Lesson 2
Okay, fine: new week, new lesson. Hope you’re doing well. In the first lesson I asked you to watch TV and read books. If you did this faithfully, you are now one of two things: (1) Ready for the next lesson. (2) Divorced, your life partner is off looking for someone who doesn’t just sit in front of the TV or lies reading a book.
Silly attempt at humour, sorry. I’m just talking BS, let’s get on with this week’s lesson:
Story and character
Okay, fine, I know you want to know what a script for television looks like, what the format is. In this lesson I show the first page of an episode from the popular soap Binnelanders, one that I wrote myself. Just so you can get an idea, okay? Explaining the format nicely is going to take a whole lesson and I promise it’s going to happen, just not this week. Trust me, it helps you zilch if you know what the monster looks like but not how to feed it. And the beast is hungry, brother and sister. Once he has tasted, he is still looking and he is looking for story, story, always story.
Story and character. In my head they are sometimes the same thing: Character is story. Why do I say that? Let me explain by means of an example from a famous monster that to everyone’s surprise (especially mine) became the King Kong of Afrikaans television drama: Eagles. In case you’ve been in a coma for the last few decades, here’s a brief overview of the plot of Arende : During the Boer War, Sloet Steenkamp is sentenced to death as a Cape rebel, but he is pardoned before the firing squad and banished to the island of Sint Helena for life. Unlike the Boers who are already held there in a camp, Sloet knows he is not going home after the war. He must stay here until his death. He therefore makes dangerous attempts to escape, to the great annoyance of the captain in charge of the English soldiers guarding the camp: James Kerwin. There are many branches to the tree of Eagles , the duel between Sloet Steenkamp and James Kerwin is the trunk.
The idea of Arende, the spark, originated with legendary director Dirk de Villiers. I wrote Ou Grote for him, a West Coast drama, I also play the sunburned detective in the series. While we are working on it at Saldanha Bay, Dirk and I walk along the beach one lunchtime and discuss the scene that should be shot just after dinner. It’s a Monday. Dirk wants to add something to what I wrote, something funny because the mother in the story is played by the brilliant Shaleen Surtie-Richards at the beginning of her TV career. And she is very funny. While we are discussing this, Dirk suddenly angrily changes the conversation: “Everyone was bloody late again this morning, it’s every bloody Monday’s story. You have to write something that I can shoot on a bloody island, far from nothing, the bloody players shouldn’t be able to go home every bloody weekend.”
An island far from nothing. The crumb. It’s still not a whole meal for the monster, but I now have the first, all-important crumb. I just need the main dish, the story.
And then I thought of my grandfather Jan. After his death at 94, a newspaper published a photo of him, under the headline: HERO OF THE PEOPLE’S WAR RESTS NOW.
Grandfather Jan was captured in the battle of the one-or-other river and the Khakies exiled him to the camp on Sint Helena. First I start to think of Grandpa Jan as a person: A real old grainy head, but with a soft heart. If he wants to do something, he’s going to do it as a wragtag. In the process, he just doesn’t want to hurt anyone else.
I know, that’s basically a summary of Sloet Steenkamp’s character.
Then I thought further about Grandpa Jan, his streaks, the clumsiness he started. He and his old mate who was with him in the war, Uncle Stefaans, a retired schoolmaster. Uncle Stefaans once ran away from a dangerous situation together with Grandpa Jan, but Uncle Stefaans’ horse stepped into an aardvark hole and the uncle fell unconscious. Because the enemy was on the attack quickly, and Grandpa Jan’s water bottle was empty, he did what he could in a desperate moment and peed Uncle Stefaans soaking wet to wake him up.
That’s right, Uncle Stefaans then became PJ Buys, Sloet Steenkamp’s best friend. I then remember some anecdotes they told about the camp on Sint Helena, how the camp’s English officer organized a sports day and Grandpa Jan signed up for the mile, he came fifth and then he just kept running; the English guards were only able to catch him when he tried to board a ship in Sint Helena’s harbour.
And there, born of character, of people , I then had the story that happens on an island, far from nothing.
Character is story. I was lucky with Arende because I had such a grandfather and uncle. With other series it wasn’t always easy, I had to build characters from pieces of real people. An aunt’s quirks, a cousin’s way of repeating everything, my mother’s way of blinking every now and then… put it together and it’s a character.
My dear mother, by the way, was the inspiration for a character in Konings, my drama series about a supermarket empire. Anna-Mart van der Merwe played the character, excellent, I sometimes felt like I was sitting and watching my mother busy in the kitchen. My mother followed all my stories slavishly, and after this week’s episode of Konings I could just tell she was going to call and talk about the specific character in particular: “Vaderland, son, Anna-Mart plays her beautifully, but where do you get the funny person?”
Oh, would some power the gift give us to see ourselves as others see us! have the Scots
poet Robert Burns wrote. My wonderful mother never clicked. And I was airy to tell her.
Character is story, yes, but story must of course be further developed. Which sometimes works for me – not always, remember everything about the creative process depends on the wind and weather, and I’m not kidding: if it keeps raining outside your writing space, I bet you there’s going to be a rainstorm in your story before long erupt And it’s not wrong, it belongs that way, I partially believe like the American fantasy writer Ray Bradbury that writing should be organic: “I get up in the morning, get some coffee, go to my computer, climb on a high cliff, dive off and build my own wings on the way down.”
That’s nicely put and I agree, but only partially. For example, if you are writing about a road builder, you better do your research on road construction work properly. The chances are good that during the research you will come across events and situations that will end up in your story. Your brain must always be persuaded to take in such “gifts from the gods” (CF Beyers-Boshoff, author of radio hits such as Dans van die flamink ) and process them especially for your story.
Character and story, the two pillars on which a television series is built. But it’s not a television series until the people at the TV channel buy it. To get there, and I only wish you strength, the process everywhere goes more or less as follows:
You finish writing one episode completely. It should come with you when you send your submission to the channel. It will be in Afrikaans if you write in our language, and that is usually not a problem.
This is a problem if you have to do the following parts of your submission, practically all the TV channels require it:
Tag line. One , extremely three lines that convey the core, the heart, of your story . I always try to think what the poster would say if it was a movie : Meet Benjamin. He falls for his girlfriend’s mom. He’s a little worried about his future (The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman in the lead role ). Enasdit Arende was : The enemy closes himself behind barbed wire on an island, but Sloet Steenkamp is a fox who knows how to dig tunnels.
Synopsis. A short but clear summary of your story, no more than a paragraph. In English, always English. Probably because there are so many English speakers working at the TV channels.
Characters. A list of your main characters. Name of character, followed by a short character description. Piece of old sneaker, it’s not rocket science, just keep it short.
Episodes. A brief summary of the main events of each episode. Only the cardinally important events. Remember the people at TV channels really get hundreds of submissions, if you get long winded they will stop reading.
And that’s all.
Then add that first episode of yours, and send everything as a submission to the head of drama of the relevant TV channel. After about 90 days, the drama chief is going to say no and break your heart, or you’re going to be invited to pitch your story . This means you have to show up at the relevant channel’s head office, stand up in front of a committee (I’ve had to do this in front of 12 heads of a bunch of departments, they always look like Da Vinci’s Last Supper painter to me and I sometimes wonder who is this turn Judas) and you must tell them your story with passion and conviction. Really, that’s how it works. You must imagine you are Marius Weyers or Sandra Prinsloo and convey your story to the committee like a real actor. If you manage to sell your story to them, they will offer you a development contract. This means they are going to pay you per episode to finish writing the series. You’re going to have to overwrite sometimes, trust me. And I only wish you strength and good mental health. Personally, I feel TV channels, in general, make the submission process unnecessarily complicated. I know good writers who can’t get TV work; they are shy and withdrawn in nature, the baptism of fire of a pitch is too severe for them. And so stories that could have been successful on television are lost.
Orraait, fine, luckily it’s not my job to get your story sold. I only hope I can, through these chats, give you enough ammunition to emerge victorious from the battle of the pitch. I would like to see your story on television!
Next time we’ll talk about dialogue. How characters should talk. It’s bloody harder than you think.