Life In All Its Richness... Or Something
August 30th 2006 13:47
The Scriptwriting Blog: Backstory
by Australis.
What do I know?, you ask. Where have I come from that I can write a column about scriptwriting? Will I make any sense? What has my experience been?
I’m assuming, if you’re reading this, you’re starting out. In a lot of ways, I’m like you, still starting out, but I’ve also learnt a lot, and this is how it happened.
I’ll put life stuff in the personal blog when time allows. It’s a long tale with its own twists and turns, but overall, when you look at the state of the world, well, I’m poor and not successful (yet), but all things considered, I’m lucky, damned lucky. But, as I said, that’s a post for another day.
So, this is all about the writing.
I started when I was around 10, little pastiches cribbed from the books I liked. Gradually my stories evolved, but I lived in a curious vacuum: no one told me you could go to college and learn to write, I just thought some people got good at it and were published.
And then, disastrously, I started hanging out with a rock band. Now, this in itself isn’t so bad (indeed, one day I will revisit that past for a couple of script ideas currently on the backburner). But they gave me a piece of advice that, I now think, was So Wrong. Because they were self taught musos (and pretty good too), they disdained further education, and brought home the idea that going to further education would stifle creativity and make me a clone of whatever lecturer and tutor I found at an institution.
I don’t know how many ways you can spell naïve, but there could be dozens and still not enough to cover how much I didn’t get it. Years later, of course, I read about Mozart, who was a prodigy at five, and later went to study music. When he finished, he played music as he’d done before… only better! Knowledge had only made what he did better. I’m no Mozart, and I needed that extra education badly. But I digress.
So, aside from getting diverted into playing music myself, I struggled with writing pads and the occasional typewriter, slowly working my way through concepts, character construction, plot development, creating stories that had good ideas and nothing else. Even I could tell they weren’t working. Awful.
But I had the monkey on my back. I HAD to write. At one point I gave it away… but the stories kept coming into my head and would not leave until I’d written down some notes about them. I began filling notebooks with more ideas than I’ll ever need. And I didn’t know what to do. Just keep practicing and building skills, I supposed, was the way to go.
Keep in mind the Real World was rolling on. Work, the abandonment of music, marriage, kids, more work… Years pass.
So, one day, in an effort to keep learning, I picked up a book on scriptwriting. To this day I can’t remember which one it was; later, there’ll be a blog on what’s in my writing library, the books I learnt from, but that first book has faded from memory. Anyway, I was telling a co-worker I was reading it, and she said “I’ve always wanted to make a film”, and described her short film idea in detail. At the time I had a long commute on a train to and from the city. I borrowed a laptop from work and on the way home and back the next day I wrote a longhand draft, typed it up, edited it, printed it at work, and gave her the copy. She was stunned and pleased. And I thought “That went well”, and started looking for something else. At the time, ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ was on air, and they had that rare thing, an open script submission policy – anyone could send a script in, and they’d read it, but only one writer in a hundred was accepted, only one spec script in a thousand was ever made. What the hell, I thought, I like the show, it’s good practice. The information said they’d get in touch within three months.
Two months later, I get a phone call. It was one of the script supervisors, saying they liked the story and the style, and while not exactly what they wanted to do, said it was enough for me to pitch ideas to them, if I wanted to. Keep in mind that I live in New South Wales, Australia.
Forgive me for having a slight gloat here, but any day a company like Paramount in Los Angeles phones you half a world away is a Good Day.
In the long run, they never did make one of my stories. Liked the ideas I pitched, but always said “we’re doing one like that” or “we don’t want to go that way”. I think they found the distance issue a bit daunting too, though why that would be so in the age of the internet’s a bit of a mystery. But they always liked the approach I was taking, and always encouraged me to keep submitting.
The interesting thing for me was when I stopped and said to myself, “In twenty years of prose writing, I’ve produced the start of numerous novels but only finished a couple, and even those are bad, and a handful of short stories that no one will publish. In six months I’ve written five scripts and had significant praise for two of them. What’s wrong with this picture?”
So ‘Voyager’ finished production, and I began looking around for a new project. I started with a contemporary retelling of The Odyssey, but it stalled for reasons I’ll discuss in another post. I then spent a year researching and writing an eight part series about a fictitious Australian pioneer family. It was an enjoyable and productive time. I’ve pitched it to a couple of people, but can’t seem to raise their interest. But it’s the single piece of work I’m proudest of, and hope one day I can persuade someone to read it seriously.
At this juncture, I thought I’d submit a script to the NSW Film and Television Office, under the New Writers Submission Scheme. I had the perfect story, a convict tale little known in Australia, it had everything, drama, romance, lust, adventure… just the ticket. I researched and wrote it in a very short period, something like three months. Got it in at the last minute. Time passes, and just before the results are announced… a production company announces they are making the exact same story for television! My script wasn’t as sharp as it could have been, I can see now the rush and compacting it into a film format definitely lessened it, but in a clear field it might have stood a chance of getting a rewrite, but two versions of the same story? No. That’s why you can see ‘The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant’, and not ‘To Sail Every Ocean – The Journey of Mary Bryant’. Just bad luck, really. and in a later post I’ll discuss simultaneous creation (far more common than you’d think).
BTW, at some point I’ll rewrite it and try and get it made. How do I put this?... The other has a number of places where historical accuracy was sacrificed for cheap drama, and I’d like to see a version closer to the truth, it’s far more interesting.
As I was winding that project up, at work I met a guy who’s other job was as a cameraman and video editor. A real live industry contact! He asked to read some of my stuff, and showed it to his wife, an actress who’d been in a few different things (another contact!). Within a short time they’d put me in touch with a producer, currently working on a well known non-drama light entertainment series. We to-ed and fro-ed a bit, and he said he wanted to see some move scripts, but what he really needed was a rewrite of a script he was working on with a director, based on the director’s life. When I got their draft… ummm, it needed to be rewritten from one end to the other (and that’s all I’m saying!), but the story was okay. So I did it, got it back to them in short order. They were impressed, it actually looked and read like a script!
Another nine rewrites, and it’s ready for the world. Nine rewrites you say? Yep. To get it right, it had to happen, as three different creative types (director, producer, myself) inserted and extracted all manner of ideas. At one point the script was 162 pages, way way too long (we’ll talk about length another time), and was whittled down to the standard 120. Now THAT was a job! And that’ll be covered in a post on what stays in, and what has to go.
Having just written a SF script (basically a space war story) that’s out there (somewhere), I’m working on a pitch for the producer, another SF story (hi tech war with present day allegory), a script for a couple of guys to turn into a CGI extravaganza, which is what they want to get into, and some letters and pitches to send to prospective production houses and TV networks. This also doesn’t include a couple of spec scripts I want to rewrite and submit. And then of course there’s the Real World, work, family, house, reading (this is important), work again…
Are you sure this is what you want to do? You’d better be certain! This is what I do because I seem to have misplaced one of those things… what do they call them?... ah yes, a LIFE!
We’ll talk more later.
by Australis.
What do I know?, you ask. Where have I come from that I can write a column about scriptwriting? Will I make any sense? What has my experience been?
I’m assuming, if you’re reading this, you’re starting out. In a lot of ways, I’m like you, still starting out, but I’ve also learnt a lot, and this is how it happened.
I’ll put life stuff in the personal blog when time allows. It’s a long tale with its own twists and turns, but overall, when you look at the state of the world, well, I’m poor and not successful (yet), but all things considered, I’m lucky, damned lucky. But, as I said, that’s a post for another day.
So, this is all about the writing.
I started when I was around 10, little pastiches cribbed from the books I liked. Gradually my stories evolved, but I lived in a curious vacuum: no one told me you could go to college and learn to write, I just thought some people got good at it and were published.
And then, disastrously, I started hanging out with a rock band. Now, this in itself isn’t so bad (indeed, one day I will revisit that past for a couple of script ideas currently on the backburner). But they gave me a piece of advice that, I now think, was So Wrong. Because they were self taught musos (and pretty good too), they disdained further education, and brought home the idea that going to further education would stifle creativity and make me a clone of whatever lecturer and tutor I found at an institution.
I don’t know how many ways you can spell naïve, but there could be dozens and still not enough to cover how much I didn’t get it. Years later, of course, I read about Mozart, who was a prodigy at five, and later went to study music. When he finished, he played music as he’d done before… only better! Knowledge had only made what he did better. I’m no Mozart, and I needed that extra education badly. But I digress.
So, aside from getting diverted into playing music myself, I struggled with writing pads and the occasional typewriter, slowly working my way through concepts, character construction, plot development, creating stories that had good ideas and nothing else. Even I could tell they weren’t working. Awful.
But I had the monkey on my back. I HAD to write. At one point I gave it away… but the stories kept coming into my head and would not leave until I’d written down some notes about them. I began filling notebooks with more ideas than I’ll ever need. And I didn’t know what to do. Just keep practicing and building skills, I supposed, was the way to go.
Keep in mind the Real World was rolling on. Work, the abandonment of music, marriage, kids, more work… Years pass.
So, one day, in an effort to keep learning, I picked up a book on scriptwriting. To this day I can’t remember which one it was; later, there’ll be a blog on what’s in my writing library, the books I learnt from, but that first book has faded from memory. Anyway, I was telling a co-worker I was reading it, and she said “I’ve always wanted to make a film”, and described her short film idea in detail. At the time I had a long commute on a train to and from the city. I borrowed a laptop from work and on the way home and back the next day I wrote a longhand draft, typed it up, edited it, printed it at work, and gave her the copy. She was stunned and pleased. And I thought “That went well”, and started looking for something else. At the time, ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ was on air, and they had that rare thing, an open script submission policy – anyone could send a script in, and they’d read it, but only one writer in a hundred was accepted, only one spec script in a thousand was ever made. What the hell, I thought, I like the show, it’s good practice. The information said they’d get in touch within three months.
Two months later, I get a phone call. It was one of the script supervisors, saying they liked the story and the style, and while not exactly what they wanted to do, said it was enough for me to pitch ideas to them, if I wanted to. Keep in mind that I live in New South Wales, Australia.
Forgive me for having a slight gloat here, but any day a company like Paramount in Los Angeles phones you half a world away is a Good Day.
In the long run, they never did make one of my stories. Liked the ideas I pitched, but always said “we’re doing one like that” or “we don’t want to go that way”. I think they found the distance issue a bit daunting too, though why that would be so in the age of the internet’s a bit of a mystery. But they always liked the approach I was taking, and always encouraged me to keep submitting.
The interesting thing for me was when I stopped and said to myself, “In twenty years of prose writing, I’ve produced the start of numerous novels but only finished a couple, and even those are bad, and a handful of short stories that no one will publish. In six months I’ve written five scripts and had significant praise for two of them. What’s wrong with this picture?”
So ‘Voyager’ finished production, and I began looking around for a new project. I started with a contemporary retelling of The Odyssey, but it stalled for reasons I’ll discuss in another post. I then spent a year researching and writing an eight part series about a fictitious Australian pioneer family. It was an enjoyable and productive time. I’ve pitched it to a couple of people, but can’t seem to raise their interest. But it’s the single piece of work I’m proudest of, and hope one day I can persuade someone to read it seriously.
At this juncture, I thought I’d submit a script to the NSW Film and Television Office, under the New Writers Submission Scheme. I had the perfect story, a convict tale little known in Australia, it had everything, drama, romance, lust, adventure… just the ticket. I researched and wrote it in a very short period, something like three months. Got it in at the last minute. Time passes, and just before the results are announced… a production company announces they are making the exact same story for television! My script wasn’t as sharp as it could have been, I can see now the rush and compacting it into a film format definitely lessened it, but in a clear field it might have stood a chance of getting a rewrite, but two versions of the same story? No. That’s why you can see ‘The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant’, and not ‘To Sail Every Ocean – The Journey of Mary Bryant’. Just bad luck, really. and in a later post I’ll discuss simultaneous creation (far more common than you’d think).
BTW, at some point I’ll rewrite it and try and get it made. How do I put this?... The other has a number of places where historical accuracy was sacrificed for cheap drama, and I’d like to see a version closer to the truth, it’s far more interesting.
As I was winding that project up, at work I met a guy who’s other job was as a cameraman and video editor. A real live industry contact! He asked to read some of my stuff, and showed it to his wife, an actress who’d been in a few different things (another contact!). Within a short time they’d put me in touch with a producer, currently working on a well known non-drama light entertainment series. We to-ed and fro-ed a bit, and he said he wanted to see some move scripts, but what he really needed was a rewrite of a script he was working on with a director, based on the director’s life. When I got their draft… ummm, it needed to be rewritten from one end to the other (and that’s all I’m saying!), but the story was okay. So I did it, got it back to them in short order. They were impressed, it actually looked and read like a script!
Another nine rewrites, and it’s ready for the world. Nine rewrites you say? Yep. To get it right, it had to happen, as three different creative types (director, producer, myself) inserted and extracted all manner of ideas. At one point the script was 162 pages, way way too long (we’ll talk about length another time), and was whittled down to the standard 120. Now THAT was a job! And that’ll be covered in a post on what stays in, and what has to go.
Having just written a SF script (basically a space war story) that’s out there (somewhere), I’m working on a pitch for the producer, another SF story (hi tech war with present day allegory), a script for a couple of guys to turn into a CGI extravaganza, which is what they want to get into, and some letters and pitches to send to prospective production houses and TV networks. This also doesn’t include a couple of spec scripts I want to rewrite and submit. And then of course there’s the Real World, work, family, house, reading (this is important), work again…
Are you sure this is what you want to do? You’d better be certain! This is what I do because I seem to have misplaced one of those things… what do they call them?... ah yes, a LIFE!
We’ll talk more later.
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