There are a lot of serial killers in the world these days, and so many of them seem to live on television. Take a look at this season's offerings: The Following follows a questionable quasi-FBI agent trying to track down a collective of killers; Bates Motel tracks a young Norman Bates, as he grows into a wig and dress wearing murderer; Hannibal, based on The Red Dragon, is an earlier look into the rise (and, one assumes, incarceration) of Hannibal Lecter. The characters In the above shows have a lot of blood on their hands. And they're not the only ones. (Throw in the veteran Dexter, and the body count rises by at least three figures.)
With so many serial killer offerings, it is inevitable that the series draw comparisons to one another. (Let's ignore the question of WHY we as a society want so many programs about such evil people, for fear of where that might lead us.) Which shows hold up? Which were worth getting excited about?
I was most excited about The Following's premier. A series about a cop trying to fight his way through a band of serial killers to find the most nefarious one, one he has history with? Awesome. It reminds me of one of Neil Gaiman's Sandman trades, which was a great read. But The Following quickly succumbed to three major problems: poor character development, shoddy writing, and some of the worst police work in recent television history. It probably comes as little surprise that the cops andolice procedures in a show about a federal agent necessitates strong detective writing. The Following showcased the worst in cop abilities. The FBI was a never-present entity, only around at the end of each episode to examine crime scenes. Kevin Bacon's somewhat alcoholic, somewhat physically injured, somewhat psychologically demented protagonist was never consistent in any of his flaws. The only thing he did regularly was ignore procedure, fail to call for backup, and lead his colleagues into danger. Even when his adversaries were sloppy and exposed, Bacon and his FBI cohorts were unable to track them. Some of the most interesting characters wee part of the following, but their bickering soon became petty and uninteresting. Or, they died. There was so much to get jazzed about leading up to the premier of The Following. Unfortunately, by the third episode, the show proved to be not worth caring about.
Bates Motel - frankly, I only watched the first two episodes, and for the second, I was doing work on my laptop for most of it. The rest of the season to date is on my DVR. Perhaps I'll get to it some day. I mildly enjoyed the first episode, but it didn't seem to know when it was set, and neither did I. Norman Bates spoke and acted like he was from the 50s or early 60s, but he had an iPhone. His mother was... interesting, and their relationship was far more incestuous than any I would ever want with my mother. But I also didn't really care about any of it. I'd glance at the screen periodically - oh look, someone is on fire - and then back to my laptop. Has anyone watched? Does anyone care?
I'll be honest - I really like Hannibal. I think it is by far the best of the three. Oddly, what I like most about it is how it handles the police shooting its protagonist is forced to commit. Like I. the Following, the protagonist in Hannibal is a sort-of FBI agent called back into duty to catch a killer. Like in The Following, he is forced to shoot a suspect. This is where the similarities end. In The Following, Kevin Bacon kills more people on screen than any of the "serial killers" do. In fact, he shoots some of them when making an arrest would just take too much time. It gets absurd. When a suspect was killed in Hannibal, I thought, "Here we go again. Should I just cancel the series recording now?" But a ton of time is dedicated to the nightmares and fears the protagonist has as a result of the shooting. He is clearly troubled by what he's done, which is incredibly refreshing. The show is also smartly written. It looks good. The characters are three dimensional, unlike in the above examples. And actions have ramifications. What more could you want?
Interestingly, another show I've taken to this season is Arrow. I am a comic book guy and watched Smallville from start to finish, so there s little doubt that I would subscribe to a show, also on the CW, about the Green Arrow. I did not expect the level of violence it broadcasts each week. According to a recent episode, the hero (the agrees Arrow) has killed 26 bad guys on the show. 26! That's serial killer numbers. The show's writers hint at guilt over the deaths, but it doesn't really factor into play too much. Sure, it's not psychological the way Hannibal is, but with so many deaths on its hero's hands, it seems plausible that Arrow would address the killing more than it does. Lackadaisical treatment of murder aside (...), Arrow is entertaining and a fun watch.
Perhaps it bears mentioning that three of the four shows referenced are based on existing characters. But, maybe not. That just goes to show that original programming is rarer these days. And there's no obvious connection to draw between the success of existing content versus established properties. The only conclusion to draw is, no matter where the idea for the show comes from, there is nothing that can make it successful (or unwatchable) more quickly than the quality of the writing.
I think today officially marks 15 months that I have been working on the sci-fi script with my writing partner, W.A. The project has taken more twists and turns than I can count in that time. We developed nearly ten major versions of the outline. I wrote three substantial drafts. I've done smaller scale revisions of all of those.
I think we're in the home stretch... for now.
A few weeks back (actually, it's more like a month and a half ago at this point), we got the second major draft of the script to our producer. To her, it was a first draft. She praised it, by saying the issues we had to address were "second draft problems." If that sounds like a slight to you, I assure you that it's not. Whatever incarnation of a script your producer, manager, agent, or director sees first is the first draft to them - even if you've written a dozen drafts of it prior to showing it the light of day.
W.A. and I chatted about her notes over the next couple of days. The outcome of those discussions, coupled with our producer's notes? A fresh draft. I thought the changes were going to be minimal. All but perhaps five pages wound up having revision marks on them. Final Draft defaults to doing revisions in blue text. Entire pages were blue by the time I was done. Rather than hunt for the changes, you would have done better to hunt for uncorrupted black text.
The changes were, comparatively, minimal.
Still, we had more work to do. W.A. read the new draft, and then we got back on the phone. He liked much of it, but a few things came to light for him. The biggest issue was that the leading science elements of the script weren't working. They came in too late and didn't track. Or they were incomplete. Or they just didn't fit within the context of the new draft. The rest was pretty sturdy, and we certainly weren't about to duct tape the science on as an afterthought, but it was necessary. We had to make it work. I have to make it work.
That's where I am now. I head to Belgium to visit friends on Wednesday, so I have four more days and nights to complete my edits. The good news is that, after last night's work and today's session, I feel like it's in a good place. I think the Wednesday deadline is doable. Whether I'll come back from Europe with another round of rewrites remains to be seen.
Up until this point in my career, I've had very little cause to use revision mode in my writing. Sure, I did revision mode a few times with my post-Apocalyptic spec so that my producers could follow my the edits I made. But I didn't really understand the scope of revisions mode, nor did I use them anywhere close to their fullest. I have since started.
As I mentioned a few weeks back, I recently made the switch from using Movie Magic to Final Draft, spurred on by the fact that both my writing partner and producer use Final Draft. More so, that software seems to have very clearly come out ahead as the industry standard for screenwriting. (I miss you, Movie Magic, but the transition to Final Draft has been a smooth one so far.) Granted, I also neglected to use Movie Magic to its fullest extent, but I'm really digging on Final Draft at the moment.
It took me a little while to get used to the shortcuts in FD compared to those in Movie Magic. Somethings are actually a little more intuitive to me in MM; for example, hitting Enter in MM prompts the next field in a slug line. Doing so in Final Draft drops me down to the action paragraph. For instance, when I used MM, I could intro my slug line (INT.) and hit enter. The software was designed to ask me which location I wanted to use. Writing in one and hitting Enter again would then prompt me to decide which time of day I was setting the scene in. I couldn't move beyond the slug line without either completing it, or telling the system to ignore that field and let me proceed. With FD, hitting enter will take me to the action paragraph, risking a blank or incomplete slug line. Rather, with the latter software, I have to hit Tab to call up the location and then time of day. Hitting Tab in MM would prompt dialogue.
Discrepancies in key commands aside, Final Draft has been pretty intuitive. In addition to, you know, actually writing the script, I've been making use of the above mentioned revision mode features. To be fair to Move Magic, since I didn't really use that feature when writing in that program, I can't compare how it worked. But for Final Draft, it's easy to assign another revision mode (the initial revisions are "Blue" in both name and appearance; the second set of revisions are Pink, and so on). Like with MM, and asterix denotes any line that was edited, added, or cut. Pages that only have one revision pass have "Blue' as their heading. Pages on which I edited the revisions are "Pink" at the top, and so on, making it easy to track what version of the script each page - and whole script - my team is reading.
Additionally, my writing partner and producer can easily read and mark up the Final Draft document I send them. Movie Magic has some weird settings, whereby it was difficult for me to even open a Movie Magic file I emailed myself. I would have to open the backup version in order to upload the script if I had been working remotely for some reason. WIth Final Draft, the files are universal (like Word documents), so anyone can open them and see all revision marks and script notes. (If you're paranoid about someone stealing your work, that might be a bad thing. But don't be worried. Just be careful who you send fdx files to and go with PDF when in doubt.) Speaking of, Script Notes are a way for my writing partner, for instance, to put his thoughts into the script without throwing off the formatting or page count. Script Notes enable him to tag a little note to any piece of text, which I can then click into to read. It can be anything he wants to make me aware of - "this dialogue doesn't make sense," "this is a typo," "you're brilliant and should win many Oscars."
Whether you're writing for yourself, a writers group, or more professionally, I encourage you to play around with your revision mode features and see what they can do for you. It beats the alternative (which, embarrassingly, I relied on even until quite recently) of simply saving each draft with a new name or version number and not having any fast way to track where the actual edits were made. Sure, you should still save each version as a new document, but it makes for comparing versions so much easier.
I guess it's not too encouraging that it only took me a decade of writing to really capitalize on these features, is it?
It's been almost a month since my collaborator, W.A., and I received feedback from our producer on the working draft of the sci-fi spec I delivered. Overall, her notes were really positive (and if you look back a few weeks, in sync with ones I got from The League). As I frequently do, I assumed that the rewrite work would be fast and easy. I don't know why I always do that - it's hardly ever the case.
All things considered, this pass was nowhere near as onerous as it could have been. I had a few major challenges to meet, which would then all string throughout the entire script. My task wasn't to insert a scene or two here or there and call it a day, but to infuse the entire script with new elements, refined existing ones, and to strengthen characters all around. Fortunately, the coherency of the notes made my job easy in some respects, since I could concentrate on three or four main objectives, and then just make sure they tracked throughout.
Without getting into too many specifics, one of the main things I had to do was to better elucidate the science behind the "sci" component of the sci-fi, and then to tie that more clearly into the protagonist's and antagonist's goals. Before we sent the script to our producer, I had an inkling that she would suggest the science be clarified. I wasn't sure, though, nor was I at a good place to determine exactly how to go about doing that. For months leading up to that moment, I had been so closely mired in the script so as to not have clear, discerning eyes when looking at it. Her notes validated my suspicions, and the call with her, along with two consecutive days of calls with W.A. shed a ton of light on how to proceed.
I was off an running. Curiously, though not surprisingly in the least, the further I got into that element, the more the other weak links tightened. By nailing the science, I was gaining a stronger foothold for my character work. As the characters fleshed out, their goals, drives, and interactions with the world solidified. Soon, the antagonist had become a more powerful, more terrifying force, not only because his goals were clearer, but because his back story leapt off the page. Inversely, the protagonist became more sympathetic and more deserving of support.
While things tied together more, they also streamlined naturally. The script dropped from a way-too-long 121 pages, to a much more manageable 109. Dialogue chunks that had been twelve or fourteen lines long were shortened by half. The language used in describing the science became more uniform, and the smaller lexicon made every event much clearer and more readily comprehensible. I'm doing a final read through over the next couple nights to make sure that the elements I added all track, and since I jumped around as ideas struck, I want to ensure that I didn't neglect to delete or add something where appropriate. But I'm very pleased and excited by this draft and can't wait to get it back to W.A.
Every writer has tools and practices idiosyncratic to his or her work. For those of us who write, or aspire to write, these particularities are fun to talk about in an extremely nerdy way - much like page count or formatting issues. Recently, I've been expanding my toolbox, and I think you might find some of these instruments helpful to your process, as well.
Last week, I talked a lot about the environmental toll that my writing is beginning to take. Draft after draft after draft, I feel compelled to print out a script so that I can scribble all over it when going through the rewrite process. I find it incredibly hard to sit down in front of Final Draft (a new toy for me, as it has replaced Movie Magic as my current writing software), pass Go, and collect my $200 when doing edits. I need to have a physical script in front of me that I can labor and sweat over, a page that I can leaden with ink and scratch marks, where I can triple strike out words and scenes that need to go and scrawl thoughts, dialogue, and proposed revisions in the margins. I can't do any of that to my liking on the computer, and so I felt compelled to print out 120 pages (or more) with each subsequent draft. I thought that the most ecologically sound option I had was to do that on recycled paper, printing on the clean side of used sheets.
I discovered I had been remiss in my green detective work. There are a number of apps out there specifically made for annotating pdfs on iPads (mini and regular), Kindles, and other tablets. (Apologies in advance if this post seems more marketing driven than any of my others; I'm not supported by any of the below vendors. I just happen to really like the programs and services they provide, which make my writing easier.) Beyond saving paper, using the app to annotate a pdf of my script is also just less unwieldy than working with over a hundred sheets of loose-leaf.
I started off with the PDF Master app for my iPad mini. Initially, I love it. You can highlight text, strike out, insert notes and/or text, free draw, and change the opacity and color of all of the above. There are also features that allow the user to add stamps and signatures, but I used neither of those. After I sung the app's praises to a couple writer friends and League members, I was confronted with the program's limitations. For one, there's a three-document limit, which I discovered when trying to import my producer's marked up pdf. I had to delete the app's instruction document in order to work around that. More seriously, though, the app seems to have some saving issues. Like, major saving issues. Thankfully, I emailed the document to myself the second night I used it (always email your work to yourself, friends), because it neglected to save about 30 pages of progress I made. I had to re-import from the email in order to continue where I left off. Then, on the last day, it just stopped saving after a certain point. I would mark up one page, scroll to the next, and then notice that none of my previous annotations were saved. Then, they began to disappear from the page I was working on at that time, immediately after I made them. Very concerning.
To fix that, I took my father's suggestion (he's a bit of a tech guy and uses similar tools at work) and switched to the Adobe Reader App. I wound up completing my annotations in the ironically named PDF Master, but Adobe's product offers the same features, plus you can type in a specific page you want to access, rather than scroll through the entire document, which Master required, coupled with what I assume will be more product stability. Adobe's not small time in the PDF world, so I can only hope that their product will be more stable.
As I made my annotations, it became apparent that a finger, even one as narrow and pointy as mine, isn't as precise as annotating a PDF document on a tablet requires. Perhaps that's intrinsic to working with the faulty PDF Master (half the time I struck out the wrong text and had to hit undo), but I wanted more precision. So, I started looking into stylus pens. There are a number of them out there, but the reviews I read (and I read a lot of them), indicated that the amPen was the best. I haven't used it yet - I'll have it Friday - but it sounds as if the rubber tip with a conductor layer makes for the most seamless, efficient tracking on the tablet screen. Plus, the pen will give the added feature of feeling more like marking up a paper script, which might make the transition to digital editing smoother.
If all goes as I hope, then I won't have to do much script printing going forward. Except, maybe, for the final version, because sometimes there's nothing more rewarding than seeing and holding the fruits of your months or years of labor.
Somewhere out there is the finish line for my sci-fi spec. I can almost see it. Maybe not quite on the horizon, but not wildly far beyond it.
Last week, my writing partner and I had two days of phone calls to go over the page notes our producer gave us. There was a lot to cover, but in a strange way, the repetition of some of her points was a comfort. She hit a few big notes time and again, stressing what (we agreed) was missing from the script, and where the characters were falling short of being fully developed. Yes, the result was a lot of mark-up, but the fact that her observations can be boiled down to about a half-dozen issues was encouraging. We were on the same page by and large with most of her thoughts, and the fact that they kept coming up throughout the script was an indicator of what the screenplay needs to really come to life. No matter how much proverbial red ink one might scribble on your script, having someone who knows the industry and - more importantly - know story weigh in on your screenplay is a giant blessing.
So, for me, the re-write process began yet again last week. I'll admit, it's been a bit more of a laborious few days than I'm used to; I've not been making a ton of progress (or really much at all to speak of some days), but I think I've identified why that is. The environmentalist in me hates printing scripts out again and again for each round of revisions. However, the writer in me is increasingly incapable of delving into rewrites without a hard copy of the script in front of him that he can mark-up and cross out and insert new hand-written dialogue into.
What to do? Print out another 120 pages? Or sit inertly before the flashing cursor in Final Draft, making minimal progress each day?
Before I set it all to print again, I'm trying two things. First, there are large chunks of the script that necessitate edits, but which didn't change too much at all since last I printed the thing. My first step is going to be to see how much I can edit from there. Alternatively, there are a couple PDF annotation apps available for iPad, so Google tells me, which I am going to check out tonight. If those work, I'll get all the benefit of a hard copy script to scribble on, without any of the tree killing that comes with it.
Of course, at the end of the day, completing the script is the priority, so if the above two fail (and I'll admit with you that the recycled script option is less than ideal), I'll print the thing. I guess I'll just have to do extra scribbling on it to make up for it.
Two weeks ago, my writing partner, W.A., and I sent a draft of our sci-fi project to our producer for the first time. We had a call with her a week ago Monday to get her overarching notes, and then sent her the Final Draft file of the script, so that she could mark it up in revision tracking mode and give us more specific page notes. Concurrently, I sent the script to the rest of the League for their feedback, having first prepped them that I was only really interested in larger, gut-reaction notes, rather than having them get mired in the minutia of the scrip. Before I told them what our producer thought, I wanted to hear their feedback. I was really curious to see how my writers group's notes compared with those of a development executive.
I was very pleased with the results. So, I am sure, were the Leaguers.
By and large, the notes stacked up pretty perfectly. My producer had notes about where certain bits of act one are set, vis-a-vis where the bulk of Act Two takes place; the League brought up the same issue. The producer touched a lot on the protagonist and his somewhat cold vibe toward the other characters; the League thought he was a bit arrogant and callous. Our producer questioned some of the science in the script and how it relates to the characters' goals; my group members focused pretty intently on the science and where it either didn't track or was way too heady.
All in all, they were pretty much on track with the producer's. Couple that with the fact that W.A.'s manager had very similar notes, and two things become very apparent to me. One) with so many people hitting the same notes, it's quite clear where the script needs to be retooled or bolstered. And two) the quality of feedback that the League presents one another is very strong, on par with the kind of observations coming from industry people. Revelation two is obviously less about this particular script than it is about the strength of the group. And I can't be more happy about that.
Especially for those of us writers who don't have many (or any) industry contacts and have yet to land our first sales, we have to rely on other writers to help us refine our material and get our screenplays industry-ready. Sure, you can have non-writer friends and family read your scripts, but unless all you want is praise, you should try to set up a group of other writers that you can meet with and be very frank with. Had the League just jumped for joy over the script and not delivered any criticism, then - given the other sets of notes we were getting - I would have to think twice on the caliber of feedback they've given on every project and debate the merit of showing future work to them. But that wasn't the case, which means that I know I can turn to them for help and hard-hitting thoughts on the script. (Of course, I knew this already, having been writing with these guys and gals for a decade now, but I'm quite glad the mini-experiment reinforced what I already knew.)
If you're without other writers that you know, I suggest using the web and social media - Facebook, MeetUp.com, or even CraigsList - to get a group of writers that you feel comfortable sharing work with. They will be one of the best resources you have in honing your writing.
