writing for TV

[Carolyn Hill]

Jane Espenson, former writer for Buffy, Angel, and Firefly (in addition to other non-SFF TV shows), has a new blog that offers useful tips and advice to would-be writers for television, using examples from her scripts and from others' shows.

Although I'm not primarily interested in writing for TV, her advice gives me cool ideas for writerly techniques I can use in novels and short stories. For example, she suggests starting a scene with a reaction line of dialogue between two characters, to economically convey information about both characters and their interaction and capture audience interest by dropping them in the middle of the conversation. Her examples:

"What? He fired you? When?
or
Well, I think you're the one who's cheap!
or
I'm not going to steal for you even if we are still married!
or
Mom said I could have some!
or
I don't know what you have, but that's not a mosquito bite."

If this sort of advice sounds useful to you, or if you're just a BDF of the Whedonverse, check out her blog. http://www.janeespenson.com/archives/

 

[Carolyn Hill]

Here's another interesting resource: the podcasts for Battlestar Galactica.

http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/index.html

In most of the podcasts, the show runner discusses each episode, blow-by-blow, offering details about what it took to get the show on the air and telling tales about the actors and so on.

But three of the recent podcasts are special. They are recordings of the writers' meeting for the episode "Scar," and you get to hear the writers and the show runner brainstorming ideas, storyboarding fights, discussing characters' motivation and the ongoing plotline, and just generally inventing and fine-tuning an episode.

Lots of valuable insight into the writing process, even for those of us who don't aspire to write for TV.

 

[Susan Boulton]

Brown Rat;

You might be interested in this;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/

 

[Carolyn Hill]

Brown Rat;

You might be interested in this;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/

Yes, thanks! The Insight interviews on that site are interesting, and the Script Archives are a valuable resource. For anyone writing for the BBC, that's a site full of solid, useful information.

 

[j d worthington]

There's also just the simple fact that knowing how to write good scripts can come in handy at any time. I recall that some of the more intriguing books that came out of the sf field in the 60's and 70's sometimes used these techniques for presenting scenes, sometimes intercut with regular text to give a character's reactions, sometimes simply to jolt the reader into viewing it as a movie to distance, sometimes for other things entirely. And if you can at least read such scripts, there are quite a few good sf scripts out there that have been published over the years that are well worth reading.