WHAT THIS BOOK CAN DO FOR YOU
Half of the information in this book assists you in mastering your genre and the other half is about what that mastering can do for you.
This book assists you —
as you begin a new writing project.
while you are writing a project.
when you feel your text just isn’t ready or perfect.
when you have been shopping your material and receiving consistent rejections.In this book, the term “texts” is used to describe material any given writer may be writing. When the term “texts” is used, I could be referring to any (or all) of the following types of writing:
manuscripts for novels and novellas
manuscripts for short story and poetry anthologies
manuscripts for flash and fan fiction
memoirs
nonfiction manuscripts
screenplays for feature-length and short theatrical movies
screenplays for movies made for television
screenplays and bibles for television series
screenplays for web seriesIdeally, it is advantageous to read the book in its entirety before you begin writing for the transmedia marketplace because of the information you’ll discover through research and your new awareness of the overall scope of the market.
Should you feel that you only want to zero in on improving a project that is already started, then utilizing the information in the first two sections of the book — KNOW WHAT HAS BEEN DONE BEFORE and ARMING YOURSELF — will give you the necessary background information needed to assist you in reworking what you have completed so far. If you have been out shopping your work and receiving rejection after rejection, then begin with the final section GETTING YOUR WORK OUT INTO THE WORLD, make your adjustments in keeping with the information therein, and go back out into the marketplace.
Here are some specific ways to best utilize the material in this book:
If you’re a first-time writer, Sections One and Two, Chapters 1 through 11 are best for you to read to understand this complex marketplace of transmedia entertainment.
If you’ve had some success with short stories or an indie film, but you are stuck on how to keep the momentum going and you want to complete a full-fledged book/novel or script, it would be advantageous for you to read Section Two, Chapters 5 through 11.
If you are on deadline and must deliver a draft yesterday, however you’re not sure how to make sure your manuscript/script is in tip-top shape, then access Chapters 8, 9, and 10 to zero in on the specific background of your genre.
If you want to adapt your own work via a manuscript or script, Chapter 8 is for you — I’d suggest reading that chapter twice and playing with the Toolkit Sandbox items.
If you have had difficulty pitching your project and you’ve received little interest from potential buyers, then Section Three, Chapters 12, 13, and 14 are for you.
If you are a veteran writer looking to identify new horizons for your genre and what your genre will look like 1 to 3 years out, Chapters 8, 9, and 10 are certain to provide insight and fuel for your fire.
If you think your work is not ready, yet you’re not certain why that may be, be sure to read Chapter 12 and learn how to defend your work.The information available within this book can be applied to your current project and future writing projects again and again. If you write within a specific genre and have established your brand within that genre, then you can continue to build upon the research you gather for each project you are composing — even if you want to produce a hybrid or sub-genre within genres, or switch to a new genre. The book is an evergreen manual to be used throughout your writing career.
BEING A FANBOY VS. BEING A FAN OF MEDIA
The transmedia landscape did not exist when I was coming up in the entertainment industry and academia. It is because of my experience of working within the traditional hallways of a broadcast network and processing media in a pre-fragmented world that I am able to present this method of writing to you. If I hadn’t been taught in the old-school ways, I would not be able to share this insight with you. That said, I am not so much a fan of any of the specific genres discussed in this book as I am a fan of the way these genres and media in general has been and continues to be delivered and consumed. I’m not the fanboy (those dedicated individuals who are fanatic fans of say, a certain franchise like Star Wars or the Twilight series), but I am the coach for fanboys everywhere as they write and distribute their material via 21st century transmedia platforms. You are no longer just writing a stand-alone novel or feature film. Within a transmedia marketplace your idea can be repurposed, rebroadcast, and/or refurbished for each of the various transmedia platforms. You need to think beyond the original incarnation of your project and the sooner you realize this, the easier it is going to be for you to be profitable within this arena.
UNIQUELY QUALIFIED
When I arrived in Hollywood in the early ‘80s I did not have a specific goal, I only knew that I wanted to be involved in the behind-the-scenes goings-on of the entertainment industry. When I took my first job as an assistant in the Dramatic Development department at ABC in Century City, I didn’t even know what “Dramatic Development” meant.
I learned quickly and I embraced skills that have benefitted me throughout my entire career, skills that have adapted well throughout the changes in culture and technology and followed me as I added academic experience on to my industry credits. It seems that I was at the right place, right time at many points in my career, such as:
From Dramatic Development at ABC, I moved to ABC Motion Pictures, a unique production company that was a branch of a broadcast network.
A year after joining Viacom Enterprises, Viacom mogul Sumner Redstone acquired MTV, Showtime, Nickelodeon, VH-1 and Ha! (a precursor to Comedy Central), and so there I was acquiring content (known as “material” at the time) for all of these cable networks.
From there I worked my way up the ladder to Vice President of a cable network — a new, emerging channel called Romance Classics. The network would be renamed as WE: Women’s Entertainment.
Within my academic career, I have also found myself at the beginning of new ventures. I was called upon to co-develop the broadcasting curriculum at a digital academic start-up in Chicago, and completed the project on deadline and with much success.
My most recent “first” has been to serve as managing editor of the newly established annual literary journal, the Midwest Prairie Review, for a Midwest writing community.So, from TV networks to film acquisition, to digital academies and literary journals, the basic development skills of identifying strong characters, solid storylines, and meaningful, believable dialogue, along with commercial appeal that would resonate to many — all the elements that I learned in those first few months on my first Hollywood desk — have now been utilized throughout the past three decades and continue to be used daily. I feel I am uniquely qualified to guide you on your writing journey as you master your genre.
TOOLKIT SANDBOX
This book’s discussions and exercises are designed for you to have fun with your material and the research you’ll conduct. Each chapter ending provides you with a TOOLKIT SANDBOX filled with items to pique your imagination. The minute you are working on a project and you are not having fun you should stop right there and ask why. By reading about these examples, answering the questions, and doing the exercises, you’ll develop skills to write authentic texts.
In each chapter within the first two sections you’ll find CASE STUDIES that illustrate the subject of that chapter in depth. Next, you’ll find the section QUESTIONING WITH THE WRITER’S ADVANTAGE. Answer these questions after you have read and processed each chapter. They are designed to walk you through the material to ensure that you are addressing all the concepts. They are also present so you can have a little fun with the subject matter on hand. And finally, you’ll see a chapter Exercise. These exercises are designe
d to assist you in your own unique understanding of the concepts discussed as you apply these concepts to your writing and your writing life.
Take control of your writing destiny — beginning now!
TO BEGIN
As you read these first chapters, here are some general questions you should be asking:
Do you know the genre in which you wish to work?
Do you know your story?
Do you know (in general) what your material will bring to the marketplace?These questions are addressed at length and in detail within the upcoming chapters. For now, just let the answers to these questions simmer in your mind. Then state your genre, write out a basic one- or two-sentence description of your story (this will later be perfected as your “logline”), and most importantly, write your mission statement in regard to the material you are writing.
In other words, state why you want to bring this idea into the world.
Welcome to The Writer’s Advantage. Let’s move onward toward creating original and authentic texts for the 21st century marketplace!
SECTION ONE
KNOW WHAT HAS BEEN DONE BEFORE
CHAPTER 1
A BRIEF INQUIRY INTO MASS AND NOT-SO-MASS MEDIA
To begin to understand learning how to write with The Writer’s Advantage, let’s start with a brief discussion about “mass communication,” aka “mass media.” The “mass” part of mass media has changed, and what we once knew as “mass” media has become a collection of niche media with many more options available to consumers. In the 21st century there exists a very different mass media — so different that it’s really now a “not-so-mass” media.
MEDIA CONSUMPTION
We live in a transmedia universe, meaning we all have opportunities to view content on various levels and screens — and all at one time. I can be watching TV on an actual television set or within my computer screen while texting, listening to music, and composing/editing my own movie at the same time. At any given time we have at our fingertips a multitude of instant media options. This is the environment you are writing within and for. You are vying for attention among humans with short attention spans — a hefty and lofty assignment for sure. How do you get their eyeballs to watch your material? How do you invite the gazes of potentially important consumers amidst all of the participating content competition? I believe that it is important to briefly take a look at where media has been to understand how to write for the transmedia marketplace now. We’ll look at a brief analysis of how different media have been distributed so far.
MOVIES
Every form of media has its own unique history. The movie industry began at the end of the 19th century with shorts, silent films, and newsreels before it found its stride and full-length feature films were produced.
If you wanted to see a movie in the ‘50s you went to your local movie palace, usually a grandiose theater located in the central neighborhood of a metropolitan area. If it was a major city, there would be two or three movie theaters. New titles appeared once a week, making for a limited selection, but still, audiences flocked to each new release. The population had one, maybe two selections to choose from, making it easy to discuss the movie afterwards as there was very little competition. This was clearly an unfragmented scenario leading to a good amount of the public viewing the same movies at relatively the same time throughout the early part of the 20th century through to the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, when multiplex theater centers first appeared on the scene. By “unfragmented” I mean that the consumers had very limited options.
Today we have multiplex theater centers with 20+ screens located in various parts of any given town along with the ability to view a movie on television via broadcast and cable networks and through Netflix, Amazon, and other web outlets. We can also DVR and download movies at any time and purchase them for our own viewing pleasure. It would be very difficult to have to wait an entire week to see a new movie and then have no choice in regard to the type of movie that might be. We are now a fragmented audience — broken off and separated from other consumers.
TELEVISION
The television industry began in the middle of the 20th century and — following the formatting of radio programming before it — offered fifteen-minute, half-hour, and hour programs usually sponsored for the entire length of the show by one sponsor. It was not until the advertising industry and the broadcast networks began their marriage of approximately four to six ads per half hour/hour that the industry found the operating pattern that we know today. That programming schedule found its way to basic cable networks when they came on the scene in the ‘80s. The premium cable networks (HBO, Showtime) found they could operate quite well on subscriber monies alone and did not need advertising to interrupt their content.
Within the television industry, there were four commercial networks born in the late 1940s: NBC, CBS, ABC — all off-shoots of established radio companies — and the DuMont Network, the first television-only network. Aside from theatrical movie releases, audiences now had a choice of drama, comedy, variety, news, documentary, talk and game shows to watch at home… and still the audience was unfragmented.
UNFRAGMENTED AUDIENCES
One of the best examples of an unfragmented society watching an event on television is the reporting of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November, 1963. The footage from newsman Walter Cronkite’s teary-eyed delivery of the fatal information that day has become legendary within the history of television. There would be a much happier event just three months later — on February 9, 1964 — that would bring nearly the entire U.S. viewing population together: the arrival of the Beatles in America and their performance on The Ed Sullivan Show (1948–1971).
Here is one of the quintessential examples of audience unfragmentation. Over half of the entire American viewing public watched the Beatles that evening. CBS had the majority of the nation’s eyeballs and, to this day, those who experienced that event will talk about it as if it were a mythic appearance. The basic contextual meaning of what the Beatles were about was immediately understood. A new generation embraced them, the older generation didn’t understand them — but both generations knew who John, Paul, George, and Ringo were.
LIMITED AMOUNT OF TEXTS
This type of programming — where the majority of viewers can recall where they were at the moment it happened — continues through the Golden Age of Television programming [I Love Lucy (1951-57), The Andy Griffith Show (1960-68), The Twilight Zone (1959-64), etc.] and with all of the NASA lift-offs at that time. The finite television network universe had its run until the early ‘80s and the advent of basic cable programming. Until the early ‘80s there is only a limited amount of texts for writers to comprehend, write about, spin off of and parody. The Carol Burnett Show (1967–78), a well-loved variety hour, would often parody famous films such as Gone With The Wind (1939) and popular soap operas and disaster movies of the time. The reason Burnett’s parody style was so successful was because the audience had collectively viewed and knew well the original content being parodied. It is nearly impossible for an audience to understand a parody unless they know the original text. This is the secret of the success of Saturday Night Live (1975–present), as the show exists purely to parody current series, events, and personalities. The point here is that because of the limited viewing audience, it was fairly easy for writers to find fodder to write about. These limited choices begin to end in the early ‘80s with the birth of basic cable programming.
THE CABLE REVOLUTION
August 1, 1981, is considered by many to be the birth of basic cable. The first video aired on MTV, The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” began the cable revolution and soon after nearly a hundred new networks were available to view and purchase by American households. Sure, networks like CNN, Lifetime, and HBO existed in the ’70s, but they didn’t have the distribution power then. When cable providers such as Time Warner, Cablevi
sion, and Cox Communication, to name a few (depending on where you were located in the country), came into power, that is when the American public had a much larger menu of entertainment options from which to choose.
FRAGMENTED VIEWERSHIP
The fragmentation of viewers begins here. Now you no longer have a large amount of viewers going out to movie theaters and watching the same movie, watching the same network at the same time, or even watching in real-time (the time the series is scheduled on the network’s programming schedule) because audiences began taping programming (via video cassette recorders) to watch when it was convenient for them personally. This shift made it more difficult for writers of movies and television/cable shows to relate to all viewers. Soon, a 500-network universe is available to American viewers. The fraction of viewers watching one event/series/network becomes smaller and smaller. With the expanding popularity of personal computers and the “world wide web” in the early to mid ’90s, the attention span of a typical content viewer becomes even more fragmented due to the many options available at any time.
WEB CHANNELS
Along with the dawn of the new century, all basic and premium cable networks have ancillary content available on their websites. An example of this might be additional interactive content for children who enjoy the viewing of Dora the Explorer (2000–present) on Nickelodeon and then want to visit the website for more information about that episode, and in some cases watch additional episodes of the show. Likewise for all of the lifestyle programs such as house hunting and remodeling homes on a network like HGTV. Their website would soon include video vignettes regarding household projects, the same for The Food Network, etc.
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