Uncharted

Plus a couple of character tips from Shonda Rhimes

Earlier this week I pitched an adult animated series to a studio that is making some fantastic shows in that space. It’s brand new territory for me, here’s how I got there.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before but I keep a document on my desktop that is a list of every idea I’ve come up with that still holds some level of interest. Most of them are just listed by the title, some don’t have titles yet, I refer to them by concept or nickname. Right now there are roughly thirty ideas on that list.

They’re in every stage of development, from a one-sentence prompt to a few fleshed out paragraphs to zoom-ready pitches to completed specs. I update it all the time with anything new that sparks my curiosity and on the days where I find myself with nothing to write I go back to see if one of them will speak to me. In Rick Rubin’s book he talks about “collecting seeds” for projects. I guess this list is like a seed vault.

In early January I had a general meeting with an exec from this animation studio. He told me three of the buckets they were looking to fill. I was hoping my GODS AND MONSTERS pitch would fall into one of those buckets but it did not. After the meeting I went back to the seed vault and found three that would fit.

I spent a day polishing up a few short paragraphs about those ideas to send to my reps. We had a call to talk about them and picked one that actually fit two of the buckets they were looking for. We set a follow-up meeting with the studio and I jumped in to fleshing out a more detailed pitch with a pilot story, character setup, and talking about the underlying themes.

I didn’t write a fully detailed twenty minute pitch because I wanted to leave more room than usual for creative input. I’ve never written (or pitched) an adult animated series before so there may be things that I don’t even know I need to account for yet.

In live action it seems like there’s less of an appetite right now for deep development. I’ve heard from a number of producers and execs on both the feature and TV side that specs make their job a lot easier. There’s a tangible piece of material they can use to attract actors or directors before bringing to a buyer, all of which increases your odds for a sale. The downside is that the spec has to be, everybody say it with me now, “Undeniable.” With this pitch, it felt like there may be more room to grow and I wanted to learn the ropes along the way.

Lucky for me, it worked! I hit the target and then some, and the studio came on board to develop the pitch and take it out together. “Sold it on the zoom,” as the saying goes. I’m excited about the concept, it would be a longtime dream come true if we get to make it, but I’m even more excited about the opportunity to learn something new.

I also recently had a call with my reps about the live action sci-fi series I’ve been working on, the one based on someone else’s IP. We’re going to start taking some shots on that one soon as well. I don’t know how all of that will be impacted by the potential WGA strike but I’m staying hopeful and will just keep going until it’s time to put pencils down. Different waters, still uncharted.

The other major thing I’ve been working on this past week is my rewrite of the new feature spec, ROAR. I’m focused on a couple of big areas, trying to make the action scenes pop, making sure everybody’s intentions and motivations are clear, and just generally trying to do more with less. Simplifying emotional journeys, grounding mythology, paring down dialogue, boiling things down to their bare essentials.

I’ve been watching a lot of action movies on my meal breaks, everything from modern favorites to Peckinpah, to help inspire and inform how I approach these sequences. I watched THE GETAWAY a few days ago and I love the way it builds tension and keeps upping the ante for Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw. Same with THE OUTFIT, by ROLLING THUNDER director John Flynn.

I finished the big stuff a couple of days ago, now I’m in a new phase I’m calling, “One improvement per page.” I pull up the draft whenever I get a chance, I start on page one, and I try to make at least one improvement per page. That could be a more descriptive action line, a better beat within a scene, a cleaner transition, a better line of dialogue, anything I can do to make this script a little better.

It goes back to the idea that George Saunders talks about, how you have this internal needle that goes from better to worse, and that the process of rewriting is just going line by line, over and over, and making dozens, hundreds, or thousands of little changes that keep pointing toward better, according to your taste. At 103 pages that’s 103 micro-adjustments in every session that hopefully gets it to the best version it can be. And it’s easier to tackle in a day’s work.

Message from the universe in DTLA

Speaking of George Saunders…

He brought up something in his latest office hours edition of his newsletter, about how if he’s really busy he’ll try to pull up his work-in-progress even for an hour or so, to “keep the story alive” in his mind. I realized I’d done that a lot with ROAR over the past month or so.

There were quite a few days, between working on pitches, having family in town, going to the wedding, etc, where I couldn’t devote much time to working on the script. On those nights I would pull it up while I was in bed, getting ready to go to sleep, and I would start on page one and tweak a few lines here and there, or obsess over one couplet of dialogue. When the lane opened up to finish the script I didn’t need any time to ramp up, the story and characters were at the forefront of my mind.

I heard the same thing from Shonda Rhimes recently on her Master Class. She talked about how when she’s writing she’s really rewriting/editing along the way. She’ll write fifteen pages or so and then she can’t move on until those fifteen pages are perfect. Doing it that way “keeps everything fresh” in her head.

Some people have a hard time doing that, they need to do the “comet draft” where they just burn through it as fast as they can and get versions of all the scenes down, even if they’re imperfect or just using placeholder dialogue. I find myself oscillating between both, doing whatever seems to make positive forward progress at the time.

Message from the universe on a sidewalk in Pasadena

Speaking of Shonda Rhimes…

I went back and watched the section of her Master Class on creating memorable characters this week. I thought I would share these two things because I found them so helpful this week when thinking about a new project.

#1) Fill Up the Lives of Your Characters:

She starts with the basic questions. How old are they? What do they do? Where do they live? Income level? Education level? Family? Then she brought up a question that I thought was really helpful — “If they went to therapy, what would be found?”

It reminded me of an idea from John Yorke’s book, about how so much of what drives a character can be traced back to a core wound. Think about Don Draper growing up in a brothel, or Walter White feeling like he got shafted with Grey Matter. A couple of projects ago, I was working on a character whose father had passed away, leaving her with no tangible connection to a culture she loved but that did not love her back. Talking about her core wound gave us a great jumping off point for story and would have paid off dividends in the series.

#2) Have Compassion for Your Characters

Even, and in some cases, especially, for the antagonists. Think about how you would feel if you were standing in their shoes? If you can find the human, emotional motivation for what they’re doing you can keep your “bad guys” from being mustache twirlers.

I was pitching a series in the fall where I brought this up in the pitch, that it was important that even the antagonistic forces have reasonable, rational motivations for what they’re doing, even if they’re morally or ethically questionable. This was one of my fixes for this latest draft of ROAR, making sure that the “bad guys” had points of view that you could understand, even if you couldn’t get behind it. There’s a reason Killmonger was one of my favorite villains of the past ten years of Marvel movies.

One more resource I enjoyed this week…

Peter Gabriel recently wrote the forward for a book called Reverberation: Do Everything Better With Music, by Keith Blanchard. It’s all about how music works on our brains and has sections devoted to things like being more productive, sleeping better, and creativity. (The book is great, you can find it here! Not an affiliate link!)

The section on creativity talked about how one of the things that can get our brains in a more creative gear is listening to music from other cultures. This came as no surprise to me because My Analog Journal YouTube channel is one of my go-tos for writing sessions. I linked to it in one of the very first newsletters but this new book inspired me to pass it on again.

Click this link if you want to travel through space and time via music!

Lastly, in honor of the title of this newsletter, here’s a link to one of my favorite songs by Sara Bareilles, live at The Hollywood Bowl. The first chorus of this version breaks my heart wide open every time, when the audience takes over. It’s such a beautiful reminder of the power of art to bring people together. (Uncharted)