Script Writing

I like to think of myself as a bit of a riter.

I mean that. I know I’m not of a professional standard, I have no real credits to my name and my only real completed projects are half baked essays and a series of underdeveloped comics. I am a riter. Almost a writer, but not quite enough credentials to really qualify.

It is with this in mind that I consider the following might be a pointless thing to say given my lack of experience or even significant effort in the field, but I find writing scripts incredibly difficult. I’m fine in the imagination department and getting ideas for a story and how it will pan out, I’m not bad and improving in the field of characterization, and dialogue, one of the most important things of a script, isn’t a major issue. What I have a problem with is putting it all together.

From a decent amount of experience making comics, I have a rough idea what does and doesn’t work in a narrative sense, largely by doing all the things that don’t work, but I never leant how to write scripts. I always had a plan, but that plan was “I’m starting here, I need to get to here” which in one case took me a whole sixteen page issue longer than I expected. With my current TV script writing project that I’ve set myself, I don’t have the option of crafting it as I go along in the same way that I did with the comics, so I have to start with the script and work it through from there.

It seems that the second you try and mash together the setting, the plot, the characters, the dialogue and the action, things go disastrously wrong. Maybe I’m getting too hung up on formatting the scrip so that it looks professional, but no matter how I write the opening scenes, it comes across as stilted, halting, and generally awful with a real struggle to get the middle ground between fast paced staccato dialogue and longer plodding exposition based dialogue.

What I’m trying to write is the first thirty minute episode for an animated children’s show. I don’t think I have an issue with writing for children, as most of the things I’ve done previously have been of the right sort of tone for children, especially so with only a little bit of tweaking, but I do have a problem with working out how to fit it all together without it becoming utterly all over the place.

Like most things I try and do, I suspect the problem I’m running in to is trying to do it all at once and assume I need to fire out my entire brain into the script in the first few pages, where actually I need to gradually leak it out over thirty, probably leaving plenty more to be deposited over subsequent potential episodes. I also reckon that this instinct of mine to try and do a whole project in five minutes isn’t helped by the fact that the people I’m submitting this to suggest making sure the first ten pages are really tight and gripping because that’s all they’re obliged to read and they’ll only read further if it’s any good, so if I have all the fun stuff happening after the ten page mark, that’s essentially the end of the project.

If anyone has any short sharp hints and tips that I could read and then ignore anyway because I’m not bad at taking advice, just bad at implementing it, I’d be very grateful to hear. Failing that, I’ll try and post some form of update if this goes anywhere.


Additional Notes:

Making mistakes is a fantastic way of learning that I fully advocate and I believe I’ve made a vast majority of them with my comic-projects. If you have the right mindset as well, looking back on those mistakes with a renewed sense of wisdom can be highly entertaining rather than utterly and crushingly depressing.
It’s also quite a kick to see how much you’ve improved from previous attempts. If you take a look at any webcomic and compare the first and most recent entries, chances are you’ll notice a marked improvement. It is incredibly satisfying to see the same thing happen to your own work. I feel really sorry for people who produce vastly inferior creations after they’ve been working in their field for a significant period of time, but that’s enough of that, I promised myself I’d stop complaining about Star Wars and grow up a little bit.

The Web and Mini Comix Thing 2009

I have been known to draw comics. I have even published one. I’m not saying they are good comics, but they are undeniably examples of sequential art with dialogue balloons that can not be mistaken for comics.

Just to get the excuses out of the way now, I’ve been working on an overhaul for my comic site for a long time and it’s getting there. I also want to go in to a bit more detail with regards to the things I have learnt through my fiddling with graphics software and to make a mention of all the mistakes I’ve made with format, writing, characterization or the lack thereof and general assistance to anyone who wants to have a go at doing something better. This is all under the ominous heading of “coming soon”, which apparently according to my recent update schedule on my comics, can be anywhere up to eleven months.

I have veered somewhat away from my very short point that I’m trying to make. This weekend sees the return of “The Web and Mini Comix Thing” in east London. If you’re in the area and enjoy comics, the tickets are cheap and the exhibition is at least interesting. I always find the day to be highly inspirational and I frequently come away thinking “I’m going to do it this year! I’m going to churn out high quality comics and nobody can stop me!” before getting home and making the crucial mistake of switching on the television.

Additional Notes:

Maybe this year will be the year I get my act together. The immortal words of Delboy Trotter spring to mind: “This time next year, we could be millionaires” and of course, that way of thinking worked for him, so who knows?

The convention really is a good day. It’s not your traditional convention full of the great unwashed masses rummaging around for that missing copy of Spiderman to complete their collection. At one point I did actually exhibit there and everyone was really friendly. There was of course the one person who was perhaps a little bit too friendly and hung around a little bit too long breathing heavily through his mouth and not saying much. I know that sounds like a clichéd stereotype of my fellow members of geek-dom, and I feel ashamed for repeating it here, but unfortunately, that one actually happened.

Fighting Cliché in Creativity

Even when I was at primary school writing stories as part of our education in English, part of me knew that “It was a Dark and Stormy Night” was the default way to set a dramatic mood. The rest of me knew that you never rely on the defaults for these sorts of things unless you want it to look like everything else. This sort of cliché can take a lot to break out of and you can find yourself slipping into it by mistake; after all, the reason it’s a cliché in the first place is because everyone else has done it first.

Nobody expects the cliché
I have had experience in the field of doing-things-everyone-else-has-done-first. For a long time now, I have run a webcomic as a hobby. It’s a fantastic method for teaching one how to draw and how to make websites and see what does and doesn’t work with compositions. I’ve learnt a huge amount from updating my comic over the last two years, even if I haven’t kept up with it on a regular basis, but I think I have also inadvertently created a complete catalogue of every single webcomic cliché out there.

In no particular order, there is an author self insertion character, the main female character tends to be violent, the predominant subject matter is a group of friends living together, it has a mad-cap inventor character, it has ninjas and relatively two dimensional characters with minimal development beyond things happening to them. For the uninitiated, that is a description of pretty much every single webcomic out there, with the only exception being that mine doesn’t have a constant discussion of video games.

I didn’t sit down and design it this way. I didn’t think carefully about what to put in. It just happened. Of course, not thinking about what to put in is exactly what landed me with the samey-mess in the first place. My only excuse is that I’ve never really taken my comic seriously where others do and that there is a certain degree of work that goes into it, as I very rarely copy and paste images and everything except the formatting, lettering and coloring is done by hand. Upon writing that, I can see that might make it seem like my comic is entirely digital, but the drawing and design is all done by hand which is still the significant part.

How to Avoid it
This could sound preachy, but I feel I can offer this advice because I’ve made the mistakes already.

1) Be aware of existing clichés and stereotypes: Study other ideas, creations or whatever it is you’re trying to do and try to identify common trends. I didn’t really notice the similarities between several different webcomics until they were pointed out to me and had I realized before, I would have taken a conscious effort to avoid them.

2) Don’t be afraid to abandon an idea even if you think it was a good one: There’s nothing wrong with a cliché if it’s done well, but you have to realize that your work will be judged against work that is already out there and will be judged harshly as a result.

3) Don’t be afraid to try something completely different: I’m repeating the point above really, but don’t be scared to shake things up a little. Sometimes you can shake things too far, so keep it within the realms of your genre, but don’t be afraid to experiment.

4) Plan things through: My inner youth cries out in pain as I offer this as advice. Everyone tells you to plan things through, and no one listens, and I do include myself in that definition of no one. I always used to write in a freeform manner which came across as rambling and directionless. Not only that, but when you don’t plan, you accidentally fall back on all those tried and tested ideas automatically and your creativity is completely stifled.

I’m repeating myself again, but there is nothing wrong with a cliché. Some people manage to make a formula work exceptionally well for them. You look at the Simpsons for example: That took the very standard and basic premise of a family sitcom and turned it into something that had never really been seen before, even when you consider that it’s heavily influenced by the Flintstones, which in turn was influenced by the Honeymooners.

There are, of course, no new ideas, but there are some incredibly over used ones.

Additional Notes:
When I was writing stories at primary school, my first book was how I learnt to spell the word “suddenly”, as it was the only way I could convey action, and all action happened suddenly throughout the book. It was fast paced in the way that arrhythmia is fast paced, haltingly and unhealthily.

Whilst writing this, I really struggled to find another way of saying cliché. Ironically enough, I seem to be working to turn the work cliché into a cliché itself.

I always used to write in an incredibly rambling way. Now I just write in a rambling way. A subtle difference, but you would notice if I abandoned my planning phase again.

Reclaiming yourself

I recently embarked upon my long abandoned webcomic project. For ages, I had my homepage on my home computer set to my webcomics page, and for ages, every time I opened it I was confronted by the cold, harsh, embrace of the "Cannot Find URL". I think every time this happened, it chipped away at me and made me chew my lip a little more.

Finally, I managed to draw a few new pages, and get my website up and running again and up to scratch, allbeit in a fairly skeletal state. If you're interested, which I'm sure you are, it's at http://www.dingbobikcomics.co.uk/. It's incredible how much of a good mood creating something can put you in.

I've also been trying to register for Google Adverts to try and sell out a little bit. The thing that people always forget to mention about selling out is that you get money from it.

Additional Notes:
Upon writing this, I have decided that skeletal state would make quite a nice band name, although it would lend itself to a band that was not very good...