Blame the audience

So Being Human and Outcasts have finished their seasons.

Being Human is a shoe-in for renewal, Outcasts is already cancelled. (Apparently the US version of Being Human is doing well - some of the dialogue is straight out of the UK version.)

I went to a Q&A with the creator of Being Human, Toby Whithouse, last year. I have read an interview with the creator of Outcasts and read a comment or two from the Producer.

Being Human is enthralling, powerful and threaded with its core theme: being human.

Outcasts was boring. I hate to say that because people worked their arses off to produce it and I desperately wanted to like it.

But now I read what the creator and producer are saying - and basically they are blaming the audience for not liking it, not being willing to put up with it being boring. Also, according to the producer as quoted in SFX, us geeks didn't like it because we just want action and shooty guns and aliens. (He didn't use those words, but that's what he said.) 

Hm, that's why we love Being Human so much then. The action and the shooty guns and the aliens. Well, the last scene of Being Human lasted for nearly 15 minutes, almost all talk and it was gripping - because it was all about the core theme of the show.

I mean I could talk about writers who know nothing of science not realising that writing science fiction doesn't mean you can just make stuff up (manipulating DNA with ultrasound at long range - oh puh-lease, there are fundamental Physics reasons why you couldn't do that) but then we'd be here all night. But even that would have been forgivable if the overall story had been character-driven instead of plot-driven (another common error among those who don't understand SF).

So, what's the difference between the two shows really? Theme and expression of theme. Being Human has it, Outcasts squandered its opportunities. And theme is not characters uttering portentous but ultimately meaningless phrases like "This changes everything" when, in fact, nothing's changed. Which is what we got instead.

There is only one reason why people switched off Outcasts, it broke the fundamental rule of writing: It was boring and that is not the fault of the audience.

(Yes, I know some people liked it, of course some people did, everybody's different and has different tastes, this is all my opinion obviously - but, to the majority, it was not appointment TV and that cannot be argued with.)

It has been suggested, with some justification, that perhaps a writer (especially a wannabe such as I) should not denigrate another writer's work - after all, how would I like it if someone did it to me? I expect I wouldn't like it at all, but I do know that if I had a cataclysmic failure like this, I wouldn't be blaming the audience.

We write to entertain the audience, and if they are not entertained the fault is ours not theirs.

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What's on the turntable? "The Rube Thing" by the Esbjorn Svensson Trio from "E.S.T. Live in Hamburg"

Bill does it again

Bill Martell on theme...

http://www.scriptsecrets.net/tips/tip181.htm

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What's on the turntable? "Jeux d'enfants" by Laurent Garnier from "The Cloud Making Machine"

Name that theme

Alexandra Sokoloff on Theme. Tasty.

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What's on the turntable? "Hide in your Shell" by Supertramp from "Crime of the Century"

Script secrets

Bill Martell is great, he really knows his stuff. His daily script secrets are great too, that's where he reveals all the stuff he knows.

I spent the evening working on my One Page Pitch for Winter (see Adrian Mead's How to Make it as a Scriptwriter, Chapter 8 - honestly I don't get a commission).

Actually I am quite pleased with the way it's coming together, although the antagonist needs work.

You see it's like this: Bill didn't like Indy IV and I wasn't overly impressed by it, Indy II wasn't great either but Indy I and III were cracking tales. Why? Was it because I and III had Nazis in them? While II and IV didn't?

Mr Martell says yes and no. It's not because they were Nazis that they made great antagonists, it's because, as antagonists, the stakes were clear. The viewer understands why it would be really bad if Hitler got hold of either the Ark or Immortality.

In II and IV the stakes either weren't high enough (II, yes it was bad what they were doing to the kids but what would actually happen if they got all the stones?) or too vague (IV, so the Commies wanted psychic powers ... okay ... so what?).

This is one of the problems I have to fix with Winter, the antagonist has his evil goal but if he succeeds ... so what?

This is the "So what?" rule which is expressed by my other favourite screenwriting adviser, Jeff Kitchen in his "Writing a Great Movie" and I quote:

Harry Cohn, the founder of Columbia Pictures, ran his development process as follows: He would sit his writers down at a conference table and ask for their ideas. The first writer would lay out his idea and Cohn would respond, "So what?" The next writer would pitch his idea and Cohn would shoot it down the same way. An idea had to pass Cohn's "So what?" test before he was willing to pursue it.

I need a motivation and consequences of the antagonist's actions that answer the "So what?" test. Currently it's way too vague and ephemeral "something bad will happen".

The other thing that needs dealing with is the theme. Now it's true that theme often doesn't reveal itself until you've finished. But there are ways to divine the theme without writing everything, in this both Bill Martell and Jeff Kitchen agree:

1. How the protagonist resolves the story.

and

2. The main philosophical difference between the protagonist and the antagonist.

Which, for reasons I can't reveal, makes working out the theme in Winter quite hard, but I'm sure I'll prevail.

It's funny how things work out I had been wondering about theme (because Adrian Mead suggested I should for the One Page Pitch) and then I looked at Bill Martell's daily script secret which, if you don't know, you do by going here and then just waiting (don't click "Enter").

I got tip #144 which didn't excite me, so being a naughty hacky type lad, I deleted the "1" from the URL and pressed return. And lo! I got Bill Martell's take on Theme. The fates were with me this eve.

Writing blogs is a great way of prevaricating when you don't have anything to read.

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What's on the turntable? "Both Sides Now" by Joni Mitchell from "Hits". I love this song.

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.