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Writing a TV Pilot – our Hints and Tips!

Writing a TV Pilot – our Hints and Tips!

by | Mar 25, 2019 | Updates

So, you’re thinking of writing a TV pilot. That’s great news – this is a great time to be writing for TV!

After years of living in film’s shadow, the TV series has stepped up and become a major medium in its own right.

The days are gone when a television series would struggle to tell a big, coherent story from first episode to the last. The subscription model of networks like HBO rewards a viewer’s commitment to a show, and the rise of streaming services such as Netflix has made it easy for audiences to keep track of their favourite shows, never missing an episode – and as a result, television has become the place to tell more complex stories. Instead of cramming dozens of characters and subplots into a 2-hour movie, you can now spread them out over multiple episodes and seasons.

But when it comes to introducing viewers (and before them, readers) to such a complicated story in a pilot episode can be difficult. When you’ve got lots of things going on, it can be easy to lose track of who’s who and what’s going on in each storyline as we rejoin it. So here are our tips for writing a TV pilot to help you on the way:

  • Create clear and distinctive personal identities for each of your regular characters. That way, it’s easy to recognize who they are and what they stand for in all situations and how they relate to the other characters around them.
  • Not sure how to do this? Try to explain each of your characters in a simple two-word epithet to make sure that they’re strongly defined. If you can’t, their personality and role isn’t clear enough!
  • It helps to gel a multi-strange pilot if all the plots, characters, and settings have visible and regularly affirmed connection to each other. This could be a person who all the others meet or see, a place they all share, a motif that keeps coming up in different contexts (e.g. a word like ‘change’).
  • Another way to connect everything together is to have a focal event that everyone is directly affected by, or which every subplot is building up to. It’s best if this is something that all the characters are aware is coming up at around the 3/4 point of the episode.

Writing a TV pilot can be tough – you need a full season to tell a complex story, but you’ve also got to introduce that complex story in less than an hour in the first episode! But keep these tips in mind, and you should soon be heading in the right direction.

And if you want more inspiration, take a look at Ian Kennedy’s series of articles on GAME OF THRONES, for his thoughts on how  the show juggles a huge cast of characters and locations with only very limited screen time each!

 

Meet our Winter 2018 Writing Contest Third Placed Winner – INSURRECTION by Simon Bowler

Meet our Winter 2018 Writing Contest Third Placed Winner – INSURRECTION by Simon Bowler

by | Apr 20, 2018 | Highlights, Our Winners

The Winter 2018 Writing Contest was a special one for us as we saw 3 previous winners all improve on past results! We had a previous Monthly Contest winner win the Grand Prize, a former third placed winner came in second, and an Honorable Mention and TV award winner broke into the top three.

Today, you get to meet the Third placed winner of our Winter 2018 Writing Contest Simon Bowler. Simon won the first ever “Best Teleplay and pilot award for Summer 2017. Then he won it again for the Winter Contest AND came Third overall!

A testament to Simon, and how well he used our past Development Notes prizes to improve on his previous draft.

Here’s what Simon said about his Third Placed finish…

“With WriteMovies development notes I was able to climb up from semi-finalist to finalist, to a being a winner three times in a row, which has been an extraordinary validation of my writing and has been hugely encouraging. I now look forward to working with WriteMovies to the hone the script, a pilot for a mini-series, into the best iteration possible, and to start focussing on how to market the project. The writing process, as any writer knows, is a lonely one, so to have the recognition of a triple win with WriteMovies and their continued support will make that journey all the more bearable, and hopefully, successful.”

Here’s some background on Simon:

 “Originally from London, where he produced documentary films for the BBC and Channel 4, Simon has spent over twenty years in Los Angeles producing, writing and directing television docs and reality shows. Simon recently switched to drama and besides the multiple award-winning “Insurrection” mini-series (of which he’s written three episodes), he has written two award-winning plays (both at this year’s Austin Film Fest), a feature film, and is developing a classic horror anthology TV series.”

And here’s the logline to Simon’s winning script, INSURRECTION:

 INSURRECTION tells the interwoven stories of three men – a farmer, a slave and a senator – whose dangerous battles against slavery led to the American Civil War. Farmer John Brown, slave Frederick Douglass, and Senator Stephen A. Douglas.

With two television awards up for grabs in our Spring 2018 Writing Contest, the chances of your pilot script winning has never been higher… enter here.