea and gets it made.

Onwards and upwards.

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What's on the turntable? "The Great Beyond" by REM