The Craft & Trade: October 2007 Archives

Keep his
identity secret!(Ed. Note: There’s nothing good to report on the state of our contract—and by “good” I mean both “interesting” and “positive”—and as I’m pretty busy shooting the movie, I’m turning the blog over to a long-time friend and pro writer, Jacob Sager Weinstein, who most notably wrote for The Dennis Miller Show back when it aired on HBO, and is now an author. Sadly, unlike Dennis, Jacob’s a big lefty, but I still love him. Here’s his essay on his experiences working as a cross-platform writer.)

I know what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking, “I really don’t want to know about the serious labor unrest that could change the face of the entertainment industry. No, what I really want to know is, how does writing a radio script for the BBC compare to co-writing a series of tongue-in-cheek government manuals?”

Well, today is your lucky day, If you’re reading this, it means Craig has finally decided that paying attention to his stewardship of a gazillion-dollar movie franchise is maybe a little more important than posting updates on his blog, and he’s temporarily handed over the reigns of the Artful Writer to his buddies.

Unlike some of the other guest posters he’s lined up, I can’t tell you how to be phenomenally successful in any one kind of writing. But while I’ve never been a Ted-Elliott-level success in any single field, I’ve nonetheless managed to break into a lot of them. I’ve been a staff writer for a TV show, I’ve sold a film script, I’ve co-authored three published books, I’ve been on staff at a (non-fiction) magazine, and I’ve done some freelaance writing for various humor magazines as well. So if I can’t tell you a vast amount about any one of those fields, I can, at least, tell you a little about each.

Having tried my hand in all these fields, the one general rule I’ve been able to deduce is this:

The more money is at stake, the more nervous people get. And the more nervous people get, the less they trust the writer.

With that in mind, let’s move from most-money-at-stake to least.

Film: There’s no way I could come up with any broad insight about film that Craig and/or Ted haven’t already expressed with vastly more eloquence and authority. But speaking from a strictly personal point of view, the most significant thing about film is how slow a process it is, and how much of it is out of the writer’s hands. In 2004, I was hired to do three drafts of a screenplay adaptation. From the time I signed the contract to the time I handed in my third draft, the process took about two years—an average of eight months per draft. Yet it only takes me about one month to write a draft. So what was going on the other seven months? Well, I was off working on other projects while the producer got notes from the director, got notes from his financiers, thought about his own notes, and arranged a time when he, the director and I could all sit down and discuss everybody’s notes. Plus he was no doubt doing other producery stuff, like chasing down financing.

On the one hand, that two-year process gave us all a lot of time to think about how to best turn the novel into a workable screenplay. On the other hand,it could also have given everybody time for a lot of second-guessing and over-thinking. (Fortunately, from the very beginning, there’s been a respected and strong-willed director attached to the project, so I haven’t had to contend with a dozen competing artistic visions.)

TV: The good news is, TV is much faster than film.

The bad news is, TV is much faster than film.

It’s good news because you can write something on Wednesday and have it shot on Thursday. And it’s good news because the fast turnaround gives non-writers much less time to muck around with your work. Oh, you will get rewritten, but it will be by the showrunner—a fellow writer, and quite possibly the guy who created the show in the first place. And you’ll probably be in the room when it happens. All this makes you feel much more like a driving force, and much less like a tiny cog in a vast machine.

But the speed of TV is bad news because it gives you much less time for polishing. If you write something on Wednesday and shoot it on Thursday, and then on Friday think of a much funnier punchline… Well, it’s too damn late. You’re already on to the next episode.

Radio: This one takes some explanation. In America, radio is reserved for talk shows and for music. But the UK still makes sitcoms and dramas—what we in the US would call “old-time radio shows.”

As you can imagine, it’s much cheaper to make a radio show than a TV show. So the BBC often uses its radio stations as a lab to try out ideas that may or may not become TV shows. This video clip, for example, comes from a TV show called “That Mitchell & Webb Look,” which started off as a radio show called “That Mitchell & Webb Sound.”

I wish this path existed in the US—a radio show is much cheaper to produce than a TV show, which makes everybody less nervous about taking creative risks. The radio show I sold to the BBC, for example, was a Dickensian sitcom, which is not the kind of thing you regularly see on primetime. I originally pitched it as a TV series, but it was quirky enough that they wanted to try it as a radio show, first. That wasn’t what I had hoped for when I pitched to them—but it was far better than an outright pass.

The other advantage of radio is that all special effects cost the same amount, which means my pilot script could feature start with an instance of spontaneous human combustion and end with an avalanche, all without breaking the bank.

The disadvantage of radio? There’s just not much money in it. I had to work just as hard crafting the characters and storylines of my radio pilot as I would have for a TV pilot, but for much less money.

Books: We’re now at the very bottom of the cost spectrum. Publishers don’t have to hire actors or sound technicians, and they don’t have to pay sets. They also don’t have to pay writers too much; generally speaking, an advance of about $10,000 would be fairly typical for an unknown first-time book author. That’s a fraction of WGA minimum for a script sale.

And you’re writing for a smaller audience, too. There are currently more than 80,000 copies of my books in print, which is a decent number for a print author. Yet it’s about a tenth of the viewership figures of the lowest-rated primetime TV show.

So why write books?

Because with much less money at stake, people get much less nervous. And that makes them much more willing to trust the writer.

Which means that once you sell your book, you’ll have all the time you need to write and revise it, with very little interference. (In fact, some authors feel they don’t get enough interference; Maxwell Perkins-style hands-on editor are rare nowadays.) You don’t have to navigate notes from a half-dozen different sources. You have no fear of being replaced, no need to delete your best scenes because you couldn’t get a location. Your ideas and your words just ride a river of paper straight into your readers’ brains.

And there’s one other thing that must make writing books look especially attractive to my fellow Guild members nowadays:

You never have to go on strike.