Finish. Send. Regret. Rewrite.

At least that's what Steven Moffat does

You’ve finally written the draft of your sitcom script. You’re thrilled. Elated! Relieved.

But. You know it’s not perfect. You know it could be better.

How do you know what’s wrong with your script?

Here’s a hack that can work almost instantly: send it to someone.

But who?

Doesn’t matter! Because this isn’t about who you send it to. It’s what happens the moment you hit ‘send’. When you hear that email go whoosh, you will immediately regret sending it. You will want to reach into the internet and pull the email out because a problem with the script has instantly become clear.

You’ll open up the latest draft of the script you just sent and howl as you find three errors on the very first page!

As you read on, you will suddenly see the script through the eyes of another human being. You may well start to hate this stupid script.

You will start deleting lines, re-writing them and pulling on threads until the whole thing starts to come apart at the seams. It’s like someone has tipped a spaghetti bolognese all over your desk. Entire scenes collapse. A character with only three lines is deleted entirely.

You will then piece it back together, frantically chasing that email you sent so that you can follow it up with another email which says ‘Read this draft! Not the last one. Sorry.’

That’s the experience of TV legend, Steven Moffat, who is not only the co-creator of Sherlock and the head writer on Doctor Who. He was the creator of sitcoms Coupling, Joking Apart, the much-loved teen comedy-drama Press Gang and the much-unloved teacher sitcom, Chalk. In short, he’s written a lot of scripts.

Dave Cohen and I spoke to Steven back in 2016 for our erstwhile podcast Sitcom Geeks (in which we also asked him about what went wrong with Chalk because, being comedy writers, we are drawn to failure). He talked about the panic of suddenly seeing the flaws in a script the moment it leaves your hands.

So imagine how I feel. I’ve just made my script available to you. Yes! You! The Lab Draft 1.2 is available to anyone joining a live Zoom session on Thursday evening next week. It’s called: Sitcom Script Development (Live!): What’s Not Working (And How I Fix It)

The 90-minute webinar is designed to give you an insight into the process of developing a sitcom. This is the bit of sitcom writing people rarely get to see: figuring out what isn’t working and deciding how to fix it.

It’s pay-what-you-like (minimum £1) simply to keep the session manageable and focused on people who are genuinely interested in this hidden world of sitcom writing. Sign up and you’ll be with me in my office via Zoom figuring out how the heck this I’m going to fix the script that I already regret sending. (And I now regret writing this article. Ah well. Too late now…)