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.

---

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.

Getting the treatment

It is entirely possible that a movie treatment is the most tedious and boring piece of writing it's possible to do. I'm not going to say I hate doing them, but it's hardly exciting.

A treatment is a reduced version of a script without dialogue. It can be best imagined as what you would say if you were telling someone the story. Let's say you went to see a film, then got home and, in your excitement, you told a friend what happened. That's a treatment.

Some people say that two pages is good for a treatment, well you can do that, you can even do one page. The trouble is that there really is no hard and fast rule. Personally I prefer the "one page = 10 minutes" approach. So for a typical movie you're looking at 9-12 pages.

My fave reader Lucy at Bang2Write has not been overly impressed by my treatments of the Blockbuster project. The trouble is, and apparently this is common, that writers tend to write treatments as a series of visuals. This is hardly surprising from one viewpoint, after all, I imagine (and I hope) that we "see" what we create in our imaginations (I know I do).

But visuals are the director's department. What we really need to do is communicate the character and the emotion, along with the sequence of actions. Clearly, concisely and not boringly.

As usual the real (and only) crime any writer can commit is to bore the reader. You can't afford to do that. Ever. Boredom is no emotion and contains no motion. Almost every other emotion contains movement, they are good, you can have those, just not boredom.

So, I'm writing this treatment after prevaricating for four days (well, okay, I'm prevaricating now but I thought you might wonder where I'd gone, honest) anyway I've written nearly 4 pages this evening -- 40 minutes of the movie.

This kind of schedule and timing allows you to see whether your movie is appropriately structured too: has life become unsettled for the protagonist by the time you've hit a quarter of the way through? And so on.

I suspect the main reason that writer's dislike treatments so much is that they'd rather be writing the actual script. I don't need a treatment to plan, I use other tools, so a treatment feels like a waste of time.

Unfortunately it's necessary.

---

What's on the turntable? "Oh Wow, it's you" by Steely Dan from "The Roaring of the Lamb"

Torn

Three days without writing and the prospect of a life without TV or Internet.

I'm torn. (See this brilliant video.)

There's nothing better than no distractions to prevent the prevarication inherent in writing. Every writer prevaricates, that's why the professionals give themselves a schedule. Like going to work, because that's exactly what it is. Just because we might enjoy writing doesn't mean it isn't work.

Of course writing isn't just writing. It's thinking about character and events, it's planning, and you can do that sort of thing while driving a car or watching TV. (Well, maybe not the latter -- but for a TV writer watching TV is research. How cool is that?)

But it hasn't really been prevarication that's prevented me from writing over the last few days, it's been this trip to Reading. On Friday I spent the day preparing, going shopping for stuff I'm going to need (I remembered the can opener at the last moment, but forgot a kettle.)

I found the best way to think about packing in terms of rooms (divide and conquer): Kitchen, Bedroom, Lounge, Bathroom and work. So it's a case of "what do I need for the kitchen?" and so on.

Saturday was a little tiring, I drove to Reading with all my stuff, 4 hours, and managed to get miss my turn twice. Which is odd for me. I paid a very large amount of cash to the Letting Agent (nice people, which was one reason I chose them) and got the keys. Drove to the flat and saw it for the first time. (And then drove back in 3.5 hours.) Met the landlord, signed things.

The flat's not too bad. Everything's in reasonably good nick. The washing machine/tumble drier is new (apparently) but I'll need to take an extension lead so I can put the fridge where I want it and get access to all the kitchen units. But there's no telephone (there is an unconnected socket) so getting the Internet is an issue. And there's what I think is a Sky cable but nothing else. So there's no TV either.

But these things are such distractions. Think how much I could write if I wasn't distracted. But I need my research!

I do have a TV and a DVD player. Perhaps I can get the basic terrestrial channels for starters, then a Freeview box for £30 and a better internal aerial. Then get a mobile plug-in thingy on contract, hm, maybe I can do something with Orange since I already have a contract with them.

There might be an unprotected WiFi in the area as a stopgap.

So, this afternoon I pack up my computer and a few other things, give my car to a friend who's helping with the "moving children around" while I'm away and off to the station. For the trip down.

---

What's on the turntable? Nothing. My wife is working at the other desk and she's listening to an Agatha Christie Poirot story on BBC7.