So You Want to Write for Television
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| Title: | So You Want to Write for Television |
| Creator: | Lee Eric Shackleford |
| Date(s): | March 1994 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | multifandom |
| Topic: | |
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| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
So You Want to Write for Television is a 1994 essay by Lee Eric Shackleford.
It was published in A Writers' Exchange #9.
Some Topics Discussed
- PHASE ONE: So what's a spec script anyway?
- PHASE TWO: Do I need an agent?
- PHASE THREE: What if they love my script?
- there is no phase four listed
- PHASE FIVE: What if they buy one of my pitches?
From the Essay
All who write for media-related fiction magazines have at least one thing in common: we all want to participate in adding to the mythology of our favorite characters. Whether we want to tell a new story about Captain Picard, or about MacGyver, or about Danger Mouse - we all want to expand the world in which our heroes live and breathe and do whatever else they do that holds us spellbound.
Some of us are content to tell prose stories about these people. Some of us, on the other hand, want to get in there and duke it out with the big, wicked world of television and try to get that story onto the small screen. We don't just want to see the story we made up-we want to see it enacted by the performers who created the roles!
I don't know if it's the creative muse that fires this ambition, or if it's a colossal narcissism-or outright greed for the big bucks of Hollywood. Happily that's not within the realm of this article. I'll just mention that if you want to write for television, it's a good idea to figure out which of these forces is driving you. If you're after the big bucks, you may want to consider going into securities and investments instead. If it's just vanity, let me give you the name of a good therapist. But if, as Peter Falk says in the film Tune in Tomorrow "you write because you got no choice"...well, dear friend, read on.
(Obligatory Establishment of Credentials. Bear with me.) In the winter of 1991, the much-loved TV series Star Trek: the Next Generation was wrapping up the stories for its fifth season. The submissions department had received its usual flood of 150-200 scripts per week. For some reason, God only knows what, one script was singled out of that mess-a teleplay called "More Things in Heaven and Earth." This was a script my friend Jody Dill and I had written entirely on speculation and mailed off to Paramount, expecting never to hear from it again. But it was singled out; much loved by Eric Stilwell, story editor for the series in those days. Eric invited me and Jody out to Paramount to meet with the staff writers and the producers to pitch plot ideas for the show. While nothing was ever bought from us, Jody and I were called back repeatedly - in fact, we ended up pitching more story ideas than any other freelancers for that series: about fifty plots from December 1991 to August 1992. And some of our ideas were used anyway, but that's a story for later on.
You may have grown up, as I did, enjoying David Gerrold's "insider" book about his experiences back in 1967 making "The Troubles With Tribbles." One important turning point in the story (and in his life as a writer) was the first total rewrite of the script -- owing to his having typed it all in 12-pitch Courier instead of 10 pitch, resulting in the script being five pages too long. The novice TV writer of today would need to know two things related to that:
1.) An error of five pages is a whopping huge error, and
2.) nobody could get past the front door today, unagented and unheard-of, with a script that was typed in the wrong format. Nobody.
If you don't have an agent, you can still send your script in, but you'll need to get a release from the studio. This is a waiver of rights that says you absolutely surrender all legal rights to your script once you send it in. I am not making this up-that's what it means. You write to the legal department of the studio, tell them you want to send a script to a particular TV show, and soon you'll receive a form in the mail. Fill out the form, enclose it with your script, put it all together in an envelope addressed to the story editor of the show and write: UNSOLICITED SUBMISSION - WAIVER ENCLOSED on the front and back of the envelope. Otherwise, they will never open the thing-they can get their pants sued off of them if they do.
Now perhaps you're saying, "Lee, buddy, chum, if I relinquish all rights to my script - can't they just steal it?" And the amazing answer is: you bet your life they can! And many shows will do it.
[...]
Can they say "no thanks" and then use your idea anyway? Well, yes. You're basically pitching to them on faith in their fairness. And it's generally a safe bet - if a TV show gets a reputation for stealing, freelancers will stop coming to pitch and they'll be left high and dry.
But (just to give you the example I know best) ST:TNG used to have a reputation for running the cleanest show in the business - they never ripped writers off. But, alas, Gene Roddenberry died and a lot of that seems to have changed. Several stories of ours were used outright despite our being told elaborate reasons why they wouldn't work. And that quite literally, as they say, is "show biz."
If they love your script, you'll get a phone call from an administrative assistant in the producer's office asking if you want to come out to Hollywood and chat with the geniuses who make the show you love. They won't offer to pay for it, you understand; ; they'll just ask if you want to come. You can also have the meeting over the phone. I recommend you go. I live in Alabama and I flew at my expense all the way to California for our first ST:TNG meeting, and I have no regrets. The reason you should be there in person is this: you're being called in as a salesperson, not a writer. You're coming in to "pitch"- t o toss out story ideas and see if any of the little sparks touches off a wildfire. And unless you're some kind of phone-skills wizard and can hypnotize people who are sitting around a conference-call speaker (and that's how they'd do it), you stand a much better chance of being listened to in person.
You'll get about an hour of time with as many of the show's writers as are available; You'll probably also get one or more of the show's producers. They'll give you their attention, if they have any sense at all (their time is very valuable-if they don't listen to writers coming in to pitch, they're idiots). You'll probably have time to toss out the bare bones-the absolute bottom line of your stories - of maybe ten plots. They may say "no" to a story before you even get the first whole sentence out. ("I've been thinking about a DS9 in which each of the characters is visited by Santa Claus, and they-" "Ah, thank you. What else you got?") And the odds are vastly in favor of your being told "no" ten times in a row and then being sent home. And the odds are you won't be called back. A series like ST:TNG brings in two or three writers every day just to pitch. This way the staff writers can afford to take only the very best stories. But it also means that freelancers are considered expendable.