This seems like a long one, but I’m barely scratching the surface. And this is such a crucial stage. I go into much more detail on my comprehensive video course, Writing Your Sitcom. Why not at least check it out?
You’ve got an idea for a sitcom that you’re excited about, or at least happy with. You’ve got your characters. What do you need now? You need to write a pilot script to send out because you’re a rookie writer and no-one’s going to pay you to write a script. Sorry.
Every stage of this game is proving yourself as a writer, and showing your idea isn’t a one-off. So as well as a pilot script, you need to show that the series has legs with five one-paragraph outlines for what happens in shows 2-6. Commissioners and producers like to see that a show can have longevity, rather than being ‘six episodes and we’re done’. I know there were only twelve episodes of Fawlty Towers. But that doesn’t mean only having twelve episodes is a good idea. It’s just what happened. I’m sure a third and fourth series would have been excellent. But given it was written by a divorcing John Cleese and Connie Booth, I suspect they weren’t worth the bother.
In the first instance, at least, you have to show that your idea will easily run to one series of six. In which case, I would try and come up with ten usable storylines – and pick the six that you think serve your show best and feel most fresh and original. Write your pilot based on the one that’s most exciting, interesting and useful. I’m not a great believer in pilot episodes with lots of backstory. More on that later.
To get those ten usable storylines, you should be thinking of pages and pages of ideas, maybe 50-100 ideas, each of which involve a key character or two doing something interesting.
As many of these storylines as possible should be active stories that centre around your key character. She decides to throw away old junk or take up a new hobby or confront someone about issue. This will drive you along further and faster than passive stories that start from outside the show and ‘happen to’ your characters, like being selected for jury duty or winning the lottery. From that, you’ll get some juicy stories that feel fruitful, fresh and funny.
50-100 ideas may sound like a lot to some. But let’s remember these are just one-line ideas. Not fully formed stories with a beginning, middle and end. These are ideas like:
Geoff decides to sell his dreadful garden produce at a farmer’s market.
Sally finally confronts her hairdresser with the news that she is really bad at cutting hair .
That’s it. Nothing more needed at this stage. You don’t need to work out which vegetables Geoff has been growing. You don’t need to know if Sally confronts her hairdresser at the beginning of the show – or spends the whole episode building up to it. We just want quick ideas.
Jumping Off
This long list is about establishing jumping off points. Ideas that trigger stories. Think about your characters. What do they like to do? What are they trying to achieve? Who
is the bane of their life? What do they do all day? And is there a story or moment for each stage or moment in that day? Let’s try an exercise now:
Think about one of your main characters and keep asking questions about who they are, what they’re doing and, crucially, why they do them. As you do this, it’s worth distinguishing between regular habits, which demonstrate and define character, and variations or interruptions from the norm, which are stories or plots.
Geoff is asleep in bed.
What does he normally wear in bed? Is there a funny reason for that (based around a traumatic event that happened one night – he used to wear pajamas until...)? What kind of linen does he have? Does he always have something on the bedside table, under the pillow or under the bed? A book? A weapon? Why? This is the sort of thing that will help define character.
Geoff wakes up.
What wakes him up? An alarm clock. The bin men? Is he likely to oversleep? Is he a deep sleeper? Was he up all night last night? Why? Is that normal for him? Is he waking up unusually early for some reason? Is this a story? Has something downstairs gone bang or collapsed? Is there a burglar?
Geoff gets up.
Shower, bath or excessive deodorant? Is he normally in a hurry or does he usually have a slow morning routine? Why does he have to do things differently this morning? Has his bathroom plumbing stopped working? When did it go wrong? Why? Was he trying to fix it himself? Is there something unsavoury in his bath?
Geoff gets dressed.
What does he wear to work? Is his employer happy about that? Is he making a statement? Why can't he wear that today? Has he ruined his regular outfit and had to improvise? What does he wear instead? How does he normally buy his clothes? Catalogue? Online? Has he had a bad experience of this? Why?
Geoff has breakfast.
Porridge? Cereal? Toast? Is there a new regime for the mornings? Is he going to meditate instead? Meditate then fresh fruit? How does he do his grocery shopping? Supermarket? Online? Farmers’ Markets? If he's unhappy with something, would he take it back and complain? What would happen in that case? Or does he have a run in with a delivery guy?
Geoff goes to work.
How does he get there? He drives? How does your character feel about cars? How did he acquire this car? Did he get ripped off? Why? Was it MOTed and serviced? Is he driving around uninsured and untaxed without realising? Does he get the bus? Who else is on the bus? Is he finally going to confront that guy he always sits opposite? Why today? Who does he turn out to be?
You get the idea. Keep going. All day. It will take you all day – but this is essential work. You can’t make an omelette without going out and getting eggs in the first place. These stories are your raw material. You need lots of them.
Trigger Happy
This ‘Day in the Life’ trick is unlikely to produce many scintillating or original stories, but here’s what it might do: Trigger stories in your own life – or the lives of people you know or lived with. Something about being woken in the night, bad plumbing, a bizarre online shopping experience, a party that got weird, complaining at a supermarket, having your car fixed or driving it illegally unaware (or fully aware, you rebel). And these stories are a much better starting point for plots, because these feel like stories that are fresh, real and could happen – because they did happen. They have detail in them that is hard to make up. But for now, make a long list of these stories. One or two lines. Keep moving.
Seinfeld
Watch the Seinfeld DVDs. Many episodes have an ‘Inside Look’ with the writer and it seems that almost every story in the show is based on something that happened to one of the writers or someone they know personally. Loads of George stories happened to Larry David.
One of the most memorable is when George quits a good job in rage, realises his mistake and goes back in the next day pretending he didn't quit. Larry David did this in real life. You probably wouldn't suggest that for a story unless you'd done it yourself. Comedy, even artificial, overlit audience sitcom, is about truth. True characters, true motivations, true moments. That's the stuff you’re after. Interesting stories with the ring of truth.
Alarm Bells
True stories are your friend. Even if they’re not very interesting. Whenever you have to do something you really don’t want to do, think about it as a possible story. A few years ago, I was thinking about this when fiddling with a burglar alarm and I knew I’d end up screaming at it. I didn’t want to do this because my then three-year-old daughter would probably have joined in with the screaming. And my little baby too. It was going to be awful. In the end, it wasn’t but it was potentially very useful. Let me explain.
I lived in a rented house with a burglar alarm that I didn’t understand, with a manual written by someone who’d clearly never met another person. We’d lived in the house for 18 months, and had never switched the alarm on, partly because, having kids, we were normally at home. But the main reason was the instructions were so annoying, unclear and counter-intuitive, they made me both drowsy and furious simultaneously.
But then it started to bleep occasionally because one of the batteries was flat. So I was forced to take on the task of getting my head around it. And decided that while I was minding the kids when my wife went out for a couple of hours, I’d try and do it then. It was a terrible plan to begin with. I can’t be with my kids (then aged three and one) and achieve anything else at the same time. But let’s pass over this mild delusion. That’s not the point.
The point is this: I embraced this situation in the hope that jokes and comic situations would be forthcoming. I was going to learn the ins and outs of burglar alams. Or at least one burglar alarm. This may come in handy one day. Maybe along these lines:
INT. WRITERS ROOM. DAY. 11.39AM
Eight writers are sitting around a large table in an airless, windowless room. There is a problem with this week's script. The story isn’t working. Our main character has to break into his own house for some hilarious but subtlety contrived reason – but it’s not as funny as it could be. After a third coffee, Sitcomgeek’s brain finally kicks in and he speaks.
Sitcomgeek: What about the burglar alarm?
Writer 2: They don’t have one.
Sitcomgeek: Maybe they should have one.
Writer 3: Burglar alarms? Are they funny?
Sitcomgeek: They are if they’re very loud. And you don’t know how they work and you have to learn very quickly.
Writer 3: But you just punch in the code, surely? Everyone knows their code. Who’s not going to know their code?
Sitcomgeek: I don’t know my code.
Writer 3: How could you not know your code?
Sitcomgeek: I never use mine. I rent my house. It was fitted before we moved in. We never speak to the landlord. It’s a hassle to figure out. And we have kids and I mostly work from home, so we’re always in.
Writer 2: How does that help?
Sitcomgeek: I had to change the battery on one of the movement sensors once. While I was minding the kids. Disaster. Kind of. It could have been catastrophic, though. It would have been if I’d had to have worked it out at night. Under pressure. Like our hero would have to.
Silence.
Writer 2: That could work.
Sitcomgeek: Do you have any idea how hard those things are to work if you don’t know what you’re doing? The manuals are written by droids and pretty much everything triggers the alarm. It’s a nightmare.
Writer 4: When did this happen?
Sitcomgeek: Ages ago. I remember thinking at the time that this experience could be useful. It was the same day that I went to the gym, got out of the pool and discovered someone had walked off with my towel and key. But that’s another story...
If you’re a sitcom writer, the upside of personal catastrophe is that you might be able to use it. Embrace that. Everything you do, the everyday trials of life, create material. Write them down. Here’s my general advice:
Go to gigs you might not like.
Agree to do stuff that you might hate.
Run errands for people. And go the long way round. Be curious. Ask one more question.
In short, live life. And remember it.
And if possible, write it down. Take a picture on your phone. Keep a list – a huge long, ever-growing list - that you can refer back to when the stories aren’t flowing. They might trigger something. And alarm bells might start to ring. Except in a good way.
Flick through a newspaper or some magazines. Sit in a café and observe people. (Avoid turning on the TV or surfing the web – as you’ll end up watching rubbish daytime TV or looking at Facebook, which probably won’t help).
Go back through ideas you’ve had for other shows, even if they’re completely different from the show you’re now thinking about. There may be a movie idea you had five years ago but has come to nothing. It could be an episode of a sitcom.
Research
If your character has a specific job, read trade magazines and websites for that industry. Even better – in fact, I’d say this is essential - talk to people who do that job in person. They think what they do is either boring or obvious, so they won’t even know what to say. Ask them lots of questions about their best day at work, their worst day, a typical day. When they say something odd, question them about it. Often the thing that they think is the most boring is the thing you find most interesting. Visit where they work if you can. Do whatever it takes to generate triggers for stories that ring true.
A Side-Note about the Perils of Research
Bluestone 42 starts in a Chinook helicopter (one of those massive ones with two rotor blades). The scene is just soldiers talking. Or, more accurately, yelling. And in some ways, this scene illustrates all the joys and nightmares of research.
Why are they in a Chinook? Well, it looks great, obviously – especially with the set that Harry Banks’ creative cohorts put together. A Chinook is an exciting place to start a TV comedy – especially a British one from the stuffy old BBC. It’s the first scene of the first episode and it screams loud and clear that this is not a show set in a laundrette or a failing video store. We have a bunch of soldiers on their way to a mission.
But that’s not the only reason. Richard and I put them in a Chinook because people we talked to say they used Chinooks in Afghanistan all the time to get around – because the roads were, unsurprisingly, quite dangerous. So for accuracy, we wanted them in a Chinook.
The problem was that this conflicted with a different piece of military advice we had which ran along these line: ‘If you’re doing a TV show about soldiers there’s only one thing that really annoys soldiers (apart from BBC’s attempt to get an actor to wear a beret in a convincing way). The most annoying thing is having people talking to each other in a Chinook. Those things are so loud, you really can’t hear a thing.’ Ah.
It was the opening scene of the opening episode and we already had a dilemma. We wanted to show the team on their way to an operation but if we did it in the mastiff (the big personnel carrier) we’d be going against one bit of advice that ‘they fly everywhere’. And if we did it in a Chinook, we’d have them talking - when in reality, they don’t even bother trying. Either way, we might look like we hadn’t done our research.
We re-set the scene in a Mastiff before putting it back into a Chinook and having them yell at each other. We went backwards and forwards a few times, but in the end we decided we were making a comedy for the public – who will believe you can yell at each other in a Chinook, even when you can’t. Once we’d committed to that, we were also told ‘they don’t fly everywhere because they don’t have enough choppers, or it’s not practical.’ It was too late. We were going to shoot in a helicopter. (Oh yes, and they tend not to call them ‘choppers’ but ‘helis’. No idea why.)
We screened the first episode to some soldiers. Afterwards, I said “I know that people don’t talk in a Chinook. Sorry about that”, and one Ammunition Technical Officer replied, “I know you can’t really hear, but it never stops me trying.” You can’t win.
Where Were We?
Oh yes. Keep going on these story ideas for as long as you can. Then stop. Come back to it. Stop again. Do a bit more. Come back to it again. Soon, you should have a list of 50-100 ideas. Maybe more. You now have plenty of eggs with which to make your omelette. We’ll work out how to pick which eggs to use in the next chapter, and hopefully come up with a better metaphor in the process. Or stop using metaphors altogether.
Find out much more, with many more worked-through examples so you’re generating loads of really strong ideas (as well as plenty of lousy ones, but you don’t know that at this stage). Writing Your Sitcom is available to work through in your own time right now.
Generating Story Ideas