Category: Resources

40 years worth of TV writing experience and info, yours for the taking.

Michaela Coel Is The Foul-Mouthed Genius Taking Over British TV

This article had us at “foul-mouthed.” But “genius” isn’t such a bad word either. Anyway:

Michaela Coelby Colin Crummy

Chewing Gum doesn’t pull its punches. A new British comedy created by 27-year-old writer and star Michaela Coel and set on a sun-dappled east London housing estate, the working-class world she depicts is a multi-racial, sexually frank, filthy and funny kind of place, with the show tackling issues of religion, race and class with a no-holds-barred frankness. It might just be this fall’s most refreshing new comedy.

Coel plays lead character Tracey, a virgin and a Pentecostal Christian who lives on a council estate in east London with her evangelical mum and sister. She dates the casually cruel, super uptight and strictly religious Ronald who pledges that after six years of going out, sex will remain very much off the agenda if the Lord thinks it best. As he prays, Tracey eyeballs the P in his pants. In steps her best friend Candice, offering sage advice on the realities of online dating: “You can bang someone on Tinder, it’s free. Stick the ting to find someone in your borough and walk. A Tinder bang ain’t even a bus fare, bro.” read article

Jennifer Hoppe-House is a New Writer We All Should Know…

…Because she’s good and getting better…and a good Pathfinder is hard to, um, find:

by Connor J. Hogan

Jennifer-Hoppe-House-by-Barbara-Green“I couldn’t break into television,” Jennifer Hoppe-House says. “So I wrote a feature with my girlfriend at the time. She became my writing partner and is still my writing partner.”

With Nancy Fichman, Hoppe-House has penned scripts for FX’s Damages, Showtime’sNurse Jackie, and Netflix’s Grace and Frankie. Now, as part of the Women’s Voices Theater Festival, Hoppe-House is setting out on her own with her play Bad Dog, which deals with addiction, family, and the shared stories that influence them both. read article

Kelly Jo Brick: Highlights from the Variety Entertainment & Technology Summit

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By Kelly Jo Brick

Developing material through a different lens was a recurring theme during Variety’s Entertainment & Technology Summit. In this day long event, panelists discussed the challenges of staying relevant and reimagining their strategies as the entertainment industry grows and adapts to new technologies.

When looking at the current entertainment atmosphere and the future of the film industry, President of Imagine Entertainment, Erica Huggins, declared, “A good story is a good story.” But stories can now be told in many ways as she added that there is, “A select group of people that will always tune in for something that is great.” read article

How Twitter’s 140-Character Limit Made Me a Better Writer

The 140 Character limit on Twitter is still in place, and there’s no certainty it will be removed. Regardless of what happens on that front, the following remains something all writers need to think about…probably for more than 140 characters’ worth of time:

tweettweetby Patrick Allan

Twitter is planning to extend its typical 140-character limit, and a lot of people are welcoming the change. But as annoying as the 140-character limit can be, I’ve found that it actually helped me practice a few principles for better writing.

It Forced Me to Declutter My Writing

Writers love words, and they love to use as many as they can. This can lead to a lot of clutter, or what some might call “fluffing” or “padding.” When you fluff your writing, you’re adding words you don’t need to convey your message. It may make your paper longer, but as William Zinnser, the author of On Writing Well, adamantly conveys, it weakens your writing: read article

Archetypes are Like Rock n Roll. They’re here to stay.

archetypesby Diana Black

Archetypes are here to stay…

The practice of storytelling is a defining characteristic of Homo sapiens. Why? Let’s take time out for a quick history lesson. As a species, we’ve been around for about 1.5 million years. Going back just 300 000 years ago, we find concrete evidence of ritualized behavior (related to burials) and so there’s
every likelihood that alongside saying ‘Good bye’ to one’s significant others, stories were told. How better to entertain the fireside audience than having certain members of the tribe get on their feet – adorn themselves with make-up and costume and take on a ‘role’ – the hunter, the hunted etc.?

Conflict as a premise started early. If we do the math, that roughly equates to members of 12 000 generations (? 4 gen/100 years) ‘strutting the floorboards’. Equally peculiar, is the notion that by-and-large, we’re still enacting the same dramas; only now they’re ‘gussied-up’ with marginally more sophisticated plotlines and CGI. read article