Sitcom Mission

Writing Episode Zero

Wednesday 26th October 2011

Writing

There's a great blog here from Hut 33 author James Cary about how the first draft of anything isn't very good and how it should be rewritten to make it better.

Don't say, "Well, dur" because you'd be amazed how many entries we get with 'Sitcom X, first draft' on the title page.

James then goes on to link to Jason Arnopp's blog about writing draft zero. Draft zero, Jason explains, is very liberating because you can just rattle through and let creativity take over without any editing or worrying whether it's any good because it won't be and it doesn't matter.

Many writers send us episode zero. This isn't even the first draft of episode one, it's the one before - the one they should have written and kept firmly to themselves. And I'd encourage the first bit; get episode zero out of your system, get the contrived setup and the rubbish dialogue on the page so that you make sure you don't send it in, and, most of all, expose the exposition so that you know what you're writing about.

The more you write, the more you get to know your characters - what they want, what they hate, how they react in certain situations - and you can have lots of fun finding that out and showing it to yourself. You've got the opportunity to write loads of literary doo-doo that you don't have to chuck out because it's great fertiliser for the stuff you want to grow.

In episode zero, you can meet your characters for the first time, have a chat with them and put them in a boring situation where they just talk about who they are and how they got into this situation. Think about it as a job interview for being in your sitcom. Are they interesting you? Do you want to invest more time in them? Do they need some nurturing? Would you spend a lot of time in their company - like half an hour a week for example?

Then put them under pressure and get them to do something crazy. Let them meet the Queen on a state visit, but get them to face the monarch in their undergarments or wearing an Oliver Cromwell costume. How would they behave? What would they say or do to get themselves out of it?

There's a wonderfully romantic idea of putting the pen to paper and coming up with a first draft that is perfect, that you're channelling Tina Fey or Graham Linehan. Well, Tina Fey claims to have done "a million drafts" of Mean Girls and here's a video interview with Graham Linehan where he explains his take on the writing process and how he got involved in rewriting Black Books.

And remember that nothing is wasted. Days of work and footage is boiled down to make one hour of The Apprentice or Strictly, so why shouldn't it be the same with your script? And you can write as many episode zeros as you like. Go on, you might surprise yourself, and what could be more fun than that?

As Scott Adams said in The Dilbert Principle, "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."


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