The BBC and the WGGB: some great ideas

I was thinking about blogging about the BBC's apparent changes when I saw Bernie Corbett's incisive thoughts in the WGGB weekly newsletter. I couldn't say it better so I would like to spread the wisdom and common sense that makes the WGGB an organisation well worth supporting. Are you a member? You should be if not.

Statement by Bernie Corbett

General Secretary, Writers’ Guild of Great Britain

2nd March 2010

In eight plain words – “The BBC should not attempt to do everything” – Mark Thompson has overturned a philosophy that has been central to the BBC since it was founded 87 years ago.

If it sticks, the new policy that the BBC can no longer provide something for everybody but must instead concentrate on high quality and areas where others can’t or won’t provide, will have profound implications.

While we take no pleasure in the destruction of Radio 6 or the Asian Network (both of which would appear to be high-quality services that no one else will provide), nevertheless this is a revolution that could have its sunny side for writers.

If it is true that £600 million will be freed to go into more and better programmes, then the Guild can make some immediate and obvious suggestions.

Original drama: For several years everyone has been asking why Britain can’t produce brilliant series like The Sopranos, The Wire, etc. Here is a chance for the BBC to create its own in-house HBO.

New writers: Fresh talent and new ideas don’t have to be developed to death – here is an opportunity to take some risks. Five out of every six TV drama scripts commissioned and paid for by the BBC never get made – now that ratio can be radically improved.

Make me laugh: We long for brilliant new sitcoms. Use some of this money to give them room to grow. Many of the true greats were into their second or third series before they achieved classic status.

Something for the kids: Build on the success of CBBC and CBeebies by reinventing real, meaty drama and comedy for kids – there is more to children’s TV than running-around-shouting-and-playing shows and endlessly repeated animations – brilliant though they are.

Rescue radio: A tiny fragment of the money would not only restore but reverse the shameful cuts in BBC Radio drama that in recent years have seen the abandonment of World Service drama, the crazy cancellation of terrific soaps like Westway and Silver Street, the imminent demise of the Friday Play and the dumbing-down of the Woman’s Hour drama slot into little more than a reading with interludes of dialogue.

Comedy: While we’re at it, let us have the reintroduction of topical sketch shows like Week Ending or the News Huddlines – these shows have enabled generations of brilliant writers to get started and write their way out of their bedsits and into the ratings.

Britain’s broadcasting heritage: At long last here is a realistic source for the huge sums required to digitise the BBC archive and put it online, where everyone can access every TV or radio show that was ever made in the UK (or at least, those that still survive). And please will the BBC not give our heritage away for nothing, but charge a reasonable pay-per-view or subscription price. Doing so will avoid the iPlayer mistake of setting up impossible competition for other, commercial providers, and it will bring in revenue to fund even more programme making and to ensure fair payment for the writers and other creators who made those shows. Never forget, the BBC did not buy or pay for these rights at the time the programmes were made and it cannot rewrite history now.

Should scriptwriters write novels as well?

This blog is an article from TwelvePoint.com (without the illustrations). After a spirited #scriptchat session on Twitter where many of the questions related to writing in different formats (check out #scriptchat) I was asked to make this article available to non TwelvePoint members so here it is.

Julian Friedmann is an agent representing both scriptwriters and book writers. In this article he looks at some of the reasons why scriptwriters should also consider writing prose, not instead of but in addition to scripts. He demystifies the publishing process for writers, explaining how to access alternative ways to earn money.

This article is based on a talk I gave at the Screenwriters’ Festival in Cheltenham in October 2009. When we did a survey of delegates early in 2009, writing novels was low down the list of priorities yet in October 2009, the lecture was so crowded that not everyone who wanted to could get in.

What happened between early 2009 and late 2009 to bring about that change? Several things could explain the change. Perhaps what else was on during the Festival at that time was not very interesting? The recession had begun to take its toll of the creative industries: film and television budgets had been cut and staff made redundant. In publishing the same was true, with advances falling for newer writers, editors being fired and lists cut, so that a publishing company that previously released 100 books a year might now be releasing 70. That meant that they already had 30 for the following year and, as a result, were looking to buy fewer books than before.

There is big business to be made out of writing and selling rights in books.

Why should scriptwriters think about writing novels if publishing is also having problems? The main reasons are not straightforward but there are sound arguments to recommend it. In the same way that the film industry is seen by some to be healthy despite the recession (bumper box-office receipts largely because movie going is not an expensive form of entertainment ‘per hour’), so publishing overall is not in bad shape because reading is another inexpensive way of spending leisure time.

Brand name authors do better in recessions - although the ‘mid-list’ suffers - and niche books on specialised subjects sell as well as before because they are not impulse buys.

I spent my customary week in Frankfurt earlier in October at the Frankfurt Book Fair (as I have for nearly 40 years) where many thousands of publishers from all over the world were selling rights in books to each other. In one building, the Film & Media Rights Centre, there were also producers trying to buy film and television rights to books. On some days I had so many meetings that they could only be 15 minute slots.

In other words, there is big business to be made out of writing and selling rights in books and, in the troubled financial time we find ourselves in, I believe that it is increasingly important for scriptwriters to think outside the box. One way to do this is to step back and reconsider what it is you do.
Scriptwriters tell stories in a particular format, in Courier 12 point font, usually in three acts. The significant word here is ‘stories’. Most scriptwriters become scriptwriters because they are passionate about movies and television drama or the theatre, and most scriptwriters spend a great deal of time trying to get to grips with the complex and often inscrutable legal and contractual aspects of doing business as a scriptwriter.

They also face endless disputes between the so-called experts as to whether there are 3 acts, 22 steps, 12 stages and so on. They are caught up in disputes between script editors, producers and directors, and are sometimes fired to be replaced with a writer who has less talent. There are literally hundreds of books about writing scripts and hundreds of courses, long and short, degree courses and two-hour miracle fixes.

What is so often missing from courses is really useful information about the psychological makeup of the characters; instead the courses tend to focus on - amongst other things - writing script formatted documents. What writers write about is human behaviour but this is rarely a component of scriptwriting courses.

I have also realised from many conversations over decades with scriptwriters that the vast majority are daunted by the idea of attempting to write a novel. There seem to be two main reasons for this. The first is that a novel is rather long. It has been estimated that the average novel is 100,000 words whereas the average script is apparently 30,000 words.

Secondly, publishing is a completely different business with its own arcane rules, terms and contracts, all of which are daunting to have to deal with if you don't have an agent who can pave the way for you.
I would like to suggest that writing prose is a serious and complementary activity for scriptwriters. There are many reasons for this but the main ones seem to me to be as follows

• Most of you have probably read more novels than you've read scripts and you would certainly have had some training at school and possibly university to write prose probably long before you had any training to write scripts.

• Compared to writing a script, writing prose is relatively straightforward and it does not require the same obsessional adherence to structural templates that scripts need to demonstrate for them to be taken seriously when submitted.

• I believe that one of the great fallacies in the teaching of scriptwriting is precisely that I do not believe we should be teaching 'scriptwriting'. Instead I believe writers should study (and learn to appreciate) storytelling. One of the most important motivations, apart from making money, for a writer should be that he or she is compelled to be a storyteller and after forty years of working with writers, I believe it's easier to tell the story in prose than in script. As Alexander Mackendrick, the director of The Ladykillers said: 'Don't try to work out story in script form; do it in prose first.'

• A great advantage of writing a novel as opposed to a script is that you can describe what characters think and feel, something you can't easily or acceptably do in a script. In other words, a draft of a novel can be a very extended treatment enabling you to work out the subtleties of character and plot for your proposed feature film. Admittedly it can take many months. As Robert McKee said when asked how long it should take to write a script, it should take about 6 months but you shouldn’t start writing the script for 5½ months.

• Whether you're able to sell the novel or not, it might be easier to find a publisher for a well-worked-out manuscript taking us into the hearts and minds of the characters, the emotions, the pace and the plot - effectively a template for the film - than to find a producer willing to put up money for the script version. Furthermore, should a producer make you an offer to option your prose document, one of your deal points can be that you have to be given the first crack at the script. If a publisher therefore makes an offer for your novel, whatever you do, do not allow them to control film dramatisation rights; keep those yourself.

• My final argument for the value of investing time in writing a novel as opposed to working in a bar is that all things being equal, by which I mean if your prose writing ability is as good as your scriptwriting ability, novels and therefore novelists tend to make more money than scripts or scriptwriters. This may not be true in Hollywood where silly money can be paid for a script but it is true in Europe, particularly in Britain. You need to remember that in Britain we make about a 100 movies a year but we publish about 100,000 books a year.

Those are the main reasons why I think scriptwriters and storytellers should take prose seriously.

However, it does mean learning how to get to grips with the structure of the publishing industry, the very different way of trying to sell book rights and, when you get an offer, having to try and deal with contracts that are even more alien to you than the script contracts with which you're more familiar.

What follows is a very rapid tour through the publishing industry so that you have some idea of how it differs from the film and television industries in order that you might be in a better position to think about whether to turn some of your story ideas into prose before or instead of into script.

There are many aspects of approaching writing a book that are similar to the approach for writing a script. You have to think about the market: is there a market for what you want to write? Let’s take horror for a moment. There are specialised publishing lists that publish horror, not many but easy to identify. How easy is it to identify producers who are interested in horror? Quite difficult because as soon as you discover one who is doing a horror film, you will also probably discover that they don’t really want another at the same time whereas a publisher who does say ten horror novels a year will not be put off by the fact that they have all ten if a really good one comes along.

How do you check the market? Read widely, check the best-seller lists, spend time browsing in bookstores, try to read the publishing trade papers (the main one being The Bookseller). You need to know what sells just like you should when writing scripts. If a particular type of novel (say Brigit Jones’ Diary or The Da Vinci Code) is a huge hit, don’t assume you should copy it because the timetable of the publishing industry is very slow. From acceptance by a publisher of a completed manuscript that they have bought until publication is usually more than a year. By the time you have written your opus it might be two years after The Da Vinci Code is in the best-seller list before your book is published.

On the other hand, as a genre this kind of conspiracy thriller is a stable genre and if your book has something that sets it apart and is very fast-paced with endless reversals, tension and suspense, then it will probably find a publisher at any time.

You could always self-publish and have printed copies in about a week. So why the delay with regular publishers? Simple: most publishers already have all the books they are going to publish in the next 12 months and some for the following year.

Your choice or genre, theme and subject should be based in part on what you know you can do best. Many scriptwriters try to set scripts in the USA because they believe that is a bigger market than their own but in reality few non-Americans write scripts with the muscular intensity that American writers seem to have and you will not be around the corner for a script editor to sit down with you to work on the rewrites.

For a novel it is easier but still problematical. There is not a big market for books set in the Middle East despite The Kite Runner so where you set a book, the nationality of the central characters and the genre can all play a part in making your novel more likely to sell.

If you are writing the book as a template for a film, remember that it costs no more to publish a novel with a cast of thousands than a cast of three, but don’t be lured into expansiveness and still expect it to be easy to sell film rights, although a great novel with a cast of thousands is far more likely to be picked up for film if the book performs really well than an original script is likely to be picked up.

With google and the internet it is possible to conjure up a location so well that people reading will believe that you have been there. I suggested to a novelist client many years ago that he set a spy story in Russia. He had never been there and didn’t know the genre. I provided him with research books (this was in the early 1980s, long before the internet) and after publication, one major American newspaper reviewed the book (which was made into the television mini series Codename Kyril) with the words ‘Mr Trenhaile, who obviously knows Moscow like the back of his hand…’ We had a good laugh at that.

In the next part of this article, Julian Friedmann goes on to look at what kinds of novels writers might choose, how to submit and to whom, how offers for rights are made to authors and how contracts are negotiated.

Julian Friedmann is an agent at Blake Friedmann, Editor of ScriptWriter Magazine (now published at TwelvePoint.com), Board Director of the International Screenwriting Festival (Cheltenham) and author of How to Make Money Screenwriting (Intellect, 2000).

Publish so you are not damned

I gave a talk at the SWF in Cheltenham and many people who did not get into the room asked for a copy to be provided, so it is up as a TwelvePoint article. I was going to do a blog about the subject but decided to put the key points of the talk and article into a blog. Here it is.

I am suggesting that writing prose is a serious and complementary activity for scriptwriters. There are many reasons for this but the main ones seem to me to be as follows:

• Most of you have probably read more novels than you've read scripts and you would certainly have had some training at school and possibly university to write prose probably long before you had any training to write scripts.

• Compared to writing a script, writing prose is relatively straightforward and it does not require the same obsessional adherence to structural templates that scripts need to demonstrate for them to be taken seriously when submitted.

• I believe that one of the great fallacies in the teaching of scriptwriting is precisely that I do not believe we should be teaching 'scriptwriting'. Instead I believe writers should study (and learn to appreciate) storytelling. One of the most important motivations, apart from making money, for a writer should be that he or she is compelled to be a storyteller and after forty years of working with writers, I believe it's easier to tell the story in prose than in script. As Alexander Mackendrick, the director of The Ladykillers said: 'Don't try to work out story in script form; do it in prose first.'

• A great advantage of writing a novel as opposed to a script is that you can describe what characters think and feel, something you can't easily or acceptably do in a script. In other words, a draft of a novel can be a very extended treatment enabling you to work out the subtleties of character and plot for your proposed feature film. Admittedly it can take many months. As Robert McKee said when asked how long it should take to write a script, it should take about 6 months but you shouldn’t start writing the script for 5½ months.

• Whether you're able to sell the novel or not, it might be easier to find a publisher for a well-worked-out manuscript taking us into the hearts and minds of the characters, the emotions, the pace and the plot - effectively a template for the film - than to find a producer willing to put up money for the script version. Furthermore, should a producer make you an offer to option your prose document, one of your deal points can be that you have to be given the first crack at the script. If a publisher therefore makes an offer for your novel, whatever you do, do not allow them to control film dramatisation rights; keep those yourself.

• My final argument for the value of investing time in writing a novel as opposed to working in a bar is that all things being equal, by which I mean if your prose writing ability is as good as your scriptwriting ability, novels and therefore novelists tend to make more money than scripts or scriptwriters. This may not be true in Hollywood where silly money can be paid for a script but it is true in Europe, particularly in Britain. You need to remember that in Britain we make about a 100 movies a year but we publish about 100,000 books a year.

Selling script or shooting script?

Yesterday I had one of those conversations with a client and then with his producer that made me wonder about the manipulative nature of what agents do. Not necessarily bad manipulation, more like the golden oil that ensures that your car starts smoothly.

The writer is anxious the producer won’t understand what he is trying to do in this draft of the script. The producer has issues with the draft. I sit somewhere between them.

I recommend that we get two reports on the script, one from an established script analyst, the other from someone with some knowledge of the history and geography of the location.

I propose that when we have these reports we can all be more dispassionate about deciding how to go forward. What I want is not a script ready to shoot, but a script that will attract a director and start attracting finance. Do they want the same?

My guess is that this is not the script that the writer wants to be shot.

So is there a useful distinction to be made between a selling script and a shooting script? I think so: after all until the director has had some input we cannot have a shooting script. Next week will be interesting.

It is not what you say it is how you say it….

I had an interesting meeting with Jen Segaio (sp) this week as she is helping organise Mark Travis’ influential workshop, The Solo Workshop, in the UK later in the year. In this Mark works with a limited number of writers on a project of theirs: in essence it is to find out what the story is really about. http://www.markwtravis.com/

This reminds me of the dictum I have always loved: what happens in a story is not what the story is really about. Failure to realize that almost always leads to the blight on most spec scripts especially by inexperienced writers: the stories are very thin; they lack substance; they lack universality; they lack depth.

It also made me think about what two iconic writers, Agatha Christie and Stephanie Meyer (couldn’t be further apart), have so much in common. Do they, you ask? Well, what they have in common is that neither writes particularly well, in the sense that they do not use language like poets; their style is not ‘authorial’; they do not really have an unforgettable voice.

They also have in common that they are read and watched all over the world, by huge audiences.

What they really have in common is their accessible storytelling. The way the story is told is perhaps more important than the actual story being told. Accessibility is the key. Where is this taught or studied? Please let me know if you know.