I loved 'Six Feet Under'. Brilliant TV. So here's a practical plotting exercise with a TV slant that will strengthen your 'story muscle' across all forms of scriptwriting. One of the hardest skills to master as a scriptwriter is practical plotting at speed. It takes plain old practice. Keep your answers in a portfolio that you can show to a producer to illustrate how good a writer you are.
Brainstorm ten ideas for interesting moral dilemmas that a doctor in a TV medical series might face (just a sentence each). Remember, give yourself permission to write down weak ideas (you will filter them later) Go for quantity not quality because this way you’ll flush out all of the clichés first.
If you are thinking: ‘how cheesy is that!’, well, fair comment – in a way. Your answers could well be cheesy and clichéd – that’s what happens in bad TV writing. However, the test for you –what will show that you are a good writer – is to create brilliant, thought- provoking dilemmas out of a task that seems inherently doomed to cheesiness. The task in TV writing is usually to escape the cliches. It's hard. Push yourself.
Brainstorm ten ideas for interesting moral dilemmas that a doctor in a TV medical series might face (just a sentence each). Remember, give yourself permission to write down weak ideas (you will filter them later) Go for quantity not quality because this way you’ll flush out all of the clichés first.
If you are thinking: ‘how cheesy is that!’, well, fair comment – in a way. Your answers could well be cheesy and clichéd – that’s what happens in bad TV writing. However, the test for you –what will show that you are a good writer – is to create brilliant, thought- provoking dilemmas out of a task that seems inherently doomed to cheesiness. The task in TV writing is usually to escape the cliches. It's hard. Push yourself.
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