Craptastic
On the bright side, I finished draft one. Yay. On the other side, that dark gloomy worse than death side, it’s one, first class, grade A pile of crap.
Let me start before I got this incredibly sour taste in my mouth.
I got out my legal pad that has done nothing, but get my engine going so far. I look over the work I’ve already done. Characters, log line, all that and give myself a hearty pat on the back. Brilliance is just waiting in the wings. Networks, watch out. I’m ready for the bidding war (I’ve done this enough times that I should have known this was a bad sign). Things start well enough. I start brainstorming ideas___the stuff I usually do in this part of the process no matter what I’m writing. I write down everything I can think of: plot ideas, dialogue, character descriptions, anything really. And this is an ongoing process, not just a one time thing. Before I started writing the novel I wrote, I collected one year’s worth of these noodlings and when I went to organize them, I realized I had an outline for a trilogy. I’m pretty happy with the ideas I have so far. In going over them, I realize that there are sure to be some people, maybe even some organizations, that will absolutely hate my show. I think this is a good sign.
The next step, I take a couple days and read some pilots of shows I really like, Californication and Scrubs to name a couple. I’m trying to get a hold of structure. I want to see what a successful pilot did. I came away with this: establish the main character and his/her suffering (yes even, no, especially in a comedy), establish the tone of the show and meet the other main characters (by the way if you think I’m missing anything here, PLEASE TELL ME). So I’m feeling pretty good.
I write an outline for the pilot episode pretty easily, although looking back I think I was a little too confident and made it too loose. I understand the main character so well everything else seemed like it should just fall into place (I think that was one mistake).
Then I tackle actually writing it.
Here is where my confidence and creativity screeched to a halt. The best way I can describe it is I felt like I was trying to write using a jackhammer. Nothing was seamless. Everything felt disjointed. Most of the time I was forcing myself to do it. Just write it! I would scream to myself.
I read through the pathetic thing in front of me that I dare to call a pilot episode and this is what I see: the characters are stereotypes; the tone I seemed to be going for was offensive, spinning from slapstick comedy to dark drama in twenty pages. That’s RIGHT! It’s only twenty pages. And I wrote the one man in the show like he’s the biggest idiot ever conceived. Almost every line is trite and contrived.
I’m not being hard on myself. Believe me, it’s all true. It really seems like I was going for an idea, not really looking at the thing going on. Everything I have wanted to do I have done the opposite.
But then I remembered.
I remembered the wonderful thing called “shitty first drafts” and breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Every writing guru I have ever read or heard speak talks about them.
“The first draft equals barfing on the page.” an author at a writing conference once said.
“Write it wrong,” the moderator of my writing group said.
“Now practically even better news than the era of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them,” Anne Lamott said in Bird by Bird.
The first draft just has to exist, I tell myself. It’s job. And I ’wrote it wrong.’ I for sure barfed all over those pages and it most definitely is a piece of shit. So I have to be on the right track. Right?
