When in doubt, blame the writer.
Even though in TV, not one word, one idea, one storyline or arc, ever makes it to the screen without being approved (and many times demanded) by a menagerie of executives.
Read it and weep, future scapegoats:
Tag: Spec Scriptacular Contest
Why We Write TV
TV writers – and TVWriter™ – do a lot of complaining about various, um, “difficulties” that go with the gig. But sometimes things go right in unexpected ways. For example:
Unsolicited Flashbacks
by Earl Pomerantz
On the rarest of occasions, something happens in my life that reminds me that I actually once did something.
When it happens two days in a row, I feel the impulse to write about it.
Dennis O’Neil: Legends of All Time!
by Dennis O’Neil
In this metaphor, time is a liquid and so we find ourselves doing the breaststroke, swimming back, back until we surface until we surface and…
Where might we be? The air is crisp and clean, the ocean before us is deep blue, the whole world seems freshly minted… Oh, of course! We’re somewhere in the region that will come to be called Before the Common Era and we’re watching a group of alpha male-type gentlemen board a sailing ship. Ah, we have it now. The gents are Jason and his pals who will eventually be dubbed The Argonauts, which means that the ship is the Argo, built by a handy chap named Argus and protected by the goddess Hera. They’re preparing to voyage in quest of some golden fleece for reasons with which we need not bother. There we are – everything tied up in a neat package. Don’t you love it when that happens?
But while we were ogling the BCE version of celebrities, the metaphor morphed. What was liquid is now pages, some yellowed and curling, some clean and white and on those rapidly flipping pages… glimpses. There’s King Arthur and the roundtable bunch. (How do we know that this particular king is Arthur? Because we do, that’s how! Now hush.) And there’s Odysseus and his shipmates. And the four musketeers, who, for some reason, are hailed as the three musketeers. (Maybe the seventeenth century French dudes weren’t so good at counting?) And The Shadow with his helpers, and Doc Savage with his and – the pages are crisper and whiter – the Magnificent Seven and the Dirty Dozen and the Justice Society and the Justice League and the X-Men and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow…
Support Grant Snider on Patreon
Nobody here at TVWriter™ is personally acquainted with Grant Snider, the genius behind Incidental Comics, but we all agree on one thing: Dude really is a genius.
He’s been publishing his amazing work online for about 7 years now, and LB and the minions have been moved to laughter and tears (really!) by everything we’ve ever seen him do.
Trying To Find a Literary Agent Is the Worst Thing Ever
Even successful writers have a hard time finding an agent. But don’t take our word for it…visit Ken Pisani and take in his words on his visit to writer hell:
by Ken Pisani
Anyone who’s ever dated regularly, tried to score against LeBron James, or been a transplanted organ knows what it’s like to face rejection. But no one understands the pain of rejection better than a first-time novelist looking for an agent.
It all starts with writing a query letter asking for the thing you probably won’t get, like a toddler who wants a cookie before dinner. My own query pled my case as a TV writer and a frequent Web contributor, while attempting to distill the novel I’d worked on for years into a single paragraph that almost made sense. I included the first 10 pages of the novel and hit 22 agents in 30 days, like a budget tour of Europe during which you see nothing.