Fieldwork: Learning a whole new way of thinking

Drama is about withholding information. Sitcom is about being obvious.

One of the interesting things about switching genre from urban fantasy to sitcom is that I’m having to learn a whole new vocabulary and way of thinking about my writing. It’s not easy. But thankfully I have found some great teachers. 

Dave Cohen’s Build a Script course taught me how to do the pre-writing required to make the actual writing bit a lot easier. All that honing of the concept, the situation, the characters, developing plot ideas, writing an outline and then actually getting a script together and incorporating a couple of rounds of notes gave me a solid framework for how to put a sitcom together. There was lots in there that I can repeat as necessary, whether for the next episode of Fieldwork or for a new project altogether. (And why, yes, as it happens, I have started having a ridiculous number of ideas for sitcoms.) 

From Joel Morris’s book, Be Funny Or Die I learnt about the shape of a joke. What are its components? How do you fit them together? What pitfalls do I need to look out for? As with all things, it’s easier to see the shape of someone else’s jokes than to write them yourself, but understanding what you’re aiming for helps. 

And from my improv lessons with Seamus Allen I have learnt how to get out of my head and into the moment, as well as the importance of small talk and how to stop trying to be clever (because the cleverer you try to be, the harder you’ll fall on your arse.) Improv has without doubt freed up my writing brain, as well as improving my ability to think on my feet. 

So all was going very well until I got stuck again. Great. 

I do have, as you may be aware, a deep and intimate relationship with writer’s block. Often it just comes out of nowhere. There I am, happily pottering away, writing a thing, and then bam, no more words are available in my head. 

404 not found. 

++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.

Sometimes I can bull my way through it, sometimes the malaise just magically lifts. This time, I wrote a post about how important it is to focus on what’s directly in front of you rather than fretting about things that are far away in the distance and, just like that, my block was gone. 

My brain is weird. 

So I’m feeling quite excited about Fieldwork again. And, despite the intense workload in the run-up to Ada Lovelace Day on 8 October, I’m finding the time and energy to work on it. This is all helped by another course and another book. 

Jill Chamberlain’s The Nutshell Technique

The other day, a fellow writer mentioned script consultant Jill Chamberlain’s The Nutshell Technique to me and shared the PDF she provides on her website for analysing scripts. (See the main Word Count newsletter for more useful links, including a few explanatory videos.) 

I haven’t finished reading the book yet — see above note about Ada Lovelace Day — but I did spend a couple of evenings watching, rewatching and analysing the pilot of Ghosts US, an American sitcom that I think is significantly funnier than its British progenitor. 

Let me back up a bit. 

One of the problems I’ve been having with the Fieldwork pilot is it just feels all wrong. There are what I think might be funny bits in there, but it just doesn’t really hang together very well. And the ending’s rubbish. That’s fine. This is just how writing works. 

Now, I could throw it away and work on a different story, and at some point I probably will. But I don’t want to do that until I can say, confidently, that I understand what is wrong and why it can’t be saved. 

The Nutshell Technique is giving me some of those answers. 

Chamberlain has identified eight key story elements that need to be present for a story to work, and she present them all in a simple, single page graphic. More importantly, she talks about how these elements relate to one another. That’s something I really haven’t see anyone else really do in quite the same way. 

So, in order to get a bit of practice identifying these elements, I watched the Ghosts US pilot several times to see if I could fill in the Nutshell sheet for Sam/Jay and the ghosts, (in the pilot they act almost as a single entity). 

It’s a fascinating process and it’s really helping me to see how these elements connect with one another and what’s missing from my own script. 

One thing I did add myself, though, is a “But” section. In sitcoms, characters might seem to get what they want, but there’s always a catch at the end. So the Ghosts’ house is saved from the developers… but Sam and Jay intend to turn it into a BnB anyway. Sam gets the big house she wants… but it’s full of ghosts and she can see them.

Joel Morris’s Writers’ Room course

If I’ve learnt one thing over the last year, is that’s a good course moves my writing on far faster than muddling along on my own. So I was really excited to see Joel Morris spin up a new course for comedy writers, The Writers’ Room. Although based on his book, Be Funny Or Die, I’m learning a lot that I didn’t get from the book, and of course it’s great to be able to grill Joel directly. 

We’re two weeks into the five week course and the two key take aways for me so far are: 

1. Write for your tribe. Comedy is tribal and you can’t be all things to all people, so pick the group you’re writing for, the people who will have the ‘code book’ to understand your jokes, and write for them. I’m writing for a very specific group – ecologists, academics and adjacent groups – and it was rather nice to have someone say, “Yes, it’s fine to have a specific audience in mind”. It was very freeing.

2. You can’t be too obvious. Drama is all about concealing information and letting it out in dribs and drabs. Comedy is all about being really on the nose and letting the audience follow along in a delightful cloud of familiarity. As a drama writer, it’s really, really hard to let go of that urge to conceal and start being blatant. 

And this is where Joel’s and Jill’s work comes together very nicely. Analysing Ghosts US emphasised to me just how obvious ‘obvious’ is. 

The Ghosts literally start introducing themselves by name and, as with the UK version, they are all dressed stereotypically, telling us who they are the instant we lay eyes on them. They literally outline the world they inhabit, saying “We’re ghosts” and explain that they are trapped here, unable to move on to the afterlife. And Sam literally points out her own character flaw when she explains how her husband Jay views her: “He thinks I’m a little impulsive”. 

I was really quite surprised when I realised how very obvious the writers were being, because it doesn’t feel obvious. It doesn’t feel like you’re being slapped around the face with a blatant wet haddock. It just sort of slides by, part of the furniture, part of our expectations of how comedy works. 

I’m now itching to get back to Fieldwork, to be able to spend more time working out my own nutshells and figuring how how to make this thing properly hang together. Just another five weeks and I’ll be through ALD, have had my holiday in the US, and will be back at my desk, eager to thrash this thing into shape.