Sam has quite a few ex-colleagues from her days spent working for Granada TV, one of whom came to visit this weekend. Not only has this particular colleague had a script made into a TV drama, it won the prestigious Dennis Potter Screenwriting Award.
This Little Life is a harrowing story of the birth of a premature baby and the effect it has on a husband and wife and was based on her novel, Between Two Eternities. So when Sam and I arranged to meet for our now weekly scriptwriting morning, I was nervous. Had she shown our raw script to her friend? Did I want her to? What if she hated it?
Worse, what if she didn’t hate it but didn’t particularly like it either?
Fortunately for me and my scatterbrained insecurities Sam hadn’t shown our script to her award winning friend but she did pick up a few nuggets of advice including:
• If you are writing a serial/series make sure that there are a number of big stories and a number of sub plots so that as well as THE BIG THEME. It should be possible to view each episode as a story in itself.
• Ensure that you know exactly how the series finishes.
• The story idea and the characters are just as important, possibly more important, than the actual writing of the script.
Deep down I know our script isn’t ready yet. Yes, we’ve written the first draft, but I envisage lots of rewriting before it’s ready. Although, having said that, Sam is keen for us to have it ready to send off - where to, we haven’t quite decided - by the end of January.
One nugget of information given to all of us at the Writing for TV and Radio talk in Manchester a couple of weeks ago was Ric Michael’s tale which involved a pitch for a TV comedy series that involved nine rewrites. It seemed that the BBC liked the idea but requested that the writers look at the script again and ‘tweak’ it here and there. Unfortunately, as it passed from one department to the next, the rewrites multiplied exponentially.
The scriptwriters (for there were two of them) clung on in the hope that they would get their idea on the small screen eventually and dutifully rewrote and rewrote again …and again …and again until the project was given the green light.
By this time the two writers were, I’m sure, on first name terms with every manager of every department at the BBC, right up to Director General.
They turned up for another meeting only to be told that their green-lighted project was about to be…pulled.
And the moral of this story? Sam and I consider nine rewrites excessive. But what about five? Or six? Or seven? Would we have the confidence to insist on a limit?
It might be rejected at first reading and we may never have that problem.
Or it might not…
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Read on...and on...and on: Hi Amy No - neither of us live in Blacon, but Sam
Read on...and on...and on: Hi, I'm a journalism student from the university