Category: Resources

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

Six Characteristics of Great Storymaking

In case you wondered how advertisers and marketing mayvens view the story creation process:

storyby David Berkowitz

It’s easy to call storytelling a cliché, but how exactly can one move beyond it when storytelling is entrenched as the epitome of what defines great marketing?

In previous Ad Age columns and during the Ad Age Digital Conference this April, storymaking has kept coming up as a way to describe the shift away from the broadcast-era mentality of storytelling to a new approach where marketers build on stories that people share with each other. Yet storymaking needs to be dissected so that anyone can identify it, learn from it, and engage in it themselves. read article

Peggy Bechko Tells Writers: “Keep Writing!”

Keep-Going

by Peggy Bechko

TV Writer? Screenwriter? Novelist?

I won’t mention writers of shorter pieces because that’s not what I’m going to focus on in this post.

The crux of the matter here is do you have a couple of half-finished novels on your hard drive? Screenplays maybe? You get going with lots of steam and a great idea that’s exciting and motivating, but somewhere along the line something happens. Maybe it feels like the original premise hits a dead end or the writer gets confused about where the original destination was or it just isn’t coming together the way it was hoped. read article

How to Write for Late Night TV

Tips from Josh Lieb, one of the producers of a little thing called THE TONIGHT SHOW:

jimmy-fallon-tonight-show-youth-group-gamesby kat rosenfield

Every comedian with a TV talk show has a behind-the-scenes team of writers whose job it is to put hilarious words into his mouth every night, thus creating the illusion that he (the comedian) is the funniest human alive.

And if that sounds like a super-cool job to you, you’ll want to check out our interview with Josh Lieb. read article

Do Personality Disorders Make You a Better Writer?

Uh-oh. Now we know why the UK has so many dark “comedies”:

Paul Abbott, creator of SHAMELESS and NO OFFENCE
Paul Abbott, creator of SHAMELESS and NO OFFENCE

by Simon Hattenstone

Paul Abbott is in danger of having created a new character every bit as monstrous as Shameless’s Frank Gallagher, and he is so excited that the words can’t tumble out fast enough. Detective inspector Vivienne Deering (played by Joanna Scanlan from The Thick of It) is not shy of squirting vaginal deodorant in public meetings, occasionally confuses it with her mouth spray, takes the longest (singing) pisses in TV history, will do anything to protect herself, is pretty good at looking after others too, and is not to be messed with. No Offenceis the first original UK TV series Abbott has written in more than a decade.

He has been working in television for 30 years, and in the 80s and 90s made his name writing for Coronation Street and Cracker, and co-creating the medical series Ward Four with Kay Mellor. But it was in the noughties that he established himself as one of the TV greats, with an astonishing run that included Linda Green, Clocking Off and most memorably State of Play and Shameless, two series that couldn’t have been more different. read article

WGAW May Calendar of Events

wgawmay15calendar

The Clickable Version is HERE