CT: Back To School

It's that time of year again, readers! The time when the weather starts to cool, my allergies dull to a reasonable misery (not counting the new mystery hives on my arm), and all our Mom friends wave their kids off to a new year of school. Little C has already told you a bit about our favorite parts of fall, but I wanted to touch on one last thing. As a kid, I freaking loved the start of a new school year. I loved buying supplies, I loved meeting my new teachers, but most of all I loved the syllabus. That little piece of structure that broke down my time between now and the sweet freedom of summer. 

I've always needed a bit of that structure, and it's difficult to find or build into adult life. You have to work at it. Not just finding a structure that works for you, but maintaining it. And Little C and I are about to try something new to inject some structure into our writing lives. 

On the Go Into The Story blog, Scott Myers lays down a simple 1-2-7-14 week to week structure for screenwriters. You can (and should) check out the whole post here: http://gointothestory.blcklst.com/2012/01/1-2-7-14.html

But we're not really feature writers at heart. The goal here is to write for and create TV. So we're modifying the plan a little bit. Each week will work like this:

1: We'll read one new pilot script. Old shows and new, shows we like and shows that got cancelled immediately. Then we can talk about the style and what else that writer has done and what they did to set up their world in the pilot. 

2: We'll watch two new pilots every week. Again, old shows and new, good and bad. Maybe we'll find a show we didn't know we'd love. But mostly it will once again give us a better understanding of what makes a pilot, and what makes a script producer-friendly. 

7: Here's the tough one. Every week we write seven pages. Each. Even if they're not great pages, we pound out a page of material a day. Right now we're neck deep in a pilot, and have approximately 15 other projects that we want to do. And TV is all about writing on a deadline. So we need to learn how to get our thoughts on the dang page. 

14: This is my favorite part. Each week we'll do 14 hours of development on another project. Characters, world building, plot structure. Myers describes how this teaches you how to stack projects (be writing one thing while you develop another). It's my favorite part of the process so the idea of having 2 dedicated hours a day to it makes my little heart sing.

Ok friends, who's with us? It's going to be one heck of a challenge but I think we're going to love it. 

Happy writing!

CT