Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV by Douglas Pamela

Author:Douglas, Pamela [Douglas, Pamela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Michael Wiese Productions
Published: 2011-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

WRITING YOUR OWN EPISODE

HEARING VOICES

(The following impressionistic essay appeared in The Journal of the Writers Guild of America.)

“…Trumpet at his lips, he listened to the notes bounce from brick rooftop to rooftop until, finally, he knew the rhythm of the echoes. He’d based his music on those intervals. People called him a genius, but he knew what they could not understand — that he had merely listened.”

That’s from a short story I wrote in college, when I believed music exists before it is played, that a statue is inside the marble block and the sculptor cuts away whatever is not the statue, and that for writers — now we come to it — characters exist beyond what is written, with larger lives than fit on film. They’ll talk to you. You merely have to listen.

You catch a character the way a surfer catches a wave, waiting in still water until it wells up from a source as invisible as it is powerful.

Whaddya want? That was a kid talking.

Okay, okay, we know what it’s really like. In some scripts, catching a character is more like catching a bug mid-flight on your windshield.

Working writers have to hear other voices. “You want it good or you want it Friday?” Yeah, yeah, I know, good and Friday… and it better be Friday.

The voice of my first movie business boss plays in a perpetual loop. Greenly arrived from the East Coast, I had landed a studio development job. I brought the boss a script by a New York friend and naively blazoned it with the kiss of death. I called it beautiful. I can hear the boss now, over his thick cigar, “Don’t tell me that shit!” He’s making boxing moves like Norman Mailer. “Man to man! Action! Action! Get it? Mano a manol!” He’s snapping his fingers in my face. “Is it going to make 100 million? Is it? Is it? That’s what you tell me. You come in here and prove it’s going to make 100 million.” A sucker dare. No one can prove any movie will make a dime. But I didn’t know.

He didn’t snap his fingers in your face. You’re over the top, and that character is running wild. Stop him!

Okay, okay. He didn’t snap. But the rest is true. I soon left the studio job for a writing career. The denigrated New York author went on to win a Pulitzer. And the executive retired richer than both of us.

What’s that got to do with the voices?

They don’t come easy. Sometimes you have to snare them.

My field is television drama. I’ve had the chance to learn from a few great writer-producers who provoked their staffs to what drives a real person, not just what gets a laugh or twists the plot. Where else do you find a 22-hour narrative of evolving characters? Immediacy. Intimacy. Power. Like a hard-charging river. But we all know what’s along the banks: some cesspool shows.

When I was a beginner, I went for an assignment on one. It wasn’t exactly a cesspool, just stagnant.

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