Part 1 - Breaking in as an assistant
Part 2 - First Staff Writer Job on "American Dreams"
Part 3 - How Do I Get an Agent?
Part 4 - Selling a Pilot
Part 5 - Personal Themes in Writing
This next interview clip deals with the origins of Life Unexpected,
and so I can understand that those readers unfamiliar with the show
might be inclined to skip this clip, but you'd miss out on a fascinating
bit of conversation. Here we discuss where Liz takes inspiration,
whether it's from her own life and views, and also how she develops and
discovers her themes in writing.
Certainly you'll have more appreciation for this if you're already know the show and the characters, but even if you don't, I think you'll be able to keep up. I know I'm always fascinated to learn how much of themselves a writer
puts into their characters.
Part 7 - First-Time Showrunner
Part 8 - Developing the second year of LUX
Part 9 - Dealing with network notes
Part 10 - Controversial LUX storylines
Part 11 - LUX lives on
Part 12 - Network overall deal, working on Once Upon a Time and Revenge
Part 13 - The Bitter Questions
Showing posts with label theme. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theme. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Interview with TV writer Liz Tigelaar, creator of "Life Unexpected" - Part 5: Personal Themes in Writing
Part 1 - Breaking in as an assistant
Part 2 - First Staff Writer Job on "American Dreams"
Part 3 - How Do I Get an Agent?
Part 4 - Selling a Pilot
One recurring theme in Liz Tigelaar's work is that of identity. In this latest segment of my interview with Liz, we discuss the origins of her pilot Split Decision and how exploring that theme led Liz to develop a show that would have followed two different versions of it's lead character's life, with different choices in each reality leading to different outcomes and consequences. In doing so, it would have explored how the choices we make shape who we are.
This is something important for young writers to remember. A show has to be about something. It's best to develop themes that can live below the surface. A superficial exploration of this idea might have just dealt with the gimmick of alternate versions of the same people. It sounds like Liz's intent was to go beyond that and use those realities to explore the characters and what it can really mean to be defined by your actions and your history. There are elements here that resonate with an audience on a personal level. Who among us hasn't wondered how different we'd be had we had or not had a particular experience?
Identity is a theme I deal with in my writing a lot too, and I think I would have liked Liz's take on it because she wouldn't have gone the route of saying "No matter what, this person was always fated to end up this way."
What sort of ideas do you use your writing to explore?
Part 6 - Genesis of "Life Unexpected"
Part 7 - First-Time Showrunner
Part 8 - Developing the second year of LUX
Part 9 - Dealing with network notes
Part 10 - Controversial LUX storylines
Part 11 - LUX lives on
Part 12 - Network overall deal, working on Once Upon a Time and Revenge
Part 13 - The Bitter Questions
Part 2 - First Staff Writer Job on "American Dreams"
Part 3 - How Do I Get an Agent?
Part 4 - Selling a Pilot
One recurring theme in Liz Tigelaar's work is that of identity. In this latest segment of my interview with Liz, we discuss the origins of her pilot Split Decision and how exploring that theme led Liz to develop a show that would have followed two different versions of it's lead character's life, with different choices in each reality leading to different outcomes and consequences. In doing so, it would have explored how the choices we make shape who we are.
This is something important for young writers to remember. A show has to be about something. It's best to develop themes that can live below the surface. A superficial exploration of this idea might have just dealt with the gimmick of alternate versions of the same people. It sounds like Liz's intent was to go beyond that and use those realities to explore the characters and what it can really mean to be defined by your actions and your history. There are elements here that resonate with an audience on a personal level. Who among us hasn't wondered how different we'd be had we had or not had a particular experience?
Identity is a theme I deal with in my writing a lot too, and I think I would have liked Liz's take on it because she wouldn't have gone the route of saying "No matter what, this person was always fated to end up this way."
What sort of ideas do you use your writing to explore?
Part 6 - Genesis of "Life Unexpected"
Part 7 - First-Time Showrunner
Part 8 - Developing the second year of LUX
Part 9 - Dealing with network notes
Part 10 - Controversial LUX storylines
Part 11 - LUX lives on
Part 12 - Network overall deal, working on Once Upon a Time and Revenge
Part 13 - The Bitter Questions
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Have a plan - Know your theme and plot
As we've seen over the last few weeks, interesting problems result when you set out on your story without a clear plan. Before long, narrative threads are lost, character arcs loose cohesion, and the plot falls apart. Old characters are forgotten, or drastically changed mid-stream to fit the developing story, while new characters might be introduced to explain plot holes.
With Project Wilson Phillips, we had three groups all start with the same ten pages, the same main characters - and yet three COMPLETELY different stories of varying quality emerged. There were high points in each of them, and also there seemed to be details that got lost along the way in each of them. Without any direction, a lot of writers got stuck making the characters explain the story, just so there was some sense of everything fitting together. And if you go in each of the script, you'll find some small dropped threads that went nowhere. In a script with a plan, those all would have been pruned out.
And that's the danger of working without a plan. It's a little like tracing a maze with a pencil. Every now and then you'll take a wrong turn which leads to a dead end. You can back up and find your way out and to the right path, but that little detour is still going to be there, so that anyone who follows your path will see that run up to the wrong turn.
If you preplan, those mistakes don't exist.
One thing I could have done with Project Wilson Phillips to force greater cohesion would have been to assign a theme, or possibly give all the writers a logline that they had to adhere to. Such a rule would have kept the script more focused and on course, but at the expense of the freedom of the individual writers.
When you're working on a "real" script, it's essential that you know the themes and the story trajectory from the start. Let's take Back to the Future for example. If I wrote ten or fifteen pages that only got as far as putting Marty in the time machine and sending him back to the fifties, any writer that takes up after me could have taken that story in any direction. Maybe he'd get involved in the civil rights movement, or perhaps he decides to buy vintage comics and baseball cards that he knows he can sell for big bucks when he gets back. Maybe he uses his knowledge of the future to come up with inventions.
But let's say I give you those fifteen pages and also the logline: "A teenager travels back in time to encounter his parents as teenagers and after inadvertently messing up their first meeting, must get them to fall in love before he ceases to exist." Suddenly there's a much stronger spine to the story than just the novelty of sending an 80s teen back to the fifties, no?
Better still, what if I told you how the theme would be that a person's past - even small incidents in it - can have a profound role in shaping the adult he becomes. Then the subsequent writers might get that as Marty changes his parent's past, he affects who they grow up to be.
And I bet if I gave the groups those fifteen pages and those two pieces of information, the resulting scripts might have been a lot more cohesive, focused and similar to each other. There still probably would be the issue of the plot being made up as it went along, but there would be a stronger direction here than before.
So keep that in mind when working on your own screenplays. The best writers work from plans.
If we do another Collaborative Writing Project, I'm toying with the idea of soliciting loglines and themes from the participants, and then setting the teams to work with that information, just to see if it leads to a higher-quality result than the first iteration.
With Project Wilson Phillips, we had three groups all start with the same ten pages, the same main characters - and yet three COMPLETELY different stories of varying quality emerged. There were high points in each of them, and also there seemed to be details that got lost along the way in each of them. Without any direction, a lot of writers got stuck making the characters explain the story, just so there was some sense of everything fitting together. And if you go in each of the script, you'll find some small dropped threads that went nowhere. In a script with a plan, those all would have been pruned out.
And that's the danger of working without a plan. It's a little like tracing a maze with a pencil. Every now and then you'll take a wrong turn which leads to a dead end. You can back up and find your way out and to the right path, but that little detour is still going to be there, so that anyone who follows your path will see that run up to the wrong turn.
If you preplan, those mistakes don't exist.
One thing I could have done with Project Wilson Phillips to force greater cohesion would have been to assign a theme, or possibly give all the writers a logline that they had to adhere to. Such a rule would have kept the script more focused and on course, but at the expense of the freedom of the individual writers.
When you're working on a "real" script, it's essential that you know the themes and the story trajectory from the start. Let's take Back to the Future for example. If I wrote ten or fifteen pages that only got as far as putting Marty in the time machine and sending him back to the fifties, any writer that takes up after me could have taken that story in any direction. Maybe he'd get involved in the civil rights movement, or perhaps he decides to buy vintage comics and baseball cards that he knows he can sell for big bucks when he gets back. Maybe he uses his knowledge of the future to come up with inventions.
But let's say I give you those fifteen pages and also the logline: "A teenager travels back in time to encounter his parents as teenagers and after inadvertently messing up their first meeting, must get them to fall in love before he ceases to exist." Suddenly there's a much stronger spine to the story than just the novelty of sending an 80s teen back to the fifties, no?
Better still, what if I told you how the theme would be that a person's past - even small incidents in it - can have a profound role in shaping the adult he becomes. Then the subsequent writers might get that as Marty changes his parent's past, he affects who they grow up to be.
And I bet if I gave the groups those fifteen pages and those two pieces of information, the resulting scripts might have been a lot more cohesive, focused and similar to each other. There still probably would be the issue of the plot being made up as it went along, but there would be a stronger direction here than before.
So keep that in mind when working on your own screenplays. The best writers work from plans.
If we do another Collaborative Writing Project, I'm toying with the idea of soliciting loglines and themes from the participants, and then setting the teams to work with that information, just to see if it leads to a higher-quality result than the first iteration.
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