Welcome to the thirty-second of our Creative Challenges. We’re focusing on ways to blend originality with commercial viability and production risk management in our seventh week of Creative Challenges: WriteMovies’ 100-Day Creative Challenge 32 is about TV show ‘formulas’.
Guidance: For the next 20 minutes, use whatever method you like – thoughts and ideas, mind maps, diagrams or sketches, a sample of script, prose, poetry – as you prepare a creative piece, about:
Several kinds of scene that you could include in every episode of a TV series that you’d love to write.
- As you work through this task, you might also consider how this activity relates to TV show ‘formulas’.
- Save or photograph your work as a document called “100DayCC32”. Then reflect on this experience and what it has taught you about you and your writing: what comes naturally to you, which aspects were easy and difficult, and the subjects, angles and attitudes that you like to focus your writing on.
- Share online if you like using the hashtag #100DayCC32 to compare to other people’s experiences and support each other, or submit to our Academy Lite if you’re a subscriber!
When you complete the Challenge – or if you get completely stuck – then look at the Feedback below!
Feedback:
Every series has a ‘formula’ – a set of situations that you can expect to find in every single episode, somehow! The key is to create an appealing formula and find new ways to play with it every time, potentially for hundreds of episodes. For example, GAME OF THRONES episodes always contain political intrigue, moral and strategic dilemmas for key characters, a fight or battle, death and sex.
For this one, think about the kinds of scene you most love watching – the kinds of actions and interactions that most catch your attention. Action? Intrigue? The supernatural? Intellectual conflict?
Many series include love or sex scenes, or at least a ‘will they, won’t they’ element, within their formula as a ‘bonus lure’ for audiences and to provide variety and changes of tone or style within episodes that are dominated by other tones and styles of storytelling. Few people want to write a porn movie – but actually a high proportion of adults like to see some aspects of sex appeal in the productions they watch, as the casting of most family-friendly major productions also usually assumes. Really, what most people like to see on our screens is usually a proxy experience for love and intimacy and attraction, not sex itself. So if you can write those elements in successfully without resorting to the bluntness and monotony of porn, you can attract a much wider audience.
General tips and feedback:
Many writers, naturally, don’t find it easy to be creative ‘on tap’ – especially for work that they didn’t set themselves. But to write professionally, you will usually need to meet deadlines and requirements, that can’t be put off, for briefs you didn’t choose for yourself: even if you’re ill or feeling down, you’ll usually have to just find a way through, and get the results that are needed, to the quality that’s necessary. So the WriteMovies Creative Challenges are designed to help you find ways around the crucial issues of ‘block’.
We do this by setting a (deceptively!) simple brief, and encouraging you to use a variety of methods, approaches and creative products in order to find ways around it, and generate some kind of outcomes that might be useful to you in the future. Whatever state your mind and mood are in – energetic or tired, stimulated or bored, motivated or disengaged, etc – there are different ‘modes’ of creative productivity which you can engage, to make the best of it: editing your work if you can’t write, making notes if you can’t generate script, etc. Try a mix of methods to make the most of activities such as the Creative Challenges, especially anytime you get stuck: just keep adding notes, sketches etc freely, you can decide later whether any of them are useful! Also note that the brief is to ‘prepare’ a creative work – not to actually make it straight away, before you feel ready to! But if you’ve come away from this with a passage of prose or script or even poetry, well done!
Hopefully this activity will have shown you the potential value of our Creative Challenges, and the benefits of making a routine to complete them, and persisting with it day by day to gradually improve all aspects of your writing and to develop solutions to ‘block’, that you will become more and more proficient with over time. We recommend that you commit to fulfilling the 100-Day Creative Challenges, sharing your outputs to gain the support and feedback of other writers working on the same activities, and if you’d like expert daily feedback from us on this and much more, additional material, subscribe to the WriteMovies Academy Lite now!