From Creation to Pitch E-Book

Yvonne Grace

• Herausgeber: Creative Essentials
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 171

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Fleabag... The Queen\'s Gambit... Peaky Blinders... Happy Valley... All phenomenally popular shows, whose creators had to work hard to hone their pitches and get their ideas noticed. And even harder to deliver on those ideas. From the initial spark of inspiration to the delivery of a creative, commercial series, From Creation to Pitch sets out to demystify the entire process of Television Series Drama Development for writers who are keen to get their voices heard and their stories read, discussed and viewed. Employing a practical, no-nonsense approach to what can be a minefield for many creatives, Yvonne Grace applies her decades of experience in development, script-editing and production. She also includes illuminating, in-depth interviews with leading practitioners about working on their own TV shows, including Tony Jordan who discusses the making of hit shows Sanditon and Death in Paradise, Ashley Pharoah who talks about his passion project The Living and the Dead and his multi-facetted drama Around the World in 80 Days, and Sarah Pinborough on her successful Netflix thriller Behind Her Eyes, adapted from her own bestseller. Perfect for anyone who is just starting out in the industry, as well as more experienced screenwriters looking to take the next step in their career.

Leseprobe

‘We are the story of our lives – now let’s write’

Yvonne Grace, Script Advice

To all the writers: for turning up to the blank page every day, for digging deep when the inspiration was weak, for putting the work in and for sharing your worlds with me, thank you.

INTRODUCTION

Three pigeons line up on the fence; you are looking out of the window and begin to imagine that number one and two are Mr and Mrs, and number three is their attractive new neighbour. And now, looking more closely, you can definitely see a glint in Mrs Pigeon’s birdy eye. There are two reasons here to identify you as a writer. First, instead of three rather bland, suburban birds, you imagined the beginnings of a tawdry feathered affair. Second, in order to see this drama unfolding in the first place, you were staring out of the window which, as many writers agree, is the same thing as working.

Writing is a creative activity and when you’re first embarking on a new concept for a television series, it’s guaranteed that you’ll be doing a fair amount of metaphorical paint-splashing; throwing all your thoughts and feelings and ideas at the canvas to see what sticks. I love working with writers. I enjoy helping them to explore their creative ideas: rootling around in the narrative rubble, identifying the treasure and discarding the trash, then showing them how to present this gorgeous thing we’ve discovered in the most constructive way, using the language that producers will understand.

But there are moments during this creative process when I’ve been known to break out in a rash of anxiety, particularly when writers say things like: ‘I don’t plan. I just let my mind wander until I find what feels like a start point’, or ‘I never know where I’m going to end up when I start writing a story, I let my characters decide that’, or ‘I think outlining hinders my creative process’. Because here’s the rub: if you are going to be a successful TV writer, pretty soon you’ll be required to address the structure and building blocks of your television world. And if you don’t like structuring your stories, you will find writing for television hard. It’s hard anyway – doing anything worthwhile takes effort – but it’s a tough thing to do well, and giving in to the unbending rule that ‘Outlining Is Your Friend’ will save you a lot of time, pain and stress from the start.

In preparation for this book, I talked to a carefully picked selection of my favourite television writers, alongside a handful of key producers. Almost all of them will tell you that outlining and structuring is a process that they, to a greater or lesser extent, follow. And what any television producer worth their salt will also tell you is that only a well-structured series will land both creatively and commercially with its audience. Which means that, as television writers, you need to have one foot firmly rooted in creative turf and the other in commercial ground.

In order to help you write with confidence in both these camps, I will explore the different demands of each. I will take you through the process of writing the documents required to pitch, looking at loglines, synopses and treatments; how to storyline and structure your series stories in the best way possible; and how to approach the all-important pilot and make your project shine. The interviews with television colleagues towards the end of the book will also give you a wide variety of professional perspectives on the entire process.

So strap yourself in and come with me as we move from creation to pitch.

THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY

Before anyone else gets involved, your project will start with just you, and perhaps a white board, or a wall full of sticky notes, or maybe a spreadsheet or a pile of notebooks. Or it may be the cursor on your laptop, blinking... Whatever way you begin this process, you will primarily be having a one-sided conversation with yourself. Yet television is fundamentally collaborative and what I wish for you is to find a like-minded professional with whom you can work to help bring your projects to the fore. That way you are not stuck for too long in your room alone, wrestling with your many-tentacled series idea.

If you are going to be successful at getting your stories out of your head, and out of your room into the wider world, you will need to begin a conversation with a bunch of people who may actually be able to get this thing made. Drama development for television is based on a crucial, sometimes fragile, foundation which is the relationship between the script editor/development exec and the writer.

Drama veteran executive producer Hilary Salmon at the BBC back in the early 1990s said something to me – a wet-behind-the-ears script editor in the series department – that has stayed with me ever since. To be a strong support for writers in this industry we need to be fascinated by them not only as people but as practitioners. We need to be hungry to find out how writers write like they do and why they do it.

As soon as you involve a script editor or development exec in the development of your television project, it will undergo an examination that takes in not only the internal shape of the story but also an entire series overview; and increasingly producers and commissioners are looking to glean suggestions as to how a series 2 may pick up from series 1.

THE ENGAGEMENT, THE CORE, THE CONNECTION, THE LANDING

There are four important elements to a television series that will hit both the commercial and the creative notes, and ultimately land with a receptive, engaged audience. The key here is to create an investment that will pay off in terms of both ratings and tweets on social media. Producers and the platforms that broadcast their product are looking for that holy grail of audience loyalty coupled with commercial recoup of their very expensive outlay. If a series hits the four elements outlined here, it will be a successful show in both critical and commercial circles.

The Engagement Factor is that ‘thing’ in a story that pulls the reader/viewer in, and it can come from many sources. Character is most important here. But not just character, it has to be character plus subtext. In Hacks, the award-winning HBO/Amazon Prime comedy (penned by a tight writer team and created by Paul W Downs, Jen Statsky and Lucia Aniello), Deborah Vance, the driven, career-focused Las Vegas comic (played by Jean Smart in the performance of her life) would not be nearly so attractive to us if we didn’t know what truly drove her to be so ruthless in her personal and professional lives. Her subtext, which the writing beautifully expresses, is all about her abject fear of getting too old to be relevant, of being overlooked and forgotten. The audience know too how hard she has had to fight for her place, albeit now shaky, on the clifftop of success.

A relevant story – and even a period piece must on some level be relevant to its contemporary audience – is another way to create engagement. Consider the hugely successful Netflix period romp Bridgerton, created by Chris Van Dusen and executive produced by that very commercially minded showrunner Shonda Rhimes (Grey’s Anatomy/Inventing Anna). This is a daring, hugely confident and original take on the period genre. Here we have skyscraper wigs and lavish costumes – something we may well expect in a high-end drama series – but there is a unique, and very appealing, theatrical edge. Queen Charlotte’s gown and wig-game in particular, steals every scene she’s in. Also ensuring a high engagement factor is the style and energy applied to the language, which could be described as ‘Colloquial-Baroque’. In short, these people are our people, but in period costume.

The Core of the series is where its commercial aspect truly lies. Here, producers will have identified what makes it tick and made sure that it’s easily identifiable; confident that there is both an audience for this particular story and a marketable angle to the series as a whole. We will look more at how that works during the development process in Chapter 2, but some recent examples of strong television series with an identifiable core, which is both creative and commercial, are:

Bad Sisters (Sharon Horgan/Merman Productions/Apple TV). The ensemble of the tight-knit familial group of these engaging, funny, flawed Irish sisters is a massively attractive structural hook and also a means to drive the storyline in a dynamic way, by virtue of the fact that these girls are united in one thing. They all hate John Paul, but they are not all on the same page as to what to do about him.

Slow Horses (Mick Herron/See-Saw Films/Sony/Apple TV). Again, this is an ensemble piece, which is an effective way of structuring a series to ensure maximum engagement, but it is expertly driven through the central character of Lamb, the shambolic old-school agent who knows all the tricks and stopped giving a toss a long time ago. His character is essentially what holds this piece together and makes it a cut above other thriller/espionage formats.

The White Lotus (Mike White/HBO). A line of dialogue delivered by the beleaguered, fractured heiress Tanya McQuoid-Hunt, played by Jennifer Coolidge (who won Best Supporting Actress at the Emmys) – ‘These gays, they’re trying to murder me’ – started trending big-time on Twitter after it streamed. It perfectly encapsulated the creatively brave, dark, twisty nature of this successful anthology series based around a luxury hotel franchise.

Killing Eve(Phoebe Waller-Bridge/Emerald Fennell/Laura Neal/BBC). Villanelle and her nemesis, Eve Polastri, form the darkly disturbing but blackly comic duo at the centre of this cat-and-mouse scenario, and the commercial angles are many. There’s murder done stylishly, dialogue that is both acerbic and funny, fabulous locations and clothes, and at the heart of it all, a love story.

The Connection to a series happens in the first instance via the all-important pilot script which must create a positive reaction in the potential producer to go any further. This can be on a commercial level but also, more often than not, it is on an emotional level. There is a reason why writers like Russell T Davies, Sally Wainwright and Jed Mercurio write such successful television series. They understand the importance of connection in storytelling. Their processes no doubt differ, but I am sure that early on in their series’ development they addressed the over arc of the series they wanted to write and found ways of making connections between the central characters and their storylines.

This is the territory I came into, very green and eager to learn, at Granada in 1993. I was hot off the back of a year script editing EastEnders which was riding high in the ratings war at the time and giving Coronation Street a run for its money. Very quickly, in a room with the likes of Russell T and Sally W, I got used to discussing story with a confidence that I didn’t at the time feel. But during this intense period, I realise now, looking back, that I was in a crucible of creativity where story was everything and it always came from character. Our discussions were not so much about the five-act structure of television storytelling that I teach today, nor about the jump off, midpoint and landing format which I now use to help my writers shape their storylines. There was no formula and no official structural analysis going on. But we all, to a person, understood innately how to make a storyline tick. What process was needed to get it truly going and what would be the ‘thing’ that got an audience hooked to the end. This was a lot to do with understanding the story engine – literally what was driving the story through the series arc as a whole.

Over a period of five intense years I worked with Russell, Sally, Paul Abbott, Kay Mellor, and many other writers who are still doing their amazing thing to this day. It was here that I learned how to handle long-running series narrative. And the key to all of it is how to make a dramatic, emotional connection with the characters in the fictional world you are creating, and with your viewers in the real world, outside the small screen.

A producer is looking, possibly without even realising it, for elements in a script that will form the bedrock of a creative, commercial series: the hooks, cliffs and set pieces. The business of story development and structure is often aided very well by the use of imagery, and the hook – used a great deal in soap structure – immediately gives the writer the image necessary to understand what it is that the script needs to do at this point. Whether this is a specific visual, a revelatory line of dialogue or a sequence of events, the job here is to literally hook the viewer into the next episode.

‘Cliff’ is another soap term but can be applied to all good series storytelling. What is it that you’re ending on and why would your audience return? Set pieces are a combination of the subtext, the text and a strong visual that wraps around the two key storytelling elements to create a perfect representation of the series you are watching as a whole. An example of a set piece in drama might be the scene in Bad Sisters, when the Garvey siblings are all gathered in eldest sister Eva’s garden. On a spike is a melon, which represents the hateful head of John Paul – their nemesis. Each one takes their turn in trying to hit a bullseye with their ineffectual bow and arrow skills. Bibi (not hindered by her eyepatch) is nearest to hitting the target. Will this be enough to kill him?

The Landing – the way the series ends should, in my opinion, be considered at the point of conception. A strong, commercial and creative series – no matter how many series or seasons there are of the show – will have a feeling of cohesion throughout its time span. This will be achieved by attention not only to the overall tone of the show, but more crucially to how the storylines, spanning across this timeline, weave and connect. Storylining is key to a coherent, truly immersive series, and its flow needs to be controlled from the outset. We need an engaging beginning, a middle where the storylines are expanded and explored, and a defined, impactful landing.

Series 1 and 2 of Happy Valley (BBC1) are so interconnected that I am sure Sally Wainwright would have had a strong idea about where she was going to take the main characters of Catherine Cawood and her bête noire Tommy Lee Royce in series 2, when first conceiving of series 1. And the final series 3 is a tour de force in how to tie up all the story strands from across the arc of all three series. Sally understands the way to create narrative stretch and connection throughout the arc of the series. She creates not obvious, but realistic, crossover points for all her main characters and by drilling constantly into the subtext of what is driving them, we have what appears to be a free-flowing, uninterrupted and natural progression of storyline for each major player. This looks effortless but it takes a seasoned expert at handling series narrative like this to make it appear easy. The structure is all there – but we, the audience, do not see the joins.

MY DEVELOPMENT PROCESS: CREATIVE VS COMMERCIAL

Setting up my script consultancy in 2013, I realised that in order to truly help writers develop and produce really great stories and scripts for television, I had to not only analyse, but also write down the process I use with the writers I work with. There is a school of thought that says the creative process is 90 per cent instinctive and only 10 per cent prescriptive. I don’t agree with this. To my mind, the creative process is a 50/50 split between the ideas and the application. The creative free flow and the prescriptive work. I realised there had to be a formula somewhere in all of this that I could pass on to my writers so they could use it going forward, to create solid television series narratives, when I wasn’t in the room or breathing down their necks via Zoom.

As we’ve established, my big ethos, and the one I carry with me always when working with writers, is this: all series television stories need to be both creatively engaging and commercially successful. I put on my producer hat when I read your work, or discuss with you the world you want to create. Producers do not like to have to dig through reams of extraneous stuff to get to the core of the story you are writing. They want to be hand-fed. They want everything to be clear, engaging and to say something about our world today.

The zeitgeist is at play here. Producers want to feel the work they develop and produce is both relevant and in whatever way you fashion it, will somehow hit the zeitgeist. They love a television angle. It’s all about the way you package and present your television series which will ensure they have to say yes, when they are always actively looking for a reason to say no. So, not only is it vital your story is creatively strong, it has to be commercially viable, and this comes down to the prescriptive elements I mentioned in the previous chapter. You need a particular mindset to ensure you are writing commercially as well as creatively, and here I will try and impart my specific development process, which I hope will bring you clarity when you are knee-deep in a new idea and inspire you to carry on.

What’s the Big Picture? Macro vs Micro Viewpoints

The biggest mistake writers make when they come to me with a new series they want to develop is they have invariably focused on the detail, not the big picture. So my first question, and the one that often is the hardest one to answer, is, ‘What’s the big picture?’ What I mean by this question is, ‘What is the overall message of your story?’ Or put another way, ‘What is it that you really want to say?’

This is the macro viewpoint of the series as a whole. I will refer often to the macro viewpoint. To my mind this is both the bigger picture of the story you are telling incrementally across a series arc of time, and it also represents the audience’s viewpoint as they observe your story unfolding on screen. The macro viewpoint is tied into the actual fabric of the series structure. For example, in a procedural drama like Casualty or Line of Duty, the macro viewpoint is the hospital and its staff and the members of the AC12 unit and their police world respectively. In the Netflix series Criminal, created by Jim Field Smith and George Kay, it is the psychologically tricky world of interrogation and in Detectorists (BBC/Netflix, written by Mackenzie Crook), the macro view is the far gentler world of metal detecting.

Identify at the outset what your macro viewpoint is and then we can consider the micro viewpoint. This is the point of view of those characters living in the world you create. They are seeing their world from the inside out and we, the macro viewers, are seeing it from the outside in. For example, Catherine Cawood in Happy Valley (written by Sally Wainwright BBC/Red Productions series 1 and 2 and Lookout Point Productions series 3), takes the micro viewpoint, and ultimately we see everything through her eyes. The micro view in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, created by Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino for Amazon Prime Video, is Mrs Maisel – Midge. And in the drama series Gangs of London, written by Gareth Evans and Matt Flannery (Sky Atlantic/Pulse and Sister Productions), the micro viewpoint is with a powerful ensemble.

The Bicycle Wheel