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03/11/2008: If You Want To Do It At All, Do It All


I haven't quite finished with William's letter from last time. He has more to ask. First off:

...I'm wondering about other ways to slowly get into the TV-writing business. For instance, I'm wondering if I could dabble in creating comic books and if that would help me get into the industry. Or will getting some short stories published help me as well? Or should I just put all of my energy into writing my glorious spec?

Do it all! Your spec pilots can't really do you a ton a good right now, since you're just now starting college and presumably won't be ready to jump to L.A. during the next four years, but they're good practice. You can also write writing short films if that interests you, maybe with an eye toward filming them and putting them on the internet. You can write plays, too. And, yeah, short stories. Comic books are great as well -- why not? (I think I'll devote an entry soon to comic book scripts, in fact.) When I was in college, I sold a greeting card idea for fifty bucks and considered it an important early sale. It's all good.

As I said in a recent post, (Jan. 25), becoming an established writer outside of the TV field can actually be one of the faster ways into the business. In fact, short stories and plays can actually be used as television spec scripts right now, so it's not even a matter of making a choice. What's the worst that happens -- you become a famous novelist by mistake? Might as well!

William also asks a very specific question about scriptcraft:

... if I wanted to write a scene with the camera facing down on somebody from an aerial shot, how would I do that? Would it be--

AERIAL ANGLE looking down on CHESSIE

--for example?

Yep, that would work. These things tend to be much more flexible than you might think. You could also say:

OVERHEAD ANGLE looking down on CHESSIE

Or

LOOKING DOWN FROM OVERHEAD on CHESSIE

Or you don't even have to break it out as an indicated shot. You could stay in stage directions with something like:

And suddenly our POV changes and we're OVERHEAD, looking straight down on CHESSIE.

Bottom line: your objective is to be clear more than it is to do something right. Hope this helps!

Lunch: An avocado, lettuce and tomato sandwich. The bacon looked chancy.