The first thing that the prospective television writer has to understand is the importance of the “Spec” script to begin your career as a TV writer. It could be your ticket into the fabled “Writer’s Room.” For the prospective writer to break into the business, they must write a spec script based on a current show. The “Writers Room” is what it sounds like. Several staff writers sit in the room and plot the weekly episodes. They break down the story into beats, sequences, act endings and either write it themselves, rewrite freelancers scripts or do it as a group project It must be as good, if not better than what the showrunner and his staff produce during a season. The Showrunner is the overall person in charge of the show. He is looking for people who understand their show. They are looking to hire writers who can mimic the characters in the show in terms of their actions and dialogue. They are not looking for the new writer to create new characters for the show, but to use the characters established for the show. Most shows are staff written these days. They are very familiar with the characters on the show. They know the show’s characters inside and out. They must deal with them like long lost friends. Who are they? What motivates them? How they relate to other show regulars? What is the process in which you recreate these characters? How do you learn how to write a a great script using the show’s established characters? First, we must assume that you enjoy the show. What is the point of writing a spec script for a show that you don’t enjoy watching? The odds are great that you will not enjoy writing it and the staff readers will detect your lack of enthusiasm in the final script.
The greatest technological advance to writers was the invention of the VCR and later the DVD. It allowed you to record TV shows or re watch old episodes of a series Libraries have started to add large collections of popular shows to their DVD collections. It is easy to borrow a DVD collection for a week or more.
The prospective spec writer may feel like they are back in school. They must watch the shows with a surgeon’s eye towards how the characters interacted with each other. Watch the shows and jot down specific things that you see recurring in an episode. Chances are they are part of the character.
Some of the things that you must watch for are:
How do the characters relate to each other? Do they tease each other? Do they socialize with each other? Is there a Comic Relief character ( i.e .Belker, in the old Hill Street Blues series) who brings a moment of humor to the show? Do they have any expressions that they have as a trademark in every episode? In the A Team, Hannibal Smith could be counted on to say
”I love it when a plan comes together.” Mr. T would always utter his signature line, “I pity the fool”, Star Trek’s Captain Picard always said “Make it so “ when issuing a command to one of his officers. These characters could be counted on to behave in a certain way or utter certain catch phrases. A cautionary note, never try and short cut the research process. A member of my old writing group once wrote a spec script for “Simon and Simon”, an 80’s detective show. He thought that by changing the names of the character, he could turn Simon and Simon script into a Magnum script. He made number of unforgiving mistakes such as taking the characters out of Hawaii and generally acting out of character for the characters in Magnum.
I will provide examples from two shows that I used when I researched character for my two spec scripts. The first is the 80’s favorite Magnum P.I. and the other is most recent version of the classic procedural cop show Hawaii 5-0.
The main characters during the first two years of the show were Steve McGarrett and Danny Williams. During the last two seasons, they have expanded the roles of the Kono and Chin characters to handle more of the detective roles in the show. Last season, they have added a tough SWAT team officer played by Chi McBride. McBride was initially antagonistic toward Five –O, but has joined the team after being dropped from the force. Danny Williams and Steve McGarrett started off with an antagonistic attitude towards each other. Danny was a by the book sort of detective. Danny was a reluctant New Jersey transplant. He was allergic to Hawaii’s sun and surf. He dealt with the problems of divorce and remarriage of his ex- wife. The ex -wife had taken his young daughter to Hawaii despite Danny’s protests.
McGarrett was the macho, break the rules, ex- special forces guy. In an early show, McGarrett had no problem threatening to toss a suspect off a roof, to the horror of Danny. He tended to be stoic and appeared uninterested in relationships outside of work. During the last few seasons, McGarrett had two ongoing relationships with female characters who were either ex- navy or law enforcement officers. His character was further developed with the introduction of his long lost mother, who happened to be C.I.A, a ditzy sister and “Joe White” his spit and polish mentor. The Danny –Steve relationship has evolved into a “Bromance,” a friendly good natured ribbing of each other. Each show features a scene in McGarrett’s car, in which they are riding to the scene of the crime . They rib each other about some factor of their lives. Usually, the bantering involves some aspect of the show’s “B” or “C” story that adds new dimensions to the characters.
Chin Ho has evolved from a secondary character who provided information on the central computer in the Five-0 HQ. He was briefly married and later dealt with the brutal murder of his wife. He struggled to regain his badge after being removed from the force based on charges of corruptions. In recent seasons, he has carried more of the load in solving the cases. Kono became romantically involved with a handsome relative of the head of the Yakuza, Japanese Mafia. They were forced to flee to evade pursuing assassins. Comic relief can often be found with the Medical Examiner, with his shy romantic life or his collection of Star Wars memorabilia. There was more to this show than Tom Selleck’s famous moustache. It featured a great supporting cast, suspenseful stories and a dash of humor that made it a standout and fan favorite.
The classic sparring between the uptight Sgt. Major Higgins and Magnum were often the highlights of the show. Higgins was the manager of the vast Robin Masters Estate. Magnum was hired to provide security, much to the dismay of the spit and polish Higgins. Many of the shows revolved around the humorous sparring of Higgins and Magnum over the rights to use various parts of the Master’s estate including the fabulous red Ferrari. Higgins was meticulous and Magnum casual in his handling of the property of the estate. In every episode, Higgins always typed his memoirs or talking at length about his service in some remote section of the British empire. A classic episode featured Higgins building a perfect match stick replica of the “Bridge on the River Kwai.” The two bickered over right to use certain estate property. At the end of the show, in retaliation Magnum blew it up. Yet, towards the end of the show’s eight year run, a sort of friendship or grudging respect had developed between the two characters.
Rick Wright and T.C. ( Theodore Calvin) were Magnum’s ex- army buddies They always were dragged reluctantly into Magnum’s cases. T.C. (never called Theodore or Ted on the show) could always be counted on to complain about Magnum owing him gas money or interrupting time from Island Hoppers Tour Business. Rick was the manager of the fancy King Kameamaya Club. He had the underground connections with “Icepick ” the aged Mafia chieftain.
As we can see, writing the characters of a TV spec script is not simple. It takes a lot of research and thought. The importance of knowing the show’s style of characters and story telling is the most important part of writing a “Spec Script “ that can get you into a Hollywood Writers Room. If you ignore these concepts, your script will wind up in the old circular file and never get any consideration for getting purchased or being used as a ticket into a job as a television writer.
Many times, when writing a script or a novel, you might consider the task of creating strong secondary characters for granted. That is, you have created a unique and interesting Sci-Fi world or main character that drives the action in your novel or screenplay. This drives the main character to overcome major obstacles and emotional challenges in order to achieve their goal by the end of the movie or novel. Their “Need” or “Desire” to achieve their goal is paramount to achieving a satisfactory conclusion of the story.
However, interesting the main character might be, he or she is not friendless. They don’t exist in a vacuum; they need secondary or supporting characters to react to their problems and provide opposition or emotional support. Many times, the secondary characters will have issues or struggles of their own that will create subplots that will affect the main character. The supporting character’s subplot is often crucial to the emotional struggle or development of your main character. They may sharpen the conflict and provide challenges for the main character on the way to the resolution to the story. It will provide numerous moments of internal reflection and an emotional pathway forward for your main character.
In the classic movie “Officer and a Gentlemen,” Zack earns the friendship of Sid, another trainee at the base. Sid’s struggle and eventual suicide at the end of the movie propels Zack to transform from being the selfish loner that he was at the beginning of the movie. He has learned the value of teamwork and learns that he needs other people’s friendship and love to survive.
Subplots are not the main plot of the movie or novel, but they add to your story. The main character needs allies or friends who support or conflict with the main character. They must have adversaries with their own issues to resolve or plot to thwart the main characters goals Their purpose is to interact in a way that creates challengers and push ahead to resolve the story. In addition, secondary characters enrich the plot of your story. A well-developed supporting character will have their own fleshed out story that intersects with the main character.
For example, in my novel Turbulence, my main character Danny Watkins is the student advisor in a dorm filled with college freshmen. One of the students is Barry Lipkin. He is ambitious and politically aware. He wants to be a leader in the protest movement and constantly barrages Danny with radical literature. His innocent invitation to a dinner party held by Bennett Andrews, leader of the student protest, leads to events that help Danny evolve and change his political views. Bennett Andrews developed from a one-dimensional speech maker at the student protest to a multi – level caring guy who befriends Danny. He befriends Danny at crucial moments in the story and helps Danny grow as a character.
Thus, secondary characters help the main character see multiple perspective in the world. It helps them with their struggles and help develop them as characters. They also provide multiple viewpoints to influence the main character and provide different paths for development within the main story.
THE END
I had written my television project Turbulence as a tv project back in 2013. I entered it several times into Larry Brody’s People’s Pilot competition. It did well the first time winding up in the middle of the scripts submissions. The second time it received Semi-Finalist status based on the very favorable ratings. At one point, Larry suggested that I turn it into a novel. I discounted the idea at first. After all, I was a screenwriter first and not a novelist.
After thinking about it and devoting free time in my schedule, I found that I enjoyed the process of doing a novel. There is an element of freedom in novels that cannot be found in Screenplays. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Both are creative mediums; it depends on which works best for the story that you are telling.
My first challenge was reading up on how long novels had to be. Most estimates were eighty thousand to one hundred thousand words and three hundred pages. This was a daunting number of words and pages. First thing I did was take my television script and turned it into a word document. It came out to about ten thousand words. Only about seventy thousand words short. However, it provided only a framework. I knew the direction of the novel would take because I had already completed it in script form.
I decided to start off the novel with a short three-page teaser that would hook the reader and allow me to head into a second chapter that was good to begin the story. Several days later… It was fun because I felt that it was a good device for hooking any potential reader into my main character’s dilemma. Later on, in the middle of the novel, I would return to that point of the story to finish off several questions raised by the teaser. My Development Editor would comment very favorably when I returned to conclude back to that point in the novel.
Novels require more detailed character backgrounds I knew that I would have to develop the characters in greater depth than in the script version. I had suggested in the script version that my main character was a farm boy. I recalled that one of the first people I met in real life in college in 1970 was a young wrestler named Scott Myers. He came from a small town in Central Pennsylvania called Jersey Shore. It was a real place and the offbeat name stuck in my mind all these years. I developed a detailed back story for the character. He was a farm boy from Jersey shore who had a desire to be a journalist instead of working on the father’s farm.
I created his brother Kenny as a volunteer fighting in Vietnam. This furthered the conflict between Danny and his father, an ex-marine. I was able to add in childhood memories such as playing army with my friends in Warnaco Park in Elizabeth, NJ. It allowed me to introduce the other major characters as residents of Danny’s dormitory. The other characters were fleshed out. Barry Lipkin was based on my friend Larry, a friend from High School. Alex was modeled after this gorgeous young woman who I had a crush on fifty years ago. Etc.
The conflict between father and son became a crucial element in the story because Danny starts off conservative believing in the war and gradually converts to a more radical anti-war viewpoint. At one point, the father and son have a loud argumentative argument over dinner. I developed the role of the mother as the peacemaker in the family.
I recalled many moments of the loud protests against the war in Vietnam and other social issues back in the more innocent 1970’s They became the background of the story. I added subplots and characters such as Alex being a beautiful young feminist who did not believe in marriage and Fred Turner, a young African American student from Newark, an urban area closes to my home in New Jersey.
After several months, I had a rough draft, I worked at a high school in Mahwah NJ. I spoke to several people who had worked in the publishing field. They all mentioned that editors charge a few pennies per word. At eighty thousand words, we were beginning to talk about real money. Multiply this by the multiple drafts and the expense started to appear overwhelming.
I was fortunate e enough to meet Judy Hammett, my development editor. I had worked with her years before on a short-lived revision of a feature film script. She charged me a much more affordable rate to read and comment on the script. In fact, she was amazing. Every page was loaded with comments such as “why is so and so doing this on page” when he did x on page” or” why doesn’t so and so think or say x instead of y.” I used for her for several drafts. One of her biggest objections was that I seemed to have separate chapters for each of the secondary characters. She made it clear that they had to intersect with my main character’s story, or they were irrelevant. Several drafts later, they all had a part in the development of the plot
When it came to writing the emotions of the character, I found a book called the Emotional Thesaurus. It outlined numerous emotions and how to describe them on paper. I used the book for the first draft and after a while, many of these concepts became a more natural development of my writing style.
My next challenge was once I had finished my first draft, I sent out query letters to agents in the NJ-NY area. I was hoping that these agents would take a chance the first-time writer based on the nature of the material. I was quickly disillusioned by the amounts of rejection letters that I received. The manuscript went back under my computer.
A chance email from a retired VA employee who wrote a series of novels. He indicated that he had made a somewhat successful second career for himself. This encouraged me to take another look at the manuscript. I contacted Judy Hammett and worked with her on a third draft. This seemed to be the one that made it a viable novel. The friend recommended a small publisher that he had used. I decided that I could afford the cost of Self-Publishing. In many ways, it is better than traditional publishing especially for the beginner.
To develop my skills, I read numerous books on how to write novels. The best ones that I found were a series of You Tube videos by a young woman named Abbe Emmons a book by Lisa La Cron called Story Genius.
So, at long last, I found a publisher and am in the process of laying out the book and sending it out to different outfits like Amazon and Ingram-Spark. I hope to have it out within a short period of time. I can only wish that it becomes a best seller, but in any event, I can be proud of seeing my name in print. As I’ve said many times. I want to be an overnight success after forty years.
Most readers purchase novels by their favorite authors for new and exciting plot. They want to follow their favorite policeman / CIA agent in their latest attempt to thwart the villain and save humanity. They marvel at the intricate twists and turns of the plot. In a mystery, the readers attempt to catch the clues that the author planted along the way. They want to be surprised at how the story concludes but also satisfied in that they discovered the clues only to be revealed and explained at the end of the novel. The conclusion of the novel must wrap up the mystery in a satisfying manner with the hero/heroine solving the mystery set forth at the beginning. In a thriller, it is the eternal question of will the protagonist discover the clues that help them unravel the villain’s dastardly plot to start WWIII or unleash a deadly virus.
However, most readers often confuse the two elements of the Story and Plot. The plot is the surface events that happen. The car chase, how the villain plans to kidnap the children or wife of the hero, and the hero is threatened with being fired for investigating a powerful politician. All plot elements add further layers of complications and danger to the protagonists.
However, the heart of the story is the protagonist or main character which is an important element that drives and transpires to your character at the end of the story.
For example, in elementary school, children enjoy fairy tales because the children sympathize with the innocence of the main characters. In The Three Little Pigs. Will they wind up as the Wolf’s main meal or will they survive? Cinderella is sympathetic because she is the pretty sister in the family. She appears doomed to be a poor servant girl with a dismal future. Yet, yet at the end of the story, she winds up marrying the handsome prince and living happily ever after. Hansel and Gretel are sympathetic because they are innocent prisoners of the wicked witch. Thus readers root for the witch to be punished and get shoved into the furnace at the end of the story.
From middle school to high school, readers are drawn to fantasy and science fiction because it takes them out of their mundane world into a more interesting future. They don’t want to read about the perfect person. Harry Potter was a mega success because he started off as the unwanted child of an abusive family and discovered his future as a wizard at Hogwarts. Most likely, if Harry had been perfect out of the gate, readers would have stopped reading the series after Book #1. In The Hunger Games, Katniss starts off as a poor girl in a poverty-stricken region of the country, she winds up over the course of the series of books to become the leader of the rebellion.
People would not be drawn to many novels in which you don’t root for the protagonist to succeed. The protagonist must have qualities that make them sympathetic to the reader. They face real-life problems and hardships that the average reader can relate to such as family problems, troubled siblings or divorce.
Thus the essence of the story is the struggle of the protagonist and how they overcame the issues and problems that they faced at the beginning of the novel. The story is how someone grapples with a problem and they want to about how their struggle will it change in the process
The reader wants to feel this inner struggle. How do the characters react emotionally to the story events? Do they grow or retreat pressure of life events? Are they affected by the event happening to a secondary character? For example, the popular Joe Pickett novels by C.J Box deals with a central mystery, but also traces the growth and personal issues of his wife and two daughters, often, they are intermingled with the storyline. Harlan Coben novels involve a family member who has died or vanished under mysterious circumstances. The other family member must unravel the mystery and unravel the truth behind the disappearance.
One novel I read was called “The Cabal”. Its main character was simply called “The Detective.” He had no backstory that was apparent to the reader and was simply not a compelling read. It went back to my bookshelf after reading only a few chapters. The lack of a compelling main character sabotaged any interest the story might have generated in later chapters.
Thus Story is different and, in many ways, more important than the Plot. Plot is the top level of the story, but the essential story is the undercurrent of the flawed main character that grips the reader and makes them flip through the pages of the novel all the way to the end. They are searching for the protagonist to find the solution to the dilemma. In short, readers want to follow a compelling main character in the novel or it is quickly discarded for the next novel on your to-read list.
Many screenplays and teleplays start off as the work of one person. A writer gets an inspiration for a great script and develops and rewrites it via multiple drafts until it is ready to read. They work out the details in grueling months’ worth of thought and writing. The initial draft gets rewritten countless times until the last version of the script is “finished” and ready to submit to a producer or a Screenplay Competition like the Austin Film Festival. If the writer is lucky, the script may be optioned or bought by a producer. Many times, you will watch a movie and notice several credits on a script. This means that a script was developed by multiple writers through multiple drafts before the producers were satisfied with the final script. Often, the original writer may not even recognize his original work! Welcome to the world of screenwriting!
Another method of creating screenplays is to collaborate with a second writer. Occasionally the first writer finds another fellow writer interested in collaborating on a script. Sometimes, one of the writers creates the original idea or does the initial outline for the story. The other writer may contribute dialogue or a new complications or a terrific plot twist to enrich the story. They may each have their specialty. One may be good at crafting scenes and the other good at dialogue.
The best outcome is when both collaborators have similar ideas on what the final project that will become. They work well together. Each writer contributes their own ideas on story direction i.e. plot or dialogue in either a writer’s room or a zoom call. They can work separately and then meet at a set time during the week to compare notes or combine changes into a script.
Collaboration works in movies, but I feel that novels should be the work of one person. Novels are the personal reflection of the writer’s life and memories incorporated into their original story. They may have different viewpoints or life experience that do not mesh with the other’s writer’s ideas. I offered a novelist a chance to collaborate on my “Turbulence” novel. Thankfully, he turned it down. I was grateful because it might have resulted in a mishmash of ideas and images. It might have been a failure. Another fact to consider is being the sole writer on a novel gives you all the sole credit, good or bad for the result.
A few years ago, I attended a writer’s workshop at a local high school evening class. I got friendly with the seminar leader. We wound up collaborating on two projects that are potential streaming projects.
I read the original version of “Mr. Zak “to the teacher in the class. Zak was originally based on my experience teaching in an inner-city school. He suggested that it would be better if the main character were the Vice Principal or even Principal instead of a teacher. I rewrote the script and entered it into the “People’s Pilot” competition where it became a Semi-Finalist. A while later, we redeveloped the script and made Zak a wounded combat veteran with friends who were also veterans with difficult life situations. Sometime, a script will evolve from its earlier version and be quite different from your original concept. We collaborated on different versions of the Turbulence script, and it was his suggestion to add in a sexy DJ as occasional narrator and toss in more seventy’s dialogue. This meant cursing and language that would be taboo by today’s standards.
The problem arises when the collaboration becomes one sided. If the collaborators have different visions for the script or think that their ideas, scenes sequence or dialogue are superior to the other writer’s ideas. Sometimes a partnership will result in one of the more experienced writers takes the lead in developing the script. At this point the other writer must accept the idea and put his ego aside. If not, chances are that the collaboration will fail. At that point, they agree to let one or the other take over the project. If it is an amicable parting of the ways, they may come back to work on another project in the future. Collaboration can be either a blessing or a curse, but it should always be considered as an option unless you prefer to work alone on your masterpiece.
