Fieldwork: Book reviews & writing progress
Plus a quick look at Plottr, character progress, and what's in store for March.
Last month, I shared my plan for 2024 and I’m happy to say, as February draws to a close, that I’ve largely stuck to it.
Transcripts
I finished reading through and annotating all the interview transcripts, many of which I’d not looked at since I did the interviews. It was a good reminder of what this project is all about — translating those experiences into a cohesive and, hopefully, funny story.
Reading
I’ve also finished reading three of the books I’d hoped to get through:
Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, Keith Johnstone
Originally published in 1971, this book really show its age via some very dated language and concepts. If you can set that aside, though, there are some useful insights into improv and storytelling in general. I wrote about one, the idea that creativity is about radical acceptance of your first ideas, over on Why Aren’t I Writing?, and will not doubt pull out some more to consider in depth. But I wouldn’t recommend this book if you’re not into improv, not least because the final chapter on Masks and Trance (and he doesn’t mean Faithless or Paul Oakenfold) is utterly, utterly batshit.
The Complete Comedy Writer: Make your sitcom, stand-up, screenplay, sketches and stories 62% funnier, Dave Cohen
Published more recently, in 2022, this is a much better book! Cohen gets deep in the weeds of sitcoms, explaining the form in detail and providing a framework for thinking about comedy writing. Lots of actionable advice — I took so many notes that half the book is now orange. It does get a little repetitive, but I’ll forgive that because everything he repeats is important and needs hammering into my brain.
Build A Script: Writing Comedy For The British Market, Dave Cohen
This book is based on the course I’ll be doing in April, so this is the written equivalent of doing a recce. I have a good idea of what will be asked of me over the eight weeks of the course and am now looking forward to it even more.
Characters
Sitcom characters are often stereotypes — heightened versions of aspects of ourselves — so I’ve been working on a collection of character ideas that I can develop over coming weeks. I’ve yet to do a full character development worksheet for any of them, but I am starting to get hints of what drives a couple of them, what their intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are, what their goals are. I have a lot, lot more work to do on this though.
Writing
I was really taken by this post by
about screenwriter David Milch’s writing habits, and particularly the assignment he gives his students to write nothing but dialogue between two voices for at least 20 minutes a day. I did that for a few days, based on the events described in one of the interviews, and ended up with 23 pages of dialogue!Sitcom writer James Cary explains on
that “Each scene of your sitcom is like a sketch. It’s somewhere between ten seconds and four minutes long with one or two simple ideas at the heart of it. And each scene, like a good sketch, should have some kind of punchline at the end.”So I read through my dialogue and marked up the exposition, the joke set-ups and punchlines, and any callbacks (ie references to earlier set-ups or jokes) to see how well my stream of consciousness was doing in terms of funny. I was quite surprised to see that I had 29 jokes in 23 pages, although I’m not going to make promises on the quality of those jokes.
My next task is to cut down the dialogue to the very bare minimum and turn it into scenes with descriptions, action and all the other furniture that makes a script a script. And then do it again with two different characters and another situation.
Tech
I have also started using Plottr, an app that is designed to help with managing character descriptions, locations, plots, etc. It is so far pretty easy to use — I’ve just plunged in and started putting together character descriptions and a brief timeline for the vignette I’m working on.
I’m not yet sure if it’s going to be helpful, or if it’s just another form of yak shaving. I don’t think I’ll find out until I start using it in anger, which will happen as I get deeper into this project.
What’s next?
March will be more of the same: More character development, more dialogue, more jokes, more reading. And perhaps more playing with Plottr and seeing whether it really is useful or not.