Category: Resources

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

MAKE YOUR FEMALE VILLAIN STRONGER THAN HER GUN

So “villainess” is no longer a word, huh? Ah, the PC-ness of it all. Anyway:

UnpolishedVillainessby Rita Karnopp

One of today’s hottest plots is the female villain. Really? The killer has always been the jilted male, the psychotic male, the bomber male, the fired male, etc.  Now we are introducing the really bad villain female.  She is cunning, touch, intelligent, and twisted.

There’s nothing typical about the female villain, yet she’s believable in every way.  Don’t make her the male version of a ‘bad guy.’  Once you get past that – you have liberty to create her however you want. read article

Peggy Bechko: Writers Revealing What Characters Don’t Want To Show

secrets

by Peggy Bechko

Oh, come on, you know your characters are just like you. They say one thing and think something else entirely, try to conceal you’re really doing that – and then give it all away with a flick of an eye, a gesture or some muted (or otherwise) sound you make. Yep, that’s reality. Us humans evade, lie and maneuver (just for starters). We do it to protect ourselves, to protect others, out of embarrassment or an assortment of other reasons.

Now, knowing this it becomes a challenge for the writer. In a script for a movie the writer sets the scene, the mood, tweaks details to make things clear and then actors take over to do the subtle little things that portray what’s in the script, the character’s inner monolog.

For novel writers it’s a different kind of challenge. read article

BALANCING WRITING AND LIFE

Good advice for writers and creatives of all kinds, courtesy of Rita Karnopp’s and Ginger Simpson’s fine blog:

by Rita Karnopp

When we hear the word ‘balance’ then add writing and life, an author could almost laugh.  It’s a bit of a facetious statement.now later

When I started writing my children were very young, five and three.  So I scheduled my writing time after they went to bed around nine and wrote until two or three in the morning.  But, that’s not to say I never wrote during the day – because I did.  My office space was in our front living room (because we never used it, we always used the huge family room to the back of the house facing the mountains) and my desk faced the hallway toward the bedrooms.  The kids, and their friends, came in and out of that front door – past me –  how many times a day? read article

TVWriter™ Misses STUDIO READER STAN

Studio Reader Stan Logo

Back in the first decade of this century, a comic strip and animated web series called STUDIO READER STAN appeared, wreaked mirthful havoc for a couple of years and then vanished. We’re here to say “We miss you, Studio Reader Stan!” and to give TVWriter™ visitors who never got a chance to see this cynical little gem a taste of what it was all about.

And so, with no further ado: read article

David Handelman: Plotting Nashville

by David Handelman

When you write on a TV show, you only get to actually “WRITE” very sporadically. Most of the job entails being locked in a room with fellow creative eccentrics (ten, on this show) and bashing out stories while trying not to gain too much weight being forcefed lunch and snacks.

So when after the first 8 episodes, the spinning wheel  landed on me, I was READY. What’s different about Nashville, and what I was excited to use as a springboard, was the music. Obviously, I had to first pick up “the batons” from the previous episode and move them down the field toward what we knew had to happen in the next episode — an end of 2013 cliffhanger.

I needed stories that made emotional, narrative, and musical sense. (I also had a private agenda of doing stories that would bring as many of the myriad characters together, because I’d seen other episodes compress under the pressure of delivering scenes for so many storylines — and besides, we were due for throwing awkward, secret, reunited and ex-couples Scarlett/Avery and Zoey/Gunnar into a room together.) read article