In case you’ve missed what’s happening at TVWriter™, the most popular blog posts during the week ending yesterday were:
Tag: online TV writing workshop
Happy Anniversary, All You Crazy Rebels!
Happy 4th of July from all of us at TVWriter™!
30 Practical Ways To Beat Writer’s Block
This article doesn’t fool around. It doesn’t settle for giving us a couple of tips, oh, no, no, nooo! Here are thirty – count ’em – thirty ways for all of us to get off our butts, leave our self-pity behind, and $#@! write!
by Amanda Patterson
Many of us talk about becoming writers, but when we finally have the time and we’re still stuck, will we have what it takes to go beyond the dread writer’s block? Here are 30 tips to help you. Good luck! =&0=& =&1=&:- Handwrite the scene you are working through. Do this for at least one day.
- Go to a public place and watch people. Describe what they do and say. Try to find a way to use their body language, and the sights, noises, and odours around you in your own story.
- Change the setting in your story. You may want to change it back later, but for the purpose of the exercise, move the characters into another location.
- Introduce a new character who watches your main characters. Describe the scene you are writing from that new character’s viewpoint. This should give you a different perspective on the problem.
- Use your daily writing prompt to start a scene in your story.
- Change the timeline. Make the scene you are busy with an epilogue or a prologue or the beginning or ending of the story.
- Ask your character if his or her bucket list has changed since you began writing the story. If it has, rewrite it. If it has not, perhaps it should.
- Write from another character’s perspective. If you have been telling the story through the protagonist’s viewpoint, write a scene through the eyes of the antagonist’s sidekick.
- Make your character behave out of character. If your heroine is brave, make her back away. What happens when she does this?
- Ask your character to list the five things he or she is grateful for right now. If you do not know, you may need to spend more time with your character.
- Change tenses. If you’re writing in present tense, switch to past tense and vice versa. Do this for an entire scene. You may find that it gives you ideas for what to leave in and what to exclude.
- Research something that interests a character in your story – even if you’re not interested in it. List five things you could use in the story as a result of this research.
- Add multimedia to your story. Allow your character to use tweets, emails, and texts to give your story texture.
- What if? How can you make things infinitely worse or better for your protagonist at this moment? Is it something you could use?
- Stay in the moment. Make sure you won’t be disturbed. Get inside your character’s skin and write the scene moment-by-moment, breath by breath….
America: where British sitcoms go to die
Considering how off the mark U.S. adaptations of UK sitcoms often are, the writer of the following article wonders why British comedy series creators look forward to seeing their work produced on our side of the pond. But to us at TVWriter™ the question is more along the lines of, “Why can’t American writers get UK comedies right?” (Hint: We don’t see this as the writers’ fault at all.)
by Andrew Collins
Imagine an alternative universe where Dad’s Army, The Young Ones, The Thick of It and Spaced never got past the pilot stage and Fawlty Towers was cancelled midway through series one. Well, that nightmarish world exists: it’s called the United States, and it’s the place where the brightest and best British sitcoms go to die.
Caitlin and Caroline Moran’s semi-autobiographical Raised By Wolves, about two sisters growing up in a large family in Wolverhampton, is the latest Britcom to arouse transatlantic interest. The Channel 4 original makes its US debut this week on streaming service Acorn. But, more mouth-wateringly, a deal for an American version has been agreed with Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody (Juno, Young Adult) hired to write the pilot. Caitlin tells me she is “staggered” by the US interest: “When you set a sitcom in Wolverhampton, you’re obviously not expecting that.” But, despite all the flag-waving goodwill and agape expectation, it has little hope of succeeding, statistically at least.
Web Series: “Fantasy Hospital”
Our Beloved Leader, Larry Brody, AKA Our BLLB, recently acquired an interest in an emerging animation studio. The following is not one of their productions…but he kinda wishes it was. “It’s the innocence here that I love,” he says.
New epsiode every Wednesday!
www.FantasyHospital.com