Getting into a Writers' Room

And preparing for the job you actually want

They say you should dress for the job you want, not the job you have. There’s some truth in that. It’s all about mindset.

The question is: what do you want?

If you want to write sitcoms for television, you need to think like a sitcom writer. You need to learn how to write episodes of a sitcom, rather than beavering away on one script that is the pilot for one idea.

The Problem with Pilots

The problem with writing pilot scripts is that you’re not writing a typical episode. You have to establish the characters and the world. I always recommend you try to make your pilot episode as ‘typical’ as possible, showing the producer or commissioner or audience what every future episode is going to be like. But these days, you often need to have some kind of inciting incident, setting up a story arc.

(The audience don’t actually want this. They just want a funny show. But that seems to be the world we live in at the moment.)

You can become so focused on making the one pilot script work, you fail to prepare for the desired outcome of a pilot script: a TV series.

If you spend six months making a wedding cake for your website, which is perfect and wonderful and gets you lots of work as wedding cake maker, you will get bookings. Great. But you will have to learn how to make a wedding cake in a couple of weeks, not six months.

Let’s say you are successful in pitching your sitcom with a script that’s taken you eighteen months. Your series is greenlit. Great! Now, do it again. Five times. In four months. That’s when we start shooting.

This is a nice problem to have. But are you up to the challenge?

If it turns out that you’re not, other writers may be brought in. They are probably more experienced than you. Or are a trusted friend of the producer. All of a sudden, this show that you’ve worked on for decades in your head is now starting to get away from you.

Train for the Job You Want

If you want to train for the job you want, you need to figure out how to turn ideas into workable stories that could become plots, which become episodes of a sitcom.

That kind of thing is very hard to teach in seven hundred words. It’s also hard to explain on a YouTube video.

So I’m proposing to run a writers’ room for a day. It’s going to be great fun and brilliant experience. It will be in person in Central London on Friday 5th September from 12 noon ‘til 7pm.

(If you’re outside the UK, I’ll be running a Zoom Writers’ Room, also in early September.)

I’ll create a sitcom ‘for training purposes’. I’ll give you the premise, the set-up and the characters - in fact, I’ll create those here on this blog. And I’ll give you some sample plots. You turn up at the Writers’ Room with some ideas. You’ll pitch some. I’ll pitch some. We’ll all pitch some. We’ll pick some, work on a few, turn the ideas into plots (it’s called ‘breaking’ stories). And we’ll turn the plots into episodes. Working together for seven hours.

There will be doughnuts. And terrible coffee provided, just to create the realistic effect. The time will fly by. Coming?

Bookings for the in-person session in London on 5th Sept will open next Friday. So get read. Places are strictly limited to TEN, so you’ll need to book early and fast. Stand by!

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