Preparation Is Key 

This is the third of a series of blogs by Geoff Harris on the STC! Principles and TV writing. Before becoming a freelance writer/producer, Geoff was Vice President in charge of Story and Writer Development at NBC, where he worked for 12 years. He also has taught TV-writing intensive workshops for Native American and Latino writers, sponsored by ABC and NBC, as well as a Web Series writing class for MFA students at Cal State University, Los Angeles. Many of his workshop students have gone on to staff positions on TV shows, including Happy Endings, NCIS and The Finder.

Forget about writing for television… unless you prepare for it.

Like screenwriting, you can’t just sit down and dash off a script and expect it to be great. Sure it could happen. But so could winning the Lotto. Or bumping into Les Moonves at Starbucks and getting him to green-light your pilot.

You might be tempted—as many writers are—to cut directly to the fun part: writing the script. You might feel compelled to create the colorful world of your story and provide your characters with clever and memorable dialogue as soon as possible.

But hold on a sec, my eager friend. You’re getting way ahead of yourself.

Veteran TV writers will tell you that preparation is key to writing a good script. You must take all the necessary steps—however onerous—to prepare to write. If you don’t, you’re asking for trouble. Major trouble.

The late Hall-of-Fame Basketball Coach John Wooden said it best: “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”

The TV world demands logline, treatments, and outlines. They are the lifeline of teleplay writing. Without them, episodes wouldn’t even be written, much less aired.

Here’s how it works: Before TV writers ever begin writing a first draft, they must compose an outline that goes to other writers in the room as well as to the showrunner. It’s also sent to studio and network executives, who have to sign off on it.

There is no established outline template. It varies from series to series. It usually runs in length from roughly 10 pages for a half-hour comedy to 20 pages for an hour-long drama. But it’s not uncommon to see much longer outlines.

By preparing, you can limit the number of story problems that can grow into major problems—some of which can’t be fixed without a “Page One” rewrite. After spending hours, if not weeks, writing a script, no one wants to start again from scratch.

Blake Snyder knew the importance of preparation as it applied to writing for the Big Screen. In Save the Cat!, he talked about how if you ever hope to sell your completed screenplay, you as the writer must know what the story is—not just for yourself but for the producer.

Blake said: “Because if you can learn how to tell me ‘What is it?’ better, faster, and with more creativity, you’ll keep me interested. And incidentally, by doing so before you start writing your script, you’ll make the story better, too.” (STC! – p.4)

Preparing to write your script begins with coming up with an idea. A good idea. One that is marketable. Or, in Blake’s words, has “Grabosity.”

According to Blake, these are the four components of an idea with “Grabosity”—and they as are true for TV as they are for movies:
– It’s primal. What about the story is relevant to everybody?
– It’s fresh. How do you update the primal situations?
– It has two things that jar us. What are the two worlds that are radically different and ripe for conflict?
– It’s white-hot at the center. What are the conflicts with a primal problem that a fresh hero has and that viewers can’t stop from watching him face?

Next, you should ask yourself what the story’s genre is—the category your story falls into—because each “category has rules that you need to know.” (STC! –  p.22) For example, does your pilot idea fall into the “Superhero” genre, like the now-defunct Smallville? Or, the “Dude with a Problem” category, like Breaking Bad?

Arguably the most important step in the preparation stage is to know who your main character is and what he does. For an ensemble series, you need to know who all the characters are in the same way.

Blake explained: “As my wise old father used to say, ‘Tell me a story about a guy who…’.”  He continued: “The ‘who’ gives us someone to identify with—and that someone doesn’t even have to be human.” (STC! – p.47)

Finally, if Blake had directly talked about TV writing, he would have pointed out that the writers on the NBC series Friends understood the importance of focusing the story before the script is ever written. The first words of each Friends title almost always began: “The One With…” For example, “The One With the Blackout” or “The One With Joey’s Big Break.”

In writing your pilot or spec script, ask yourself what your story is, so that can hone your idea, easily write a logline for it, and pitch it on an elevator or over the phone.

You should also ask yourself who your audience is, that is, who will be watching your script once it’s produced and aired. This is important for many reasons, including creating the show’s characters and establishing the tone of the series.

After settling on an idea and having a clear sense of your hero, write a logline, then a treatment (like a short short-story or long synopsis), followed by an outline.

Interestingly, this is the process that script readers use when they do coverage of scripts, but in reverse. They write a synopsis and then a logline, before they write their comments about the script’s viability as a TV or movie project.

So as you can see, preparation is a good thing. Once everything is in place, you will be so excited to write dialogue that it will flow freely from your mind to the computer screen.

Just remember, if you do the heavy lifting in the early stages of creating and writing your script—the planning—your script will nearly write itself.

Even the inventor of the telephone knew the importance of preparation. Alexander Graham Bell said: “Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.”

Now that you have the key, put it into the ignition of your imagination and enjoy the ride.