Writing Lessons Learned from TV: The Walking Dead S2
Season 2 of The Walking Dead on AMC has reached its half-way point. On November 27, 2011 the mid-season finale, "Pretty Much Dead Already" aired and its final moment provided a chilling turning point for a group still clinging to the hope of a normal life and happy future. As a writing fan, I thought it wrapped up many aspects of this season so well that I couldn't help but laud it here.
Sitting on Good Ideas
A few weeks ago, I was listening to "This Week in Google" podcast episode and heard about a new Twitter-based service that was launching a private beta. The service was finding a new way to connect people through their tweets, whether they were followers of each other or not. Most people would say "cool" and try to sign up. I said "well shit", sat down, and moped.
Tripping My Star Wars Alarm
This past weekend we watched G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra on Netflix, a movie that started to make me feel weird, then anxious, then totally detached. Why? Because, it was popcorn action movie that I shouldn't take at all seriously? No. Because it, like several films previously, tripped my Star Wars alarm.
Dec 10
23
Motivation: builders and conquerors
Is it fair to say that people can be classified into two camps: those who are driven to build, and those who are driven to conquer? For the sake of a blog post, answer yes. Maybe the words aren’t quite “build” and “conquer” for everyone. But it feels like an interesting viewpoint into a person or character’s motivation to determine whether they want the new thing, or just want to be rid of the old.
Let me tell you a little story, about the Lovelytown Basketball Team.
Names changed to protect the innocent.
Lovelytown has a basketball team. To be a member of this team, you need to do two things: volunteer for it and be elected to play by the fans (or whoever from the town shows up to vote). You don’t have to be able to play basketball, though it usually helps to claim you can just before elections. And no one religiously watches the basketball team play, but the outcome of the games affects things like tourism in Lovelytown, which has an impact on everybody. (Sufficiently vague?)
The team’s record last year was 5 wins and 4 losses. Respectable. But it was clear to some that part of the reason the team had missed the playoffs was a result of bad coaching. Some fans had seen this as a chronic issue for the team for a while. In fact, one player — Carl — had originally tried out not because he enjoyed or understood basketball, but because he wanted to ensure the coach got fired.
At the end of the season, the whole of Lovelytown congregated to select the new squad. But, first, they were shown a highlight reel of the coaching errors that had cost the team their shot at the championships. Carl stood up and called for a coaching change, stating that he would never play again unless a new coach was brought on board. To his surprise, the town chose to keep the current coach. (A 5-4 record is better than a losing record after all.) Carl was outraged.
When it came time to select the 2011 team, no one volunteered to play. After all, who would want to play for a terrible coach that the current players don’t trust? Minutes of silence went by. Finally, the first volunteer raised his hand. It was Carl. A few others went up, and the new basketball team was chosen.
As the Lovelytown fans left the arena, Carl hung behind. He walked up to the coach, now aware that his job had nearly been lost, and said, “So help me, next year we’ll have a new coach.”
There is no Lovelytown and there is no basketball team. But this was an interesting character study for me in what makes people tick and how driven they can be, regardless of the goal, not necessarily by obvious motivations.
So, in your own experience, does the home-improvement maniac redecorate because they want a beautiful new room or because they want to a change from the old ugly one? Are content creators and entrepreneurs primarily guided to add something special to the world, or are they mainly driven to disprove people who think they can’t? And further, does one type of motivation or the other seem more likely to propel someone successfully through to their goal?
Feels like an interesting question to ask of any new character.
Dec 10
15
Writers Toolbox – Dropbox for Backup
When you read about screenwriting on other blogs and printed publications, most focus (as they should) on the words on the page and making your written work better. But, as with any craft, it’s worth talking about how we work, the tools available to keep us productive, and how we protect our creative investment.
One tool that’s hugely important to my work flow is called Dropbox, a free utility and web storage solution that protects my content, gives me accessibility from multiple computers, and has proven to be a great tool for collaborating.
In this post, I’ll talk about Dropbox as a backup utility and an aid for multi-device users.
Backup is obviously a huge concern for anyone who sinks time and effort into digital files, whether they are written documents, film editing, music, or graphics. It would be disastrous to lose a day of work, let alone many days. Some people are dedicated enough to include manual backup in their work flow, but any process that requires this kind of discipline, for me anyway, is subject to risk.
Dropbox is a software utility that operates like an intelligent cloud-storage version of Apple’s Time Machine, for automating this backup process. When you install it, it creates a dedicated folder for documents and files you want to track and then automates the copying of those files up to a duplicate folder on Dropbox’s servers, only when those files change. It means the second you hit “Save” on your document, the Dropbox utility starts backing you up off-site. If your computer crashes, or is stolen, you have another copy safely hidden away.
And like Time Machine, it remembers older versions of your files, which allows you to go back and retrieve previous drafts if something good was unintentionally overwritten.
The other reason I use Dropbox is because I am a multi-device user. Usually, I write on the communal desktop Mac at home. But sometimes I take my old Windows laptop with me to get work done elsewhere. Most recently, I have added an iPad to my workflow to allow me to work on files while I’m commuting to and from the office. So even for a single user, when multiple devices are involved, there is a challenge in making sure the latest copy of your files is always accessible.
While Dropbox automates the copying of files to their server, it also automates the copying of updated server files to any other computer on which Dropbox is installed. Make a change at on your notebook, sync with Dropbox, and immediately the latest copy of your file will be pushed to your computer at home, at the office, anywhere the Dropbox client is active. This is a great feature for the multiple-device user. It means you’re never separated from the files you need.
Dropbox can also be a great cool for collaboration — something I’ll save for a future post — but even for single user, it provides enough benefit that I would recommend using it if you don’t already. For creative writers, the 2GB limit of a free Dropbox account will more than suffice. For musicians, filmmakers, and photographers, you can upgrade to 50 or 100GB of storage for $9.99 or $19.99 per month.
In this post, I’ll take a look at the Amazon Studios approach to collaboration.
According to the website, when you post a script to the Amazon Studios server, you open that script up to unlimited revisions by members of the Amazon Studio community. The blue-sky motivation for this approach seems to be to allow other artists to be inspired by your original material, and to use it to spawn something slightly better. To keep the rights ownership simple and to honor the original creator, authors of Revisions relinquish all rights to their Revision Content. Authors of revisions are eligible for contest winnings, but if you read Part 1, my red-lines have already abolished those.
So now we get to my problem with opening my work up to unlimited revisions: I’m greedy, selfish, like to think I’m super smart, and don’t really want a stranger messing with my stuff.
At the same time, I don’t think Amazon Studios is totally wrong. Some ideas and scripts will get better if one allows them to be modified by other parties. I’ve come to that realization myself, when stymied in the middle of a screenplay: opening the script up to edits from a trusted circle of writer friends can be beneficial. I’ve thought it’s better to have half ownership of a good finished script than full ownership of a crappy fragment.
And, in truth, most people who get rewritten probably didn’t have a say in the matter. Of course, by the time they are subjected another writer’s notes and input, most would have already been compensated — at least in some modest way — for their original material. Not so, with Amazon Studios.
So let’s be totally naive and pretend that the gist of their idea on collaboration is: “writers who open their ideas up to revision can make their work better”. I could buy into that. But how about, instead of opening every submission up to revision, we permit writers who believe in this same axiom to recruit help. They can post a logline and sample excerpt from their piece (5-10 pages should do), which give potential collaborators enough sense of genre and tone to provide feedback and maybe even suggest a couple of re-writes. I’m betting that if you notes from strangers on 10 of your pages, you’d have a pretty good idea who gets you and who doesn’t. Then you could pick someone to help with re-writes, share credit on the piece, and submit it together (if you so choose) to be eligible for option.
What do you say, Amazon? I think of it as eHarmony for screenplays. My screenplay is looking for someone, but let’s grab coffee before you totally screw it.
This week Amazon launched Amazon Studios, a crowd-sourced approach to creative collaboration and movie making. Writers and filmmakers are invited to post their scripts and “test films”, with the potential to have others work on them, win money, and possibly have their film produced.
There are going to be a hundred blog posts complaining about this venture and, as the service exists now, I don’t plan on using it.
But, let’s look at this constructively. First, we should acknowledge that Amazon is a company, not a charity. It would be unfair to suggest that everything they do here need solely be for the benefit of art and culture. They are going to invest time and money into this project, so it needs to benefit them also. Knowing this, let’s see if there’s a way to make this thing work. Not as is, mind you. We’ll need to pull out our red pen and make some edits. But if Amazon is inviting the world to critique and edit our creations, the least they can do is be open-minded to subjecting their own philosophy to the same feedback.
Contests. Contests sound great. People win money. But when it comes to a studio who is going to work with writers and filmmakers to produce content, I don’t think the participants are winning anything. I think they’re earning it. Let’s say “earn money”, stick with the production deals, and drop the contests. I’ll suggest other places to spend that prize money below.
The Free 18-Month Option. My understanding of the option system is that it gives a film production company an exclusive head-start to try to bring resources together to get a film made: actors, directors, and (most importantly) other financiers. Having a screenplay optioned seems to me like a good thing for a fledgling writer. It’s one of the steps on the road to being produced and it says that someone took an interest in something you wrote. And, while options can often mean the writer gets some compensation for their work, it’s probably true that many options are bought quite cheaply.
When an option is given away for free, and given away on every piece uploaded to the service, I don’t think it carries the same value. Nothing obligates Amazon Studios to spend any time working to secure resources for a project, even read it, because the rights were obtained for free and won’t expire for 18-months.
So let’s red-line this.
Let’s make the “License Period” 3 months. Three months of free exclusivity for Amazon to sift through the mountains of projects and proposals they receive and see what’s really worth working on. Amazon Studios wants an 18-month option. Let’s make that extension $1,000. Each month, Amazon Studios is talking about giving away $140,000 in prize money. Let’s turn that cash into 140 writers or film-makers who get paid for an option. This way, Amazon has some “skin in the game”. They need to get serious about the projects they’ve bought into and not shackle or give false hope to creators whose projects still need work. And they get what they want, 140 new projects each month that could turn into something special.
What’s missing entirely here is the collaborative crowd-sourcing element. I have thoughts on that also, but I’ll save it for Part 2.
All work and no play is why AMC’s “Rubicon” won’t see season two. Or at least that’s my amateur assertion.
I was rooting for it. After having been spellbound by “Mad Men”, three-year Emmy winner for Best Drama, I have an implicit trust in the production quality and level of story craftsmanship that AMC promotes. A show about the intelligence community, following analyst Will Travers as he unravels the web of clues and evidence that leads no only to the bottom of terrorist plots, but also to the (SPOILER ALERT:) demise of a coworker in the pilot episode, seemed like it could be a great one to follow.
The problem for me is that his job, intelligence analysis, is really boring. Now, maybe that’s completely true to life. If any of us had a camera watching a full work day, it probably wouldn’t make for good TV. But that’s why most shows provide a balance between the time we spend with characters professionally and the time we spend with them personally. And typically, it’s the contrasts and contradictions that are exposed when we see a character in different settings that makes them intriguing to watch.
Unfortunately for Rubicon, the time spent at the office has been the least interesting of the series. And most of it has only slowly propelled the show toward a secondary goal, stopping a peripheral terrorist plot, that isn’t nearly as captivating as the main thrust of the protagonist: trying to figure out who killed his mentor.
Fairly or unfairly, when you contrast Rubicon against its contemporary on the network, Mad Men, you can see what has kept that show engaging. Don Draper has made many personal choices and exposed many flaws over four seasons at Sterling Cooper (Draper Pryce): in his married life, in his love life (not the same thing), and in his mysterious past. Pete Campbell, Peggy Olson, and Joan Holloway have all shown themselves in private differently from the facades they present at the office. These home lives fuel every interaction at work. More than that, they make us care about the Mad Men characters.
Rubicon hasn’t given us a chance to get to know these people, on a personal level, enough to connect. And I think that’s what has prevented audiences from tuning in, in numbers.
AMC, character matters here.