Fieldwork: First draft done!
It took some 400 hours of prep to get here. What did that prep look like?
The first draft of the half hour TV sitcom pilot version of Fieldwork is complete and has been sent to Dave for feedback. I’m both eager to know what he thinks and hoping that he totally forgets to get back to me so that I can pretend that it’s the little slice of perfection that it feels like at the moment.
Sometimes first drafts feel like an overgrown old garden with nettles and brambles everywhere that need to be hacked back before you can even think about planting some flowers. Rarely, they feel like the garden of a stately house, beautifully arranged with every bed weeded and every hedge trimmed. Of course, they stop feeling like that as soon as you start looking at them closely but for a while the illusion persists.
I think this draft came up roses because of all the prep time I put in. Indeed, it took around 400 hours of work to get to the point where I could spend 8 hours 41 minutes actually writing the draft.
I track all my hours so that I know how I’m splitting my time between projects. I am perhaps not quite as rigorous about how I categorise my time, so lots gets dumped in the ‘admin’ bucket, but this is roughly how it looks:
Admin: 120 hours. Mostly things like email, doing the ethics application, meetings with my collaborators, social media, general organisational stuff.
Pre-writing: 93 hours. Character development, developing the situation, relationship planning, plots, treatments, outlines. Includes the course with Dave.
Interviews: 50 hours. Arranging, carrying out and analysing interviews with ecologists.
Training: 37 hours. Doing courses, reading books, attending webinars, etc.
Conferences: 12 hours. This was this year’s Big Comedy Conference. I didn’t count last year’s for some reason.
Newsletter: 10 hours. Writing newsletters and promoting them on social media.
Research: 9 hours. Reading up on stuff.
Funding: 1 hour. This’ll become a much bigger number in due course.
That comes to 332 hours, but I know there was quite a bit of watching TV and reading books specifically for this project which haven’t made it in to the stats, largely because I still can’t quite bring myself to note any of that down as ‘work’. The 40 or more hours I spent at improv class isn’t in the stats either, even though I only started doing it to help with my writing. Nor was the day at last year’s Big Comedy Conference.
When everything is added up, it’s more like 400 hours, or about 57 seven-hour days, of preparation work in order to write for 8 hours and 41 minutes. Obviously, there will be a lot more time spent on writing and rewriting. I’ll have to take Dave’s feedback into account, write second, third, fourth versions, as well as turn it into a short film and podcast version.
And when that’s done, there’ll be more research to do so that I can develop more episodes, write more scripts, pay a script editor to help me refine them, produce, cast and then record the podcast, and then do promotion.
How much prep time is enough?
Although it sounds like a lot, I don’t think that 400 hours is an inordinate amount of time on prep — it’s probably less than I spent prepping my shelved pandemic novel. I spent two years doing background research for that, and most of that was a waste of time because by the time I really got into writing, the science and our experience of pandemics had changed so much. And I didn’t do nearly enough pre-writing, so the actually writing process was much, much harder. It was the same with Tag, my urban fantasy. I’d be spending less time rewriting that if I’d spent more time doing proper pre-writing!
So I think the balance here is pretty good. 400 hours sounds like a lot, but I’m so happy with the quality of the first draft I produced that I’ll certainly do the same depth of prep for my next project (though, I hope, without the ethics application).
I’m not saying that E1 of Fieldwork is some amazing potential BAFTA winner or anything, but I am delighted with it as a first draft and I do think it’s got legs. One of my collaborators has already read it, and her response was “It's great. Soooo painful haha”, so I know I’ve hit at least some of the right notes. From here on in, it’s about refining it, making it funnier, and finding a way to take this project on to the next stage.
Prep and pre-writing as an argument for Universal Basic Income
If ever there was an argument for easier access to grants that fund creative work, and for Universal Basic Income (UBI), this is it. The pressure on writers to just churn stuff out has never been greater. Some self-published authors, particularly in the romance genre, are scheduling just two months to prep and write a book because that’s what their readers demand. If those authors had UBI, they’d be able to take things at their own pace, instead of feeling that they’ll lose momentum and thus income if they don’t produce a several books per year.
I’ve been lucky that my time on Fieldwork has been funded by a bit of leftover grant money from the International Collaboration on Mycorrhizal Ecological Traits, which was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (Grant Number: NE/S008543/1). I wouldn’t have been able to do it otherwise.
I suggested the idea of writing a sitcom as a piece of outreach work to my colleagues back in June 2022, and I started working on it properly in November 2022. Over the last 18 months, I’ve averaged 22 hours a month, which is about an hour per business day. I could happily have done more but, even with funding, I’ve had to do other work alongside it and sometimes those projects have had to take priority. Much as I’d love to, I can’t devote even half my time to writing.
I will soon start searching for other sources of money to keep the project going. The next phase will stop being about my time and start being about hiring in expertise and talent so that we can make this podcast a reality. That would be much easier to do if we had UBI.
Ultimately, though, if we want a rich and varied cultural landscape, we need to find a way to support writers and other creatives to do the kind of deep work I’ve been able to do, thanks to NERC. Without that money, Fieldwork would still just be an idea.
Without further funding, it’ll stay just a script.
Congratulations, Suw! Your breakdown on the prep work was fabulous.