Writing the TV Drama Series 3rd Edition: How to Succeed as a Professional Writer in TV (26 page)

For example, an outline scene might say something like “While Jane clings to the ledge, frozen in fear, desperately trying to convince Portia to release Sally, Portia taunts Jane to climb out to get her.” The simplified beat might say “Jane on ledge — Portia: “Come get her.” It’s an internal cue used for planning though it might not make sense to an outside reader.

This brings us to your outline. As you know from
Chapter Two
, an outline is a step in the professional development process. It’s a contracted stage of writing that generates “story by” credit and pays almost as much as a whole script. If you have a contract with “cut-offs,” you might get no further if the outline doesn’t work; but a successful outline means your option for a first draft will be “picked up” (you’ll go ahead to write the script).

What if no producer or payments are involved, though? Un-fun though outlines may be, you really should write one, even if you’re working alone on your spec. I advise: Don’t travel without a road map — hour episodes are too complex, especially if you’re juggling multiple storylines. If you’re on your own, though, hand-written notes might be enough, and initially you could get away with being vague, noting only what you need to accomplish for the characters within a scene. Personally, I’ve found that the time it takes to type a complete outline and weigh each beat saves me oodles of time writing because I’m not worrying about being lost or redundant, and it saves me from writing scenes I’ll have to delete because they don’t move the story ahead. To me, grief-avoidance is worth the effort.

HOW TO WRITE YOUR OUTLINE

Nobody launches into an outline at number one and trucks on to number 28 in a straight line. Instead, start with the tent-poles I mentioned and fill in the grid until it’s complete enough to write the scenes as an outline. Or you could begin with index cards, as many writers do. Cards are wonderful because they’re not threatening. If you don’t like an idea, toss it out. If your order doesn’t make sense, re-arrange the cards. And you can “download” your thoughts in any order, which lets you reach creatively to scenes you’d enjoy whether or not they fit next in the script.

One technique is to choose different color cards for each story. If you do all the beats of the yellow story, then the green one, then the blue, and assemble them, you’ll see at a glance whether you’ve lost your green story in the second act, and whether the blue is paying off in Act Four or if it petered out in Act Three (which might be okay, but at least you’ll have a chance to ask the question).

Remember, in a multiple-story show, the stories are probably uneven. So, if you’ll have around 28 scenes in an hour episode, and your “A” story predominates, it might have as many as 12 to 16 beats; the “B” could have 8 to 12 beats or so, and the “C” has whatever is left, as few as 3 or 4 beats, up to maybe 8. Of course, if you’re dealing with vignette writing, with seven or eight parallel stories, you might have a whole little tale in a single beat, though that’s not typical of most dramas. Understand, I’m not suggesting exact numbers of scenes that should go with any story. I’m illustrating the kind of planning you might do.

Let’s say you start with your “A” story. Make cards for every scene that tells your story. Count them. If you’ve got 40 cards you have a problem. Maybe the cards are fragments rather than whole scenes. See if you can condense many of them together until you have 10 to 20 cards. Or maybe your story doesn’t fit in an episode. What portion of this story is the essential conflict that could work within an hour? Or maybe you’re rambling, including backstory or side incidents that aren’t part of the forward motion. Whatever doctoring you need to do, get that “A” story down to size.

What if your beats are too few? You can trouble-shoot by asking the opposite questions. Maybe you have combined a few scenes on one card. See if you can separate them into two-minute blocks, and then see if this story becomes the right size. Of maybe you don’t have enough material for a major story. If it truly doesn’t have enough meat, then you might look for a larger story to “marry” with it. Or maybe it does have fine potential but you haven’t yet spelled out the moments that would unveil it on screen. Again, see if doctoring will get you to a useable scale.

After you do that with one story, go to the next and the next. Some scenes from different stories may play at the same time and place, so you’ll actually get more mileage out of your screen time than you’d have if each story was a free-standing little movie. And once you weave them, you’ll discover interesting contrasts, where telling one story enables you to ellipse time in another, or a scene from “A” resonates thematically with “B” in an interesting way. Putting the stories together can lead to discoveries, so you want to be flexible here.

After your individual stories are filled out, and you’ve ball-parked which beats occur at the act breaks, read the cards through with the feeling of watching on screen. Don’t kid yourself. If you’re bored, the audience will be too. But they’re only index cards — change anything you want at this stage.

Once your basic structure is in hand, write it out. Here is a cheat-sheet for how a standard outline looks:

“
Title of Episode”

TEASER

Summarize the teaser in a few lines, usually with more description or tone than the beats that follow. In shows where the teaser is a single scene it’s one paragraph.

— However, complex ensemble series may begin several stories in the teaser and break them into separate blocks.

— Teasers with two or three (or more) distinct scenes may have two or three (or more) segments like this.

ACT ONE

1. EXT. LOCATION — TIME

The beats of the outline are numbered, beginning with #1 in each act, and headed by slug lines, as in a script. Keep them short like “log lines” for the scenes.

2. INT. LOCATION — TIME

Each step is a scene with dramatic structure. Every scene has a protagonist (a character who drives the scene), a goal, and an antagonist or opposition to the goal, even in scenes one minute long, even where conflict is subtle.

3. INT. SAME LOCATION — LATER

These are dramatic scenes, not production scenes. In other words, beats are determined by the content, not merely by time or location. If in the same location you have a new conflict it is a new outline beat.

— However, in a show where multiple stories converge at a single moment, and you use a fragment of a different arc, it may be easier to follow if you note it after the scene.

4. EXT./INT. A FEW LOCATIONS — DAY TO NIGHT

A single dramatic scene may cover several places, beginning when characters meet, continuing with them in and out of a car, concluding elsewhere. In this case use an inclusive slug line, as above, though you wouldn’t do it in a script.

5. INT. SQUAD ROOM — DAY

An example: Jane arrives saying a mantra about her fear of heights just as Sally accepts a dare from Pedi to try on the stolen shoes if they meet her on the roof right now.

6. 7. See if you can fit one Act per page. The hour outline would then run around 4 pages total. However, every series has its own pace and style.

If you use that outline form to specify locations and times for each scene, it will help you be real about what’s actually on screen. Here’s an example of an
incorrect
beat in place of #5 on the sample:

INT. SQUAD ROOM — DAY

Jane says the mantra to herself while driving to work and stopping to feed the pigeons. While petting one, then releasing it, she thinks about how scared she would be to fly like the pigeons. Meanwhile Sally gets a call from Pedi, who is trying on shoes on the roof, inviting Sally and Jane to join her up there, where we can see her dancing in high heels. Sally worries whether Jane would be able to go up there too. When Jane enters, saying her mantra, Sally tells her, etc.…

That’s awful, right? That example is like one of those children’s games where kids try to pick out all the things that don’t belong in a picture. Before I tell you the answers, find the mistakes, yourself.

Okay, ready?

•  Engage each scene as close as possible to its conflict or problem. Here, Jane meanders while screen time ticks away before we get to the purpose of this beat.

•  Animal wrangling is expensive and consumes production time, so it’s an example of the kind of material TV series spend for only when essential to the drama.

•  If you’re inside the squad room, you can’t see Jane outdoors. All that would be exterior (EXT.) action. In an outline, you can use an inclusive slug line, but if you really mean to place the dramatic conflict in the squad room, omit the driving.

•  Jane’s fear of flying is not visible on screen. Don’t put it in the outline if you can’t put it in the script. If you do intend to put it in the script, though, indicate how you’ll show it.

•  A similar problem recurs with visualizing Pedi on the roof. Sure, there should be a place in the script to establish Pedi. If this is it, be clear in the outline — and give it all it’s due as a meaningful location — or omit it from this scene and allow Pedi’s dare to be heard on the phone or communicated in Sally’s dialogue.

Once you delineate your usable beats, you can easily turn your index cards into an outline a producer (or you) could track. Or maybe not so easily. When you move from hand-written notes to a typed structure you’ll probably realize some facts slipped by: You’ve indicated a scene is in daytime. Oh, it can’t be day because the scenes before and after are at night. But it doesn’t make sense for the characters to be at work at night. Okay, should you move this scene elsewhere? Or can the other scenes occur in the day? If so, how does that change the tension? What day of the story is this anyway?

That’s just a hint at the reality-check awaiting you, but better to resolve it in the outline than after you’ve written 50 pages!

ALTERNATE OUTLINE FORMS

Not every show, or every writer, does outlines so detailed or specific. Some prefer to plan the characters’ arcs but leave the actions (where, when, and how the characters play out their conflicts) to whoever writes the scripts.

I once wrote for
A Year in the Life
, which began as a beautiful “limited series” that followed a Seattle family in the aftermath of the mother’s death. The short run proved so successful that the family drama was picked up for a full season. The showrunners, Josh Brand and John Falsey (who also created
Northern Exposure
and
I’ll Fly Away
), had planned complete character arcs for the season, and since this was very much a serial, all episodes were like puzzle pieces that had to fit a larger picture.

The first outline Brand and Falsey handed me was unlike anything I’d encountered at the time. It followed the psychological and emotional progress in the hour, but suggested only a little that could be termed “plot” or even incidents. Yet, it was an important point in the season. In the “A” story, the family patriarch, widowed for less than a year, proposes marriage to an independent woman who has a fulfilling life as a doctor and no need to marry. The “B” story dealt with the teenage granddaughter who is arrested for driving without a license. In the “C,” the newly married daughter-in-law tries to get a first job; and she and her husband have a fight. So it’s not as if the hour was devoid of content, but the outline I was presented had hardly any guidance about how to relay these stories.

For instance, one beat said something like: “Coming into the kitchen after arguing with his wife, the son wants to confide in his father, but can’t. The father’s proposal has just been turned down, and he’d like to tell his son, but he can’t confide either. During the scene neither man ever says what is on his mind, though they comfort each other.” That was all.

I loved the challenge, but before I could write that scene I had to create a mini-outline for myself. In this case, the scene was set in the family kitchen late at night, each man surprised to find the other there, not wanting to show vulnerability. I kept the dialogue entirely “off the nose” (indirect), each man emphasizing his strength for the other, while they comforted themselves with food. No chase scenes or car crashes or anything larger than two people at a table, but the delicate moment did have tension because the audience knew what was being withheld. I tell you, this is the most difficult kind of scene to write because you have no external jeopardy to lean on; the conflict comes entirely from character, and much of the opposition is internal.

Because it was so difficult, I made notes for the turning points within this tiny scene — the optimal place to enter, when to take the milk from the fridge, exactly when the son would ask what happened with the proposal, the moment he’d let his dad off the hook by mentioning football tickets, the spot where the father would sigh and pointedly reveal nothing, and so forth. It helped me to have that map even though no one else saw it.

Many writers use outlines somewhere between the specific, detailed “cheat sheet” and the loose emotional agenda from
A Year in the Life
. On
ER
, for example, the outlines didn’t tend to have numbers, but each step was a fully realized scene with dramatic structure. That’s especially impressive when you consider how short the scenes on
ER
may be. Here is a fragment of an actual
ER
outline of the Emmy-winning episode “Love’s Labor Lost” written by Lance Gentile. I’m grateful to Warner Brothers, Executive Producer John Wells, and writer-producer Lance Gentile for permission to print it here.

Episode 18

TEASER 7:00 AM

— ROSS and GREENE toss a football outside the ambulance bay. An ambulance races past, a familiar face in the window. “Was that Benton?” Ross goes long for a pass as a car careens down the street and a bloody gang member is tossed out into the street.

— Ross, Greene and HATHAWAY race the gang member down the trauma hallway, passing HALEH, who takes us into Trauma One, where she finds a distraught BENTON. The old lady with the broken hip is MAE BENTON, his mother.

— In Trauma Two, CARTER and JARVIK join the heroic resuscitation of the trauma victim. Carter witnesses Greene at the top of his game, impressed.