Just Start Typing

So today I'm starting a new script. I have 35 blank pages ahead of me that need to be filled with people talking, stuff happening and jokes. This is the part of the job that freaks out most normal people. A long time ago, Mitchell and Webb did a splendid Edinburgh show (yes, I said 'a long' time ago) in which Rob's character was trying to write a play. He sits at his type writer (yes, 'a long' time) and stares at it blankly. David comes in and asks him what he's up to and Rob says 'I'm trying to write a play. But I don't know what to put.'

The fact is that most writers do know what to put - roughly. In fact, being told what to do is our least favourite thing. We like the freedom of a blank page on which you can write 'The Prison Guard kicks the prisoner to death' or 'Leonardo Da Vinci grabs his helicopter and flies off into the sunset', depending on your mood or intention.
 
Besides, you don't start with a blank page. You're writing a script based on an outline (unless you're Carla Lane who, let's face it, was more successful than most current comedy writers combined). My outline is a fourth draft of a show and character that I've been mulling over for several months. The outline contains lots of jokes and bits of dialogue. And it's 3000 words long. The finished script should be less than 6000 so, if you like, I've already written half of it. The least I can do is turn the outline into talking and stage directions and I've got something half-decent. And other jokes will come. I know they will. They always do. I've written or co-written over a hundred half-hour scripts for TV and radio. And the jokes do turn up - if I've set the show up right. But every time I think they won't - because the times they don't is because the show is flawed and the outline needs more work. Or you need a fresh idea. But that doesn't happen all that often.

The opening scene is the hardest because you're priming the pump. You're setting stuff up, establishing story and character so that it'll be funny later. But it needs to be funny now or they won't stick around for the end. We want to hear the audience laugh four or five times a minute from the start.

But I can do this.

I've done it before. I can do it again.

I should be fine.

I should make a start.

Any minute now.

Once I've closed Twitter, having checked it.

And closed Facebook.

And my email (wow, the Mac Mail package is useless. What's that all about?)

And now I need to find the right mood music on Spotify. Something familiar, but not boring. Ideally without lyrics. Bach? Scott Joplin? Chicane?

It's all in place. So, erm, I should probably update my blog. Hence this post.

But I've done that now.

So, I should just start typing. It'll get funny. I'm sure...

What I Learnt from Back to the Future

I was making a risotto earlier. And I was thinking about the Back to the Future films. These two things are not connected. But they were happening at the same time. There are lots of things worth noting about these films, but for this blog, let us note two.

Good Set-Up
Time travel is, of course, preposterous. Clearly impractical, and doubly so when you throw in the hopelessly ill-conceived Delorean car. And yet, two words make it believable: 'Flux Capacitor'. Genius. Normally time travel isn't possible, but the Doc invented the Flux Capacitor. Now I believe it's possible, even with a heavy car made in Northern Ireland that couldn't make 88mph if you drove downhill with the wind behind you.

Think about it. Flux Capacitor. Neither word is silly by itself. Both words already existed. Blended together they sound plausible. We have a look at the thing - and it resembles a DNA coil, a hydrogen atom and some ovaries behind some emergency glass. Suddenly, all plausibility issues vanished with those two words. We have leapt from the lunatic world of Kelly LeBrock in Weird Science, dodged the apocalyptic craziness of Matthew Broderick in War Games and landed in Hill Valley in 1955. This is the power of words.

It is amazing how often a form of words can get you through a ton of exposition, back story or plausibility structures. I'm not sure how much we can learn from this, since these things tend to sneak up on you as a writer, but when you stumble across them, use them. If the audience are prepared to shrug and go 'yeah, I buy that', move on and explore your characters, tell their stories and do the jokes. The more pressure you place on this, the more silly it appears. So don't. Move on. The audience have.

Bad Set-Up
As I was stirring the risotto, one of my favourite lines from the third film popped into my head. It's when they're seize the train so it can push the car to 88 mph. According to IMDB, it goes like this:

Doc: Reach! 
Engineer: Is this a holdup? 
Doc: It's a science experiment!

It's a pleasing line and it gets a laugh, but on inspection, it's quite annoying. Why? Because of the set-up line. Crazy-haired Doc has a mask and a gun and ends up at the controls of a train with the driver/engineer. He sees the gun and the lunatic, and then says "Is this a hold-up?" Really? He said that? What a curious thing to say. You'd beg for your life, or something. You wouldn't say "Is this a hold-up?" I believe a Flux Capacitor before I believe that.

Any set-up line that you don't believe could be said naturally is going to take the air out of your joke. It may be a really good joke, but the clunky set-up will undermine it.

If you have that, spend an extra five minutes on it. How could the Engineer's line be more natural? Is there another character there who could say something to help that set-up? If they're not there, could they be there? By this point, it sounds like the joke's not going to fly and it's falling apart in your hands. That's no bad thing. You've found a weak point and can now make it better. Think of another jokes. This is already an extraordinary situation ripe with possibilities so it shouldn't be hard. Five more minutes.

Hey, no-one said it was easy. But then again, thinking up jokes for people to say on hijacked steams train in the Wild West so a Delorean can reach 88mph and take our heroes back to the future isn't exactly work, is it?

Why? Why? Why?

The hit TV show 24 revolutionised television, in my opinion. Here was a show that demanded you watch every last second of it. In order. Drifting in an out wasn't an option. And if you watched the first TV show, you were hooked. I remember seeing bleary-eyed friends of mine and asking how many episodes they had watched the night before. The answer was often 4 episodes or more. It was the TV equivalent of crack cocaine. The trick, of course, was to stop watching an episode half-way through before they built to the next cliffhanger.

After 24, there were a number of shows that were dense, full of plot and ideally watched on DVD which is why it changed TV in my view. Writers didn't want to write show where viewers could 'just dip in and out'. The boxed set and TiVo/Sky+ series link helped that. (In fact, in a recent interview with the guy who ran FX, the reason they stopped commissioning Damages was because it was a show that was best watched on DVD, not their network.)

There were only a couple of annoyances in 24. One was the totally unbelievable wireless communications enjoyed by Jack Bauer and his 3G wi-fi phone several years before 3G wi-fi existed. We could forgive this trope because maybe CTU had access to cool stuff and it moved the plot along.

The single most annoying thing in 24 was Jack's infuriating daughter, Kim, who kept putting herself in danger for baffling or non-sensical reasons. She was a poorly drawn character anyway and very much a concept or foil rather than a person. But she was also pushed around the story like a pawn in a game of speed chess. It made for very unsatisfactory viewing and caused much shouting at the television in my house.

What's My Motivation?
Motivation is just as important in comedy as drama. In 21-28 minutes of comedy, everything happens for a reason. And people do things for good reasons, or at least reasons that make perfect sense to that character in that situation.

I'm thinking about this at the moment because I had to fix a script I've been writing this morning in which a lower-status underling is briefly sassy with a higher-status boss character. The underling is a try-hard and eager to please his boss. But for various reasons, we need him to stand up to his boss who is asking too much of him on this occasion. If I'd left it as it was, it would have looked very strange and, worse, the audience would assume there was a good reason for the underling taking a stand, and they would have been disappointed and confused. And a confused audience is not happy and doesn't laugh.

How To Fix It
In this case, I tried to find a way around it, so that this underling did not need to stand up to his boss. But we needed it to happen this way. In the end, I found a neat way through it (if I do say so myself). The underling stands up to his boss by mistake, through a misunderstanding. And to make the misunderstanding believable, I made it part of a running joke which features in the very first scene of the episode. It's a pain to have to thread things like this through the script, but it's better than a character doing something for no good reason.

Your characters need a motivation for every action in every scene. Every action they perform, every line they say - and the way they say it - is part of an overpowering, overarching desire or need that drives them. This is why planning an episode takes a really long time. I don't start writing a draft of a script until I have a 3-4 outline of the episode with at least one paragraph for every scene. Even then, I often get halfway through a scene and realise at least one of my characters is adrift and 'just doing stuff' or 'saying stuff' for no good reason.

If you read your script back and it's just not hanging together, this might well be the problem. Do you know what your character wants out of life, consciously and/or subconsciously? What is their quest in this episode - and how does this action fit into that? You need to do this for every character in the script, not just your star or hero. Otherwise, you have a Kim Bauer on your hands. And let's face it. Nobody wants that.

The God Particle Returns

There's a lot of talk about the God Particle at the moment. They've found it. Or at least they think they might have found evidence that suggests they may have found it and it turns out they were right about Physics generally all along. Which isn't bad.

Now, I know what you're thinking. "If only there was some kind of theatrical comedy called the God Particle that I could see in London towards the end of August." Good news. I've written such a play. The God Particle is a romantic comedy about a vicar and a quantum physicist who are brought together by circumstances, and they bicker and argue about life and religion like Maddie and David from Moonlighting. It's takes place in the village of Threepiggs and is based around a quotation by one of my favourite writers, GK Chesterton who said "The point of having an open mind is the same as having a open mouth: to close it on something solid." This sounds witty but is it true? The scientist would argue not. What is it to have an open mind? Does that mean never believing anything? The play looks at all that. With jokes. And lasts about 75 minutes. Do come.


It's on at St James's Church, Clerkenwell, EC1R 0EA (here) on Tuesday 21st & 22nd August 2012. You can book tickets for 21st here and for 22nd here. Flyer below.

The Larbey - Summer 2012 Edition

Voices In Your Head

In the last post, I wrote about the importance of story and structure and character in sitcom - and the dangers of rushing to write a script. Character development and storylining take ages, especially if you're doing it right, and cutting corners normally backfires. Winging it or joking your way of out trouble is tempting but hardly ever works.

But that is not to say that you shouldn't write any dialogue until you're done your fourth draft of a detailed scene by scene breakdown of the episode. If you can hear the characters talking, write it down.  Fast. Grab a napkin and a lipstick if you have to. But get it down. It's worth having.

I've been working on a new idea and will be writing a script very soon. I have the characters in place - although I've just merged two characters into one - and a rough idea for a story. But then, based on one line in my head, the main character had a conversation with her daughter in my mind and it sounded funny. So I frantically started getting it down before the voices in my head stopped. They were arguing about something and it escalated and it was funny. I wrote about three pages before it felt like I was ready to stop. That script fragment then helped me as I formulated the story.

A few days after that, I was swimming and thinking about the show. Another conversation started to take shape in my head. It was between the same two characters but felt like a conversation they'd have at the end of the show. It seemed like very useful dialogue and, rather than risk forgetting, I got out of the pool and typed out the conversation on my smartphone. It was about two pages of dialogue in note form. And when I got home, I typed it up.

I'm still working on the story. It's still not quite there, but it's coming. The third act B-Plot doesn't work yet, but the emotional beats of the story are in place and I've got some dialogue and characterful jokes for it. I may well end up ditching it, but it helps to have it, for morale if nothing else, and the characters are now talking to each other. Yes, I have voices in my head. And I'm very glad about that.

Pearls From Pixar

A link to some pearls of wisdom from Pixar has been doing the rounds on Twitter recently and we ignore these pearls at our peril. And yet, the ambitious young comedy writer might turn their snout up at these pearls. And I can understand why. After all, there’s nothing about comedy on that list – and it’s all about character, focus, story, feelings, yadda yadda yadda. So far, so Woody.

The frustration is the novice comedy writer often feels they want to get on with the jokes. Cut to the funny. It’s partly borne out of passion for comedy, which is admirable. It can also come from lack of confidence. Young writers, especially blokes, often shy away from character and story because they are more attracted to ideas and jokes. And so their characters can merely be vehicles for concepts and/or mouthpieces for clever wordplay. I remember this stage in my own career as a writer – and a very happy stage it was as I was writing sketches for stage (Infinite Number of Monkeys), radio (Concrete Cow) and TV (Smack the Pony). We've seen and loved sketch shows that revel in ideas and jokes, rather than characters. (eg. Big Train, Mr Show)

A Blend of Skills

The art of writing sitcoms requires all of the above skills – you need ideas and jokes - but also a bunch of other skills. It’s why it’s so hard. You need to be able to establish characters, tell a story that suits those characters and make it funny. All within 20-28 minutes. Ideally, it needs to be funny because it’s those characters in that story. The best jokes are often very small ones, but they mean so much because of the character and the situation.

Sketches are like pop songs. Three minute nuggets of catchy, carefully honed perfection. What’s not to like? The sitcom is the half-hour symphony with high and lows, repeating themes and a crescendo. It requires careful planning, hard work and, above all, confidence, to pull it off.

Scripts that lack confidence are easy to spot. They’re full of jokes, sometimes good ones, occasionally highly original ones, but you don’t really care. There’s not enough to keep you turning the pages. It’s what-I-call “people talking”. People with names trading lines, wise-cracks and insults.

Why People Watched Friends

The problem is that highly successful shows can look like they’re just people talking. Let’s take Friends. It was such an exciting show when it came out. But it remained exciting through its long run. How?

And at the start, everyone liked it straight off because of the jokes. Everyone’s favourite character was Chandler, because Chandler just was funny. He said funny things. The kind of things that comedy writers would say. That was his thing. Being funny. Nice trick. Phoebe too. She was crazy and said funny things. And Joey. He liked the ladies and was dumb as nuts. But the show wasn’t a huge multi-billion dollar long-running smash hit because of Chandler, Phoebe and Joey. It was because of Ross and Rachel. Their carefully paced and calibrated story kept people coming back for more and more.

Writing sitcoms is more than just joining up jokes. Yes, Graham Linehan is open about how he writes sitcom scripts, seeing funny set-piece scenes in his mind’s eye and working how to get from one to the next. But don’t do it his way even though he makes it work. Carla Lane, I’m told, didn’t used to plan her episodes of, say, Bread, in advance. Don’t do it her way either. She made it work. (In front of nearly 20 million people, let's not forget) It is unlikely any of us have the exact same skill set as Mr Linehan or Ms Lane. We need to do it like Pixar.

All of this is a long way of saying that sitcoms need characters and stories. You need to get those in place or your jokes just won’t count. A young comedy writer might think he can gag his way out of trouble. A more experienced hand my think the same. After all, who cares about the plot if it’s really funny. But thinking of better jokes won’t help any more than spending a week buffing up a Ford Cortina. At the end of the day, it’s just a Ford Cortina.

So, if you’ve got a good idea for a sitcom, or an episode, go through that Pixar list and ask yourself those difficult questions. Or get some help. Ask someone else who's strong on story and character to help you. In the long-run, it’ll make writing your show much easier.

And then when you're got your brilliant characters and carefully crafted plot, promise me one thing. That you'll write some jokes? Thank you.