Writing for Television E-Book

Yvonne Grace

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

Seitenzahl: 174

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A no-nonsense, direct down-the-lens look at the television industry written from the point of view of a television drama producer who's been there, done it, fought some battles and won the odd award. Written in an engaging, anecdotal tone, Writing for Television provides advice on: Getting an agent - The type of writer television's looking for - The tool kit a television writer needs - The writer /script editor relationship - How to structure a storyline - How to write good treatments and outlines Packed full of useful insights, links and information, the book includes interviews with successful television writers working today, pointers on how to work collaboratively in the industry and how to make good contacts with the people who can further your career.

Leseprobe

A no-nonsense, direct down-the-lens look at the television industry written from the point of view of a television drama producer who’s been there, done it, fought some battles and won the odd award. Written in an engaging, anecdotal tone, Yvonne unravels the business of making drama happen on television from the inside out, and provides advice on:

• Getting an agent

• The type of writer television's looking for

• The tool kit a television writer needs

• The writer /script editor relationship

• How to structure a storyline

• How to write good treatments and outlines

• The differences between series, serials and soaps

Packed full of useful insights, links and information, the book includes interviews with successful television writers working today, pointers on how to work collaboratively in the industry and how to make good contacts with the people who can further your career.

Yvonne Grace is a seasoned, award-winning television drama producer with 20 years experience in script editing, script development and drama production for ITV, CITV, CITV, and BBC, and has worked on shows such as EastEnders, Crossroads, Holby City, The Ward and My Dad’s a Boring Nerd. She helps writers write better scripts through her script-editing and mentoring service www.scriptadvice.co.uk.

To my dad. For all those Sunday dinner times; plates empty, we'd play 'Family Dictionary' – he'd get the book out – we'd all have to guess the word he was describing.

To my mum. For cooking all those Sunday dinners.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to the people who have influenced, helped, encouraged and inspired me along my career path:

Helen Greaves: for giving me my script editing break on EastEnders.

Hilary Salmon: for inspiring me, at the BBC, to work with writers.

Clive Brill: for allowing me creative reign as a development script editor at the BBC.

Tony Wood: for giving me my introduction to the Granada Television powerhouse.

Carolyn Reynolds: for teaching me how to be both creatively and commercially minded within ITV drama.

Russell T Davies: for teaching me how to construct, control and handle a storyline.

Kieran Roberts: for showing me how to be a good producer and believing in me.

Mal Young: for giving me responsibility, and then letting me lead, on the second series of Holby City.

Jonathan Powell: for showing me how to tackle the job of executive producer.

Here’s to the writers that I have had the pleasure of working with and learning from: Tony McHale, Tony Jordan, Russell T Davies, Joe Turner, Sally Wainwright, Cath Hayes, Ashley Pharoah, Matthew Graham, Jeff Povey, Julie Rutterford, Jan McVerry, Jonathan Harvey.

And those that inspire and entertain me with their work: Lucy Gannon, Barbara Machin, Kay Mellor, Paul Abbott, Heidi Thomas, Ruth Jones, Chris Chibnall, Toby Whithouse, Bryan Elsley.

Thanks to William Gallagher for giving me the idea of writing a book about television writing in the first place, and then reading my early drafts.

And a special thanks to Jeff Povey, Debbie Moon, Glen Laker, Pete Lawson, Damon Rochefort, Lisa Holdsworth, Sally Abbott and Robert Goldsborough for their time and for sharing their television writing experiences with me.

CONTENTS

Introduction

HOW IT ALL STARTED

KEY PEOPLE TO KNOW IN TELEVISION – AND WHO YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT YOU

AGENTS:

WHERE TO FIND THEM AND WHAT THEY SHOULD DO FOR YOU

THE DNA OF A TELEVISION WRITER

THE SKILLS YOU NEED TO BE A TELEVISION WRITER

BE A STORY CONTROL FREAK

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE STORY

AND IT’S ALSO ALL ABOUT THE STORYLINE

THE RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR SCRIPT EDITOR

DEVELOPMENT: EMBRACING THE ZEITGEIST

WORKING WITH DOCUMENTS

MISTAKES TELEVISION WRITERS MAKE

WRITING UNDER COMMISSION

STAY POSITIVE

TELEVISION WRITERS TALK ABOUT TELEVISION WRITING

THE BBC SHADOW SCHEME, WITH GLEN LAKER

YOUR STORY, ON TELEVISION – TALKING WITH DEBBIE MOON

THE CONTINUING FORMAT: WHAT IT TEACHES WRITERS

MY EVERGREEN LIST FOR TELEVISION WRITERS

USEFUL LINKS

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA:

SCRIPT PAGES BY SALLY WAINWRIGHT

THE LAST WORD

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

So you are a writer. You love to tell stories and you have been scribing away for some time now and feel you are at the stage where you want to earn a living from your passion, the thing you like to do every day, because if you don’t do it daily you are a nightmare to live with.

Television is an exciting, exacting, terrifying, funny, frantic, exposing and emboldening industry to work in. If you are lucky enough to land a regular writing position on a television drama, you will soon be enjoying good money and have the structure to your day you used to crave when you weren’t a commissioned television writer. This structure will from now on be shaped by the rigours of the deadlines that will move into your house on the day of your first commission and take up residence in the dark space under your stairs. Deadlines are difficult house guests. They take over your space and hog the television – literally. So there are downsides.

Writing is a gruelling activity with the potential to batter you daily. It’s a tough, scary thing to do, to begin crafting a narrative, creating characters and moving your plot line forward scene by scene through an hour of television. But you want to do this, you know it will be good for you; and, if you don’t do it, you will regret it. Your headstone will read ‘used to write, but life got in the way’. So do it you will. But working in such an exacting industry can and does make you feel really rubbish about yourself and your writing ability. You need a thick(ish) skin, the resilience of a plastic stacking chair and a self-belief as flexible and strong as a bungee to really be happy working in television.

You may hope to work on an already established series or serial, or join the stable of writers on a soap, or you may be holding out for the elusive joy of writing your own single, or serial, for television and no doubt have already cast this and sourced where the wrap party will be. We’ve all done it. I still do. Whichever case scenario fits you, be certain that with this holy grail comes a lot of fuss, bother and what my nanna used to call histrionics.

In this book I am going to show you how to avoid too many histrionics, and to point out the skills necessary to get on in television as a writer, the pitfalls to avoid and the attitudes and mindset to adopt in order not only to succeed in getting through the television door but also to make sure it doesn’t whack you in the bum on the way out.

HOW IT ALL STARTED

Wendy Richard is staring at me. She has her hand on her hip and she is pulling the sort of face my Uncle George would say was like ‘a bulldog chewing a wasp’. I am in trouble and I know it and she knows it. There are three other script editors in the office, Barbara, Colin and Hattie, and they are staring at me too – all of them without exception thinking ‘thank God it’s not me’. I stare back at Wendy. Hard. I swear I can hear Hattie snort a nervous laugh back up her nose whilst Colin tries to do a very good impression of a radiator.

‘Well?’ Wendy’s gimlet stare takes no prisoners. ‘Yes?’ I answer querulously. ‘Where the fuck is my script?’ repeats Wendy, her expression now synonymous with the one Pauline Fowler gave her tumble dryer when it broke down: irritation, frustration and a huge dollop of pure anger.

Another seemingly endless pause during which, out of the heat of mental and physical paralysis that has overcome me since Wendy invaded my private space, an idea begins to form of what I could say to alleviate this situation –

‘Go away.’

Yes. I said that. I had other, more complex thoughts, like a pretty detailed explanation of why her script was late finding its way to her pigeon hole in the green room (I couldn’t sign off on the rehearsal script until my producer had okayed the last changes, and she couldn’t do that until she had read and done the same on the episode before mine, which she couldn’t do until the rewrites for the previous ep had come in, and they were due that morning, but we had just heard that the writer had had to go to a funeral, so we were actually about to have a meeting to finish the scene after the second ad break so we could push the whole thing forward), but I didn’t say any of that because I told Wendy Richard – matriarch of the most successful soap on telly – to go away.

It was like farting before the Queen. You just didn’t do it.

A BEGINNING – THE DEPTFORD WIVES

How I got to be in that place, standing on that hideous carpet, breathing the rarefied air of an outraged actress, is a rather circuitous story.

I started out, with a degree in theatre design under my belt, by totally avoiding the rigours of designing exciting sets for the stage. Instead I acted on them, for five years, until I realised it wasn’t speaking the story that interested me; it was creating stories and working with those who wrote them.

The written word has always held a fascination and the whole business of storytelling – why writers write like they do, what makes a good script great and how you change a mediocre drama into a fabulous one – are the questions I have pretty much busied myself with ever since.

I ran a script development company back in the early nineties in Deptford, South London. We were called the Deptford Wives. And the script-in-hand readings we did on the dusty old stage in the back room at the Birds Nest pub were always really lively, funny affairs and lots of people came (even from north of the river) to see what we were doing.

A mixed bag of humanity used to pack out the theatre. Some were actors or writers, others were agents, and there were a few radio producers, television producers and script editors. The bar during the interval was populated by professionals and non-professionals in and on the fringes of the storytelling industry. Rubbing shoulders with the great and the good of television, radio and theatre were Deptford’s finest: Charlie the drunk (who thought he was Rudolph Valentino), Martin the landlord’s mother (who was terrifying and wore lilac-tinted specs with lenses the size of tupperware lids), Blonde Gloria (the door girl) who wore cowboy boots and oversized man sweaters, and my friend Vania and I, trying to act professional and sometimes pulling it off.

It was a crush but a productive one on every level. The professional types were there to look out for fresh talent and champion the new voices of the time. The non-professionals were picking up tips and making connections, and the drunks and locals were enjoying the camaraderie and getting drunk. Which we all were to a greater or lesser extent.

Back in 1990, networking was reserved for high-flying CEOs and people who knew their way around a spreadsheet. But standing on the sticky carpet, inhaling the fug of a busy, jolly pub in full swing, chatting and laughing and generally having fun, I was doing just that, and with people whom I would ultimately need to give me a leg up into an area I knew little about but wanted to be part of. It was working. It just didn’t feel like it. That’s what networking should feel like for you, too.

KNOCKING ON DOORS

When I was knocking on doors, it seemed the BBC was staffed by Oxbridge graduates; coming from a polytechnic and having a strong northern accent rather pushed my ginger noggin over the parapet. However, I was tenacious, confident and kept firing off letters with my CV attached (and following this up with phone calls) to drama producers in the serial department like Phillippa Giles and in drama series like Helen Greaves, Jane Harrison, Leonard Lewis, Mervyn Watson and Clive Brill.

These names have either completed world domination now or gone off to do different things, but then, back in the late 1980s, I needed these people to be accessible and open and to at least see me. So I could impress them. With my amazing knowledge of what was great on television and what dramas did not work. I had tons of opinions. Tons of passion and drive. I could talk your leg off about why Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was the best thing on telly and how I could show the BBC how to fix Eldorado.

Fortunately, the likes of Phillippa Giles listened to me. And she had a friend working on EastEnders who needed a seriously strong script team behind her. Her friend was Helen Greaves and I became one of the seriously strong script team.

We all need a champion, someone who doesn’t mind sharing their experience and expertise with you – this is a vital relationship to nurture if you are to make it in television. We don’t all have a hugely successful person in whose slipstream we can sail through the doors of the big indies or the BBC, but we do, all of us, have at our disposal our talent, our personality, our personal opinions and our networking opportunities.

KEY PEOPLE USEFUL TO KNOW IN TELEVISION – AND WHO YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT YOU

Television, unlike the world of film, is a producer-led genre (which isn’t, of course, to ignore the commissioners, the creative directors, the controllers of channel. No, I do not intend to offend). However, after what seems (to me) like rather futile analysis, I have decided not to include specific names and titles. This is because television, like a lot of high-octane creative and commercial businesses, moves at a fast pace and I do not want to do the unthinkable and date this book (I would hate to be ‘last season’). So I will keep this section general and give you instead a general lowdown on the responsibilities of executive producers, producers, and development producers/script editors.

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER

To make your life more complicated than it no doubt already is (trying as you are to scale the slippery shingle of television drama production), the people with whom you will want to make contact do not, unfortunately, all share the same (or even in some cases remotely similar) job title. What moniker they adopt depends on the company or channel they work for.

A rule of thumb, however, is that if a producer has ‘executive’ before their name they are likely to be directly responsible for the look, content, tone and cost of the dramatic output of the show in question.

A good executive is both a diplomat and a creative. They are politically savvy, by which I don’t mean that they could win a debate in the House of Commons, but rather that they are political on a personal management level, with a very strong creative and editorial track record.

Executives have to detect, deal with and solve all manner of problems arising during not only the day-to-day, but also, if their drama is a series or serial, the year-on-year running of their drama.

When addressing the issue of writers on their show, the executive producer will not only want to use the best names available, but also add to their stable. This is because executive producers know (especially on established long runners like Casualty or Holby City) how fast their writer turnaround can be. It’s a television truism that, no matter how keen, or experienced, or just downright hard working they are, writers do get burnt out if they are overcommissioned and over-relied upon to deliver. A good executive, then, will want to be made aware of new writers and to get a handle on new work.

Not all execs are the same and not all work within a system that allows this, but I was lucky, and in my own experience as an executive producer I had access to, and actively encouraged, new writers and new ideas. I had a development team under me at Carlton Television and it was to these development script editors that writers and their agents would come. A development script editor’s main job is to bring new talent into the department/company and they may even be working on specific initiatives set up by the channel or company.

Most executive producers would pass you on to their producer should you contact them directly. However, it is the executive producer who will ultimately have the last say on whether your scripts fit the bill or not. And it is this signature you most want to secure on your writing contract. So find out who this person is and then focus your efforts on those who work for them.

PRODUCER

And so we come to the producer. It’s a great role. It’s a hard role. I have happily enjoyed my years as a television producer (my liver didn’t so much), and I can honestly say that my enjoyment has been largely due to the casts, crews, writers and script teams I have had the fortune either to find or to aquire. Without the commitment and talent of these amazing people, a producer has a hard, and perhaps even impossible, task ahead of them. It is true to say that you are only as good as the people you surround yourself with, and in television this is truer than ever.

A producer’s responsibility is directly to the programme, or block of episodes to which they are assigned. They must construct and deliver an entertaining, engaging, audience-savvy, quality dramatic product under usually impossible deadlines, restricted budgets and exacting requirements from their channel, company or department executives.

Not all producers are the same (why would they be?) but most, in my experience, range from being slightly interested in to massively obsessed with storylines, story creation, writers, writing and scripts in general.

A producer worth their salt will want to be aware of any new talent and will positively encourage their script teams to find this new blood. Addressing your opening gambit to the producer of a drama you admire will not offend, but you will usually find that your details have been passed on to a script editor. This is no bad thing. A long-running programme like Holby City, Casualty, Doctors or one of the soaps needs imagination, talent and creativity to keep it fresh and relevant to the huge audiences that keep tuning in, and one of the jobs a script editor does is help find that talent for the greater good of their show and the department they work in.

And I don’t just want to mention soaps or series here; the quality of the serials and shorter-run formats coming out of both the BBC and ITV is exceptional at the moment. Producers are largely responsible for the quality of the scripted drama they control and a writer-savvy, story-led producer is, in my view, the very best sort of creative working in a management role.

So familiarise yourself with who these people are and watch the shows they make with a critical eye of appraisal. If you contact a producer directly and actually begin a dialogue, rather than being passed on to someone else, you must show you have your own opinions and an ability to back them up.

Television loves an opinion well presented. A large part of the 20 years I have been involved in drama production for television has been spent forming, holding and voicing my opinions on what is made, what should be made and how it should be made.

When you come into contact with people who can make your writing life in television not only happen in the first place, but also (happily) continue, make sure you have some solid opinions, not just about your own work, but on past and current television drama output.

DEVELOPMENT PRODUCER/DEVELOPMENT SCRIPT EDITOR

Again, depending on whom a particular development person works for, the titles may differ. However, the jobs have an overall similarity. I was a development script editor at the BBC when Eldorado was their ‘Marmite’ series (you either loved it or hated it) and my job was specifically to find and develop good, commercial, entertaining, high-quality, dramatic series treatments for BBC1, which I would ultimately pitch at the department’s regular development meetings. Times change and so do corporations and the way they work internally. Nevertheless, there are still initiatives within the BBC for new writers, and more about that later.