The Oscar-winning writer of LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE and TOY STORY 3 tells us what he learned about storytelling over at Pixar. And, yeppers, it’ll work on TV:
Category: Resources
40 years worth of TV writing experience and info, yours for the taking.
Peggy Bechko: Beware Narcissus
by Peggy Bechko
Let’s step away from the actual writing, business of writing, mechanics of writing for today.
Writers are an imaginative lot and I’m here to caution you about Narcissus. You’ve heard of him – In Greek mythology. He was a hunter renowned for his striking handsomeness. Son of a river god and a nymph, he had more pride than was wise and disdained those who loved him (don’t know if he was totally wrong if they loved him ONLY for his beauty, but that’s a whole other story). That was, until Nemisis, a goddess herself, took note of his behavior, disapproved big time, and lured Narcissus to a pool. There he gazed upon his own refection in the water and fell in love with it, not realizing it was merely a reflection of himself (okay, that’s a little bit kinky). Unable to abandon the beauty of his own reflection Narcissus drowned/died (whichever way you want to go with the myth) and was no more. And that gave us the term narcissism –for a fixation with oneself.
Rod Serling on THE TWILIGHT ZONE & Other Amazing Shows
For those who don’t know about him, Rod Serling was the Aaron Sorkin of his day, only shorter. A multi-award winning writer with opinions on everything and a writing style that no one, including Sorkin, has ever matched. To put it another way, anything this dude has to say about television and television writing is worth listening to, and in this 1959 video interview has a hella lot to say:
Peggy Bechko: The Mistakes We Make While Writing
by Peggy Bechko
Mistakes.
We all make ‘em and we’re all kind of weird about making them.
There isn’t a writers (or a person) in the world who doesn’t make mistakes at times. It’s who we are.
Cracking the Sitcom Code
Formulas? We’re sitcom writers. We don’t need no steenkin’ formulas.
Or do we?
by Noah Charney
As happens to so many of us, I was asked to write a sitcom for Croatian television. I’m an American ex-pat living in Slovenia, and I know next to nothing about Croatia, besides the fact that it’s Slovenia’s southern neighbor, a fellow ex-Yugoslav republic, and that the language resembles Slovene except with a lot more “js” in it. I am a writer of books and articles, and I used to write a lot of plays, but I’ve never written for television. So I immediately said, “Sure, of course I can do that,” before rushing off to Google “How to write a sitcom.”