Agent 99 - Online story telling

Over on Twelvepoint.com one of Julian's regular ideas is that storytellers are paramount - and that screenwriters can/should/might consider writing novels instead. There's two parts to his idea:

1) Storytelling is a separable thing - you can define a storyteller as something separate from a screenwriter or novelist. And following this that screenwriters and novelists are types of storyteller: Species - storyteller, genus - novelist.

2) Commercial reality - the odds are better on novels.

Warning: This is one of my 'are you sure you really want that' posts :-)

Making a full time living as a 'pro' is a goal that many of us will have one time or another. Surely this is the best way to achieve validation of being a 'real writer'. The road is long, the people who will make it are few and those that do are rightly justified in feeling just a little bit good about themselves.

So I sent in a script to the Writer's room - spur of the moment really. I was feeling pretty good about this film - after all it is in good enough shape to attract a producer and director, and it contains my best film writing. Actually I would go further and say this is the script in which I found my visual story telling style.

Last week I got the 'we like it send us the next one' letter with a one page critique as well. I would think this a success - they noticed, they liked it, they'll read the next. But reading the critique I realise I had made a horrible mistake...

I am being a little anti here just for the sake of it, but I wanted to make people think through the permutations when they sit down and think - "You know what, I am going to make a short film, I am going to be a producer..."

So here's some grumpy things to say about short films and some more optimistic thoughts to go along side them!

Update: If you do go ahead here is a useful wee PDF from Shooting People/BAFTA about distribution and marketing (PDF)

First - 99% of short films completely suck

There is a school of thought that believes that the script that you are developing will have a direct relationship to your own life - more explicity that the transformational arc of your charcaters and the deeper themes of the piece are probably not so different from that which you need or are going though. Obviously this may not occur at the reality level (if you are writing sci-fi for instance) but at a thematic level in your life.

Ok, so we are used to thinking of designers as people who sit around stirring pixels on screens to make things look pretty enough to buy. In fact I own a pair of glasses that make me look like a designer - but hold on, I make a large percentage of my living as a designer not a writer. I've earned my designer glasses, damn it!

So being a person who is eternally curious about how things work, and constitutionally biased towards finding communality, I wondered if there were any lessons I could take from my day job back into my writing.

First - what is design thinking?

One of the nice things that Godin gets to in his book is the difference between quitting and failing. In my own words I think of these as the difference between taking smaller tactical decisions on things that aren’t working (quit) versus the act of giving up completely because you have run out of options (fail).

A book I picked up recently is Seth Godin’s ‘The Dip’. If you don’t know Godin he’s a bit of a god in marketing circles (boom boom) and writes a lot of clever books that are getting shorter and shorter and better and better. His books are mostly about current marketing tropes, and it would be fair to say that he has invented a fair few of them. But ‘The Dip’ is a little different.

I wrote this one for a forum question on Twelvepoint.com, but liked it enough to copy it over here. The question was whether is was a good idea to write a treatment or outline etc etc. It is a good thread, but it was frustrating me as words like 'always' and 'never' got used; always write a treatment, always do this and so on. So here's what I wrote back to the thread...
Everyone is wrong, it's only you that needs to be right

Ok, part two - and glad to have you following along Simone...

One of the nice things that Godin gets to in his book is the difference between quitting and failing. In my own words I think of these as the difference between taking smaller tactical decisions on things that aren't working (quit) versus the act of giving up completely because you have run out of options (fail).