Category: Resources

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

Dreaming of glamour while living on the breadline

The subtitle of this article tells the tale: “…the life of a modern screenwriter.” Truth to tell, though, we think it would apply to just about any writer, anywhere and any time:

Spotted at Pinterest
Spotted at Pinterest

by Sally O’Reilly

Writing for the screen has always been insecure, competitive and emotionally demanding – and that’s on a good day. It’s not a calling for the maverick genius; collaboration is mandatory. While novelists, playwrights and poets are in sole command of their work, the screenwriter must be prepared for constant rewrites, and even if their script is deemed filmable, it’s often no more than the blueprint for a director to bring to life. Even so, the allure and the glamour remain: the flash of cameras at Cannes or Beverly Hills, the chance to create stories that are beamed around the planet.

Hard work and determination are prerequisites. Whether the aim is to write for the small or large screen, it’s often difficult to get a commission, and new writers usually work extremely hard for little financial reward. According to the Writers Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) the BBC pays budding writers on one of its so-called “shadow schemes” less than a third of the minimum wage. read article

Dennis O’Neil Discusses “The Crisis Of Infinite Superheroes”

Simpsons-Huck-Finnby Dennis O’Neil

Cozy down on your couch and wait for it: A Supergirl series coming soon – well, in the fall – to a television set near you. And a new superhero on The Flash and what looks like some supering up of already existing character or characters on Arrow and and and…

I’ll bet the corridors of the media giants in Hollywood and New York (and Chicago? London?) are absolutely buzz with plans and proposals for more stories about that congregation who wear peculiar costumes and bash. I think they call it extending the franchise, and it is nothing new. My current favorite example from antiquity is the King Arthur saga which was kind of inspired by rales of a fifth or sixth century British ruler who fought Saxon invaders. (Did he really exist? Was he compounded of several rulers? Let us shrug and get on with it.)

Anyway, it wasn’t until the twelfth century that Arthur’s tales began to be written down and circulated, though some stuff may have been forever lost in the long gap between inspiration and dissemination. There have been adaptations and additions and redaction ever since. Almost certainly, somewhere on this green planet, someone is even now working on an Arthur piece. read article

Fleshing Out Your Characters

Yeah, really, ya gotta flesh out your characters, you know? Cuz skeletons are so…fashion model:

How to Flesh Out a Character
by Nathan Bransford

Great characters leap off the page and take up residence in our brains. Every quirk, every bit of dialogue, every small detail just reinforces their realness.

But anyone who has written a novel knows that creating characters like that is really, really hard. read article

If Disney’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST Got Reality TV Network Notes

Notes are the bane of the existence of everybody working in television, including those who write them. Today, the ever-perceptive reality TV producer known on the web as Jeez Jon tells us what it would be like to take part in the Not-So-Wonderful-World-of-Notes for the Disney classic BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.

beauty and her friendWriter’s note: The following contains spoilers for Disney’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. If your nose is going to get bent out of shape regarding spoilers from a movie that came out in 1991, please up your dosage. 

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST RC2 NETWORK NOTES read article

A DOCTOR WHO Writer Talks About – DOCTOR WHO?

We admit it. We at TVWriter™ luvs us our DOCTOR WHO. Any DOCTOR WHO, with any incarnation of the Doctor. And, being consistent types, we also have huge crushes on every DOCTOR WHO writer. So it’s with great joy that we discovered this interview with a New Who writer we’d never heard from before. Happy New Insights, y’all!

dalek_0

from Den of Geek

As impossible as it may seem, it has been a decade since Doctor Who returned to the airwaves with Christopher Eccleston as a Time War-traumatized version of everyone’s favorite Gallifreyan. Arguably the greatest episode from that first season of “New Who” is “Dalek,” the story that reintroduced Terry Nation’s iconic pepperpots. The man responsible for the episode was British writer and playwright Robert Shearman.

A veteran of the, er, fantastic Big Finish audio dramas, Shearman adapted his own story “Jubilee” for television. Shearman is currently in New York City for a restaging of his 1992 play Easy Laughter, a biting satire that still feels very much of the moment. This Saturday, he’ll appear at Brooklyn’s only Who-themed bar, The Way Station, to host a screening and discussion of “Dalek.” In advance of these events, we had an opportunity to ask him about his fascinating career. Here’s what he had to say. read article