Comments on: Keeping Up With Journeyman

By: don young

don young — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 03:12:13 +0000

thanks Jill - I follow your postings carefully and find them not just a “fun read” but also useful in terms of professional skills development. As another long Winnipeg winter approaches I suspect I’ll be spending more and more time staring at this small screen…reading and learning and with a bit of luck “creating” too. At the moment I’m writing two very different documentary scripts -:

(a) “The Interrogator’s War”, a Frontline-style piece examining the way US Army Intelligence personnel extract information from suspected terrorists. It’s essentially an examination of how “torture” manifests itself in our digital age.

(b) “Teach A Cat To Sit”. A poignant piece about loneliness and obsession which begins with a simple question -: which is smarter a dog or a cat ?

As you can see I’m a million miles away from your world, but I love being a tourist.

thanks for the feedback.

By: admin

admin — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 02:20:25 +0000

Don-
Wow. That’s quite a lot of question.
Here’s how it’s worked in my experience:
We start by breaking the story. I’ve done it on my own and in story rooms with other writers.
We break the story lines separately starting with the A. If it’s a show we’ve been working on a while, we know exactly how many beats we need per act. I almost always start with the act breaks. When I know what they’ll be and what the starting point in the story is, then I can fill in what comes between.
Then we move to breaking the B which will generally be shorter — fewer beats per act. Most of the shows I’ve worked on we’ve used the A story for the act breaks so the B will follow a slightly different arc with high points coming a little sooner in the act.
When the beats are working, we go to outline, where we marry the A- and B-stories and flesh them out. By outline, I’ll be thinking in scene terms. I’ll see the shape of the scene (where we get in, where we get out, what the emotional arcs for the characters are) as well as which characters are there and where the scene is set.
If it’s a series you know — as in the case of pretty much any script you write from within the confines of a story department — you are already writing to budget and other production constraints. You know how many guests you can have, how many locations, etc. If you are planning on blowing up car or throwing a band concert on a rooftop or need a marching band, you’ll probably have dropped by the line producer’s office and given him a heads up and he’s let you know what the production can afford.
The outline will go through a round of approvals and only then do we go to first draft. We’ll know how many pages our production team can shoot in the allotted time and we’ll write that many.
Before the script gets to prep, it will have gone through several more rounds of notes and drafts.
That’s just to get us to prep. Then there will be more changes based on casting, location and other production matters.
My cold blooded analysis of structure is hard won. I worked on a series in which we shot 90 half hours in less than a year. I outlined five episodes a week — in addition to my other story editing duties. I got a lot of practice with laying out story beats.

By: don young

don young — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 00:49:42 +0000

hi Jill…I read your posts carefully and (unlike mine) they are well thought out, clear, and really informative. I watch TV differently now.

As a non-fiction writer I’m intrigued by your almost “mechanical” dissection of shows like Journeyman. If you don’t mind I have a couple of newbie-type questions.

1. In the writers’ room does someone keep track of the A,B,C story lines as the scripts
emerge ? Is there someone who goes “ok…ok..enough A story line to move on to ‘b’” ?

Or does the initial draft of the script come from the episodic writer’s creativity and sense of character - and then the timing and rhythms of the A,B,C, story arcs are applied in subsequent drafts ?

If the latter - then that must be a nasty process of re-writing ? Is it the same writer who does the re-write ? Or do show runners find it more efficient to have a second writer come in and apply the program template to the initial script ?

Also…Jill — if you don’t mind answering this for me too…what about BUDGET ? Do the producers hover over the emerging script like malevolent spirits saying “we can’t afford this…we can’t afford that” - a HELICOPTER ?? Are you out of your f***ing mind
etc etc.

finally - do fiction writers USE commercial breaks as turning points in story arcs and show beats ?

I write quite a lot of non-fiction stuff and one of the first things I do is to put a large whiteboard up on the wall and create a program template detailing how long each block is and roughly where the commercials come on the clock. Most nets I deal with HATE it when a show goes to commercial on the bottom of the clock. They’d rather have that break at 20 after.

I assume a similar logic must apply for fiction writer’s too ??

tks

by the way I’m getting flamed a bit on my little Book of Don blog, so I must be doing something right.