Harsh but true words all writers need to heed.
Bang2write is known for being honest in its feedback. Note that doesn’t mean brutal, vitriolic or cavalier. Writing is tough and writers have to make all kinds of sacrifices to get words on the page. Nothing winds me up more than readers and feedback-givers who don’t exercise due care. Every piece of work is an expression of someone’s hopes and dreams. I take this very seriously.
In this excerpt from his book, Generation Friends, Saul Austerlitz meets the past of successful TV writing and discovers that it’s the present and future as well.
Every writer knew the sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach. David Crane would enter the room, toting a script full of notes scribbled in the margins. He would sit down in his chair and begin drumming his fingers on the table before announcing, “All right, we’ve got a lot of really good stuff here.” The assembled writers would silently groan, knowing that this was Crane-ian code for a full script rewrite. Everything was out, and it was time to start again.
“Good enough” was not a concept Crane, or Marta Kauffman, understood or accepted. One day during the first season, writer Jeff Astrof approached Crane with a proposal. “Look,” he told Crane, “right now we work one hundred percent of the allotted time and we have a show that’s one hundred. I believe that if we worked fifty percent of the time we’d have a show that’s seventy-five, so maybe we work seventy-five percent of the time and have a show that’s like a ninety.” Crane instantly rejected the proposal: “Absolutely not. The show has to be one hundred.” There might have been a faster way to get the work done. But this was Marta Kauffman and David Crane’s show, and their room.
The Nicholl Fellowships are arguably the most important writing competition in existence for new screenwriters. In addition to the actual Fellowship, winners almost always end up with representation and agents and lots of wide open doors that were shut tight before.
TVWriter™ congratulates the following 2019 Nicholl Fellowships finalists on their achievement:
The Bitter Script Reader takes us on a very personal trip from his own life. Our takeaway – yeppers, this is personal AF…but so universal as well. This definitely is worthwhile reading, friends.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my own journey as a writer and what I can take from it to apply as lessons to some of you who are just starting out.
My first feature script began as an assignment for a screenwriting class in 2002. By that point I’d made a number of short films and had even run a campus TV series, where 7 of the scripts were mine. So I already had some experience translating my ideas to the page before this screenwriting assignment. I remember this was a story idea I’d had ever since my senior year of high school. At the time, I thought I had enough for a 30 minute short film (I had no idea the shorts I’d be making in school were to be closer to 5-10 min at most.) Over the next four years I kept expanding the idea with red herrings and twists until my treatment became longer and longer.
We get quite a few queries about TV series bibles here at TVWriter™, especially during PEOPLE’S PILOT season. (Right now we’re in the middle of the entry period for our signature TV pilot writing contest, PEOPLE’S PILOT 2019.)
Our Beloved Leader Larry Brody covers the topic, and a whole lot more, in his mucho-respected (he likes to think of it as “adored”) book Television Writing from the Inside Out), and the bible thing also figures in the Basics of TV Writing section of this very site.
Recently, however, longtime TVWriter™ friend Chuck Fox found a marvelous treasure trove of bibles for recent shows including Stranger Things, The Wire, True Detective, Freaks and Geeks (this TVWriter™ minion’s all-time fave sitcom), Fargo, Adventure Time, and more at screencraft.org, and calling this collection a must-see is no exaggeration.