![]() Each story line you create, ideally and not always directly, should link back to the title subliminally asserting the message you want to give an audience. The title can give you stability, a bedrock of theme, story, tone and character. I refer to the title as The Narrative Through Line. I use titles a lot in my writer-development, to help structure your series. The title of the series you have created is very important to my mind. I encourage my writers to take each key character and work out their jump off point, their midpoint and their landing point in the series arc and then once they have complied a journey for each character, it is only then we consider the Series Arc as a whole. And here you will need to consider firstly the Subtext of your character – what is their hidden belief, need, fear, want, that drives them and then control the Text – or plot – generated by this inner drive and so we see text and subtext working together to create plot. This is where you will be working out the Character Arc. In this blog about Subtext I mention another of her series Last Tango in Halifax which followed her first rule of writing – start from character and build up.īefore you get to the point of being able to write your Series Outline, you must first consider each individual character and the journey they will go on through your series. ![]() Her Tour de Force is, in my opinion, Happy Valley Currently the last series of which, everyone I know in my tv bubble is neck deep into. If you need examples of how story is generated and story lines are stretched across a number of episodes – or to put it another way – creating Narrative Stretch – look at anything Sally Wainwright has written in recent years. This is the interplay between Text and Subtext and what forms the bedrock of all great television series. The action or Text on screen is derived from the Subtext of the character in question. The Pilot will frame the series as a whole – it will introduce the main concepts, themes, characters and story lines for future episodes, so in my book at least, you will need to work out the Series arc first, in order for you to know where the all important Pilot lands and subsequent episodes begin.Īll plot comes from Character. Writing the Series Arc and understanding how the story pans out across the series length is important to ascertain before you drill into the Pilot. I always work on this with my writers before we get to the Pilot stage. The writing of the Treatment will have made you answer the questions that a Producer will ultimately ask – most notably, what is the main arc of the story, who are the characters and where is it set. The Treatment will be the first thing you need to nail before you move on structurally, with the rest of your tv development. The industry requires you to not only be creative and come up with great series stories to satisfy our increasing hunger for a brilliant series drama, but they also require you to be succinct, clear and to give them easy to read, easy to assimilate documents that break down and present the DNA of your television series idea. ![]() To write Pilots for Television well, you can read my blog here. This is a format I have developed over years of working on production and with writers now via my script consultancy. ![]() To write Treatments for Television well, you can read my blog here. My work with writers via my script consultancy is all about developing the idea and then writing the documents that show the creative and commercial aspects of the story to their best advantage. Writers need to know how to write Treatments, Series Outlines and how to produce a cracking Pilot episode. So, is there a set way? Some would say no, but I would say writing stories for Television Drama requires a certain process. You need to be both creative but also present your series narrative commercially so that Producers find it easy to read and it answers their key questions about the series as a whole. How to write a TV series outline is a tricky skill to get right. ![]()
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