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beccaelizabethWhen I started doing this English degree I said I wanted to write for Doctor Who.
I have been saying lately that I've realised I'm not that good. Which is kind of true. But I could get better, and people who just do the work promptly and to spec can do quite well.
The problem I think I can't get around is that TV writing has a narrower range than fanfiction. Because there are two types of fanfiction, the more of and the more from. TV only wants more of, until you are a very shiny advanced writer indeed.
If I'm happy enough with a show that I want more exactly the same, I don't have any story ideas for it.
I'm not a more of writer. I don't wish to color within the lines. I don't want to leave it to fade to black at that exact same point every time.
I want more from TV, meaning I want to change it, meaning I can't work on other people's TV shows.
If I want to write for TV, with the ideas that are in my head, I'd have to invent my very own TV show and persuade someone to make it.
As my first ever job.
Which simply isn't going to work.
And given the economics of the thing, really shouldn't.
My novice efforts aren't worth the investment.
The tried and tested solution is to write more of for someone else for a bunch of time, bringing fresh approaches but not breaking the toys.
And honestly, I really don't want to.
All the times I look at a show and see something that needs fixing, it's not something simple like 'maybe x could have y adventure' or 'maybe x should apologise to y for once' or 'maybe x could save y for once', it's something structural, like 'maybe TV could have 50% women'. I think Doctor Who does quite well on numbers, but by having the Doctor and Companion the way round they have been there's still some built in limits. If I was writing for Doctor Who I'd want to change the Doctor. He really needs to be a black woman. Maybe an asian woman. If that's too much of a stretch, okay, a white woman. But he really needs to be a woman or the show will remain, structurally, Man Saves Women A Lot. And all the rest of people, obviously, but still, he saves his Companion a lot and she's a woman and it just ends up that way a lot. The show is about how awesome the Doctor is, so the show is about how awesome angsty white man is. 11 seems to be tweaking the settings on angsty, which is nice, but not the thing. We have had enough years of white man saving us. And even if I am not let loose recasting the Doctor, which would be okay because obviously I do love the Doctor as he is, I'd want to make a new companion and once again it'd be for category reasons. Like I couldn't tell the story with existing companions. Which would be missing the point of more of fanfic.
Which is one reason I'm not exactly writing fanfic lately. I'm coming up with new ideas from playing with old favourite parts and reconfiguring them until I like them. By the time I'm done with them they're well past AU and into new show territory.
And that's all I want to do to TV lately.
Nothing grabs me in the way that says 'yes, that, only more episodes!'
It's all 'that would be great if' and the if is a whole new show.
So, writing for television?
Pretty much not going to happen.
Unless I write a whole lot of stories I've no interest in, for practice.
It'd be like writing essays, or the creative assignments for college. Just go with the assignment outcomes and make sure all the boxes are ticked and try to find something that engages with existing sources but has at least a little something new to say. I've been doing that for years.
So I could do it... but I don't especially want to.
So if I don't want to and I'm not very good at it, I think maybe I need to look at another line of work.
It'll still have to be writing though. I might not be very good at it but it's still my strongest area.
So I've been thinking on other forms, and what the appeal is of television.
Radio writing, audio plays, I haven't looked at recently, except last I heard the market was shrinking. I could make something epic for the 7th Dimension slot, I heard a bunch of those. But I don't know if they'd want me to. I've heard a bunch of those from last century, mostly adapted from quite early works. I don't know if they have things that are new and meant just for that slot. And I don't know where else is doing radio science fiction and fantasy.
Comics are unlikely to like what I like, if the way I don't like comics any more is any indication.
It'd be fun trying, if a lot of us who dislike the same things could get together and write it better.
Thinking up superheroes is always fun.
My alt DCU was fun to think on.
But for comics I would definitely need someone to work with, due to be a D@GCSE artist.
... not my strong point really.
I could write books. Those are nice. I did 50K last summer, I could totally finish that. Eventually.
And then somebody somewhere might want to read it.
When I think about why I want to write for TV it's not just that I want to shout louder. I mean, okay, yes, it very much is that the things I get frustrated about are on TV, and I want to tell lots of people better stories, and TV is the way to do that. Large audience for anything that isn't TV is tiny, tiny fraction of audience for anything, even abject failures, on TV. But it's not just that.
I like the form. A different story every week, a framework of teaser-acts-tag that's a good climbing frame, characters that persist but have room to change. You can tell a five year story in 100 parts. What other medium even dreams of that? Comics keep going and going and going, but the amount of story you get through in a month is tiny, maybe one act of a TV episode. Television really moves. It can get really epic and change everything or run variations on a theme for years. There's possibilities you can run through on TV that would take forever as a book series. One or two plots a year? You'd not live long enough to get all the stories out!
Of course I'm sitting here on the internet, with publishing a button push away. I can write and post an episode a week if I want to. Fanfic virtual seasons have done that to great effect.
But I also want to do things that are just really difficult to do without the full toolkit of television. Actors bring so much to a story. Costumes, set dressing, what buildings you're in bring so much. And, yes, prose can do it, but that picture worth a thousand words is multiplied by frames a second. Prose only has time to go for a telling detail or two if you want to keep the action rolling. If you stop long enough to convey a fraction of what you get through mise en scene you've brought it to a grinding halt. So it's a different art, and I want to play with the shiny toys. Plus you can do things with camera angle, zoom, lighting, even what sort of film you're using, that are completely subliminal and yet a rich language of their own. The closest equivalent I can think of in writing is to think of the stuff usually focused on in poetry, the paragraph length and where the punctuation is and all that. But on TV you're already using all of that in dialogue. It just has a richer toolkit and I wants to get my hands on it.
I can do without. Plus I can steal bits. We're on the internet, it's a hybrid form in waiting. If I want to give my prose a soundtrack and scatter pictures through it liberally, I can do that. ... the soundtrack part is deeply annoying though, so I probably won't do that.
But then there's collaboration. Working with people. If I'm doing all the writing, I have to make all the choices of action and angle and telling detail. It would be so cool to get together with people who have their best skills in other areas and just give them the script and see how much better they can make it.
Theatre can do that. But I don't go to the theatre so I'd be daft to try and write for it.
Fans do that too though. Big bangs do the art to go with the pictures, and other fans do podfics of written works.
... also, I'm not very good at working with people. I don't know why, I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but in lessons people rarely choose to work with me. I must be annoying. I don't know.
I think what I'm figuring is that the internet and fandom specifically already does a lot of what I'm looking for, virtual seasons and combining skills and putting pictures to words and all the cool stuff.
So maybe I don't need television.
... just to make a fandom for a TV show I make up and post here.
... I can see how that's going to be challenging.
Plus, there's the thing where making a living might be nice. But making a living off writing was always a daft idea, so *shrugs*
I have been saying lately that I've realised I'm not that good. Which is kind of true. But I could get better, and people who just do the work promptly and to spec can do quite well.
The problem I think I can't get around is that TV writing has a narrower range than fanfiction. Because there are two types of fanfiction, the more of and the more from. TV only wants more of, until you are a very shiny advanced writer indeed.
If I'm happy enough with a show that I want more exactly the same, I don't have any story ideas for it.
I'm not a more of writer. I don't wish to color within the lines. I don't want to leave it to fade to black at that exact same point every time.
I want more from TV, meaning I want to change it, meaning I can't work on other people's TV shows.
If I want to write for TV, with the ideas that are in my head, I'd have to invent my very own TV show and persuade someone to make it.
As my first ever job.
Which simply isn't going to work.
And given the economics of the thing, really shouldn't.
My novice efforts aren't worth the investment.
The tried and tested solution is to write more of for someone else for a bunch of time, bringing fresh approaches but not breaking the toys.
And honestly, I really don't want to.
All the times I look at a show and see something that needs fixing, it's not something simple like 'maybe x could have y adventure' or 'maybe x should apologise to y for once' or 'maybe x could save y for once', it's something structural, like 'maybe TV could have 50% women'. I think Doctor Who does quite well on numbers, but by having the Doctor and Companion the way round they have been there's still some built in limits. If I was writing for Doctor Who I'd want to change the Doctor. He really needs to be a black woman. Maybe an asian woman. If that's too much of a stretch, okay, a white woman. But he really needs to be a woman or the show will remain, structurally, Man Saves Women A Lot. And all the rest of people, obviously, but still, he saves his Companion a lot and she's a woman and it just ends up that way a lot. The show is about how awesome the Doctor is, so the show is about how awesome angsty white man is. 11 seems to be tweaking the settings on angsty, which is nice, but not the thing. We have had enough years of white man saving us. And even if I am not let loose recasting the Doctor, which would be okay because obviously I do love the Doctor as he is, I'd want to make a new companion and once again it'd be for category reasons. Like I couldn't tell the story with existing companions. Which would be missing the point of more of fanfic.
Which is one reason I'm not exactly writing fanfic lately. I'm coming up with new ideas from playing with old favourite parts and reconfiguring them until I like them. By the time I'm done with them they're well past AU and into new show territory.
And that's all I want to do to TV lately.
Nothing grabs me in the way that says 'yes, that, only more episodes!'
It's all 'that would be great if' and the if is a whole new show.
So, writing for television?
Pretty much not going to happen.
Unless I write a whole lot of stories I've no interest in, for practice.
It'd be like writing essays, or the creative assignments for college. Just go with the assignment outcomes and make sure all the boxes are ticked and try to find something that engages with existing sources but has at least a little something new to say. I've been doing that for years.
So I could do it... but I don't especially want to.
So if I don't want to and I'm not very good at it, I think maybe I need to look at another line of work.
It'll still have to be writing though. I might not be very good at it but it's still my strongest area.
So I've been thinking on other forms, and what the appeal is of television.
Radio writing, audio plays, I haven't looked at recently, except last I heard the market was shrinking. I could make something epic for the 7th Dimension slot, I heard a bunch of those. But I don't know if they'd want me to. I've heard a bunch of those from last century, mostly adapted from quite early works. I don't know if they have things that are new and meant just for that slot. And I don't know where else is doing radio science fiction and fantasy.
Comics are unlikely to like what I like, if the way I don't like comics any more is any indication.
It'd be fun trying, if a lot of us who dislike the same things could get together and write it better.
Thinking up superheroes is always fun.
My alt DCU was fun to think on.
But for comics I would definitely need someone to work with, due to be a D@GCSE artist.
... not my strong point really.
I could write books. Those are nice. I did 50K last summer, I could totally finish that. Eventually.
And then somebody somewhere might want to read it.
When I think about why I want to write for TV it's not just that I want to shout louder. I mean, okay, yes, it very much is that the things I get frustrated about are on TV, and I want to tell lots of people better stories, and TV is the way to do that. Large audience for anything that isn't TV is tiny, tiny fraction of audience for anything, even abject failures, on TV. But it's not just that.
I like the form. A different story every week, a framework of teaser-acts-tag that's a good climbing frame, characters that persist but have room to change. You can tell a five year story in 100 parts. What other medium even dreams of that? Comics keep going and going and going, but the amount of story you get through in a month is tiny, maybe one act of a TV episode. Television really moves. It can get really epic and change everything or run variations on a theme for years. There's possibilities you can run through on TV that would take forever as a book series. One or two plots a year? You'd not live long enough to get all the stories out!
Of course I'm sitting here on the internet, with publishing a button push away. I can write and post an episode a week if I want to. Fanfic virtual seasons have done that to great effect.
But I also want to do things that are just really difficult to do without the full toolkit of television. Actors bring so much to a story. Costumes, set dressing, what buildings you're in bring so much. And, yes, prose can do it, but that picture worth a thousand words is multiplied by frames a second. Prose only has time to go for a telling detail or two if you want to keep the action rolling. If you stop long enough to convey a fraction of what you get through mise en scene you've brought it to a grinding halt. So it's a different art, and I want to play with the shiny toys. Plus you can do things with camera angle, zoom, lighting, even what sort of film you're using, that are completely subliminal and yet a rich language of their own. The closest equivalent I can think of in writing is to think of the stuff usually focused on in poetry, the paragraph length and where the punctuation is and all that. But on TV you're already using all of that in dialogue. It just has a richer toolkit and I wants to get my hands on it.
I can do without. Plus I can steal bits. We're on the internet, it's a hybrid form in waiting. If I want to give my prose a soundtrack and scatter pictures through it liberally, I can do that. ... the soundtrack part is deeply annoying though, so I probably won't do that.
But then there's collaboration. Working with people. If I'm doing all the writing, I have to make all the choices of action and angle and telling detail. It would be so cool to get together with people who have their best skills in other areas and just give them the script and see how much better they can make it.
Theatre can do that. But I don't go to the theatre so I'd be daft to try and write for it.
Fans do that too though. Big bangs do the art to go with the pictures, and other fans do podfics of written works.
... also, I'm not very good at working with people. I don't know why, I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but in lessons people rarely choose to work with me. I must be annoying. I don't know.
I think what I'm figuring is that the internet and fandom specifically already does a lot of what I'm looking for, virtual seasons and combining skills and putting pictures to words and all the cool stuff.
So maybe I don't need television.
... just to make a fandom for a TV show I make up and post here.
... I can see how that's going to be challenging.
Plus, there's the thing where making a living might be nice. But making a living off writing was always a daft idea, so *shrugs*
no subject
Date: 2012-01-29 07:57 pm (UTC)How bad of a D@GCSE artist are you? If you can see in your head what you want to show, then using (mostly) existing 3D content in a studio app might be the way to go -- these can do either stills for comic-book panels or animation.
There's lots of content (including human figures) out there for Poser and DAZ|Studio, but Poser's pricey and lately DS has been getting less free and more bogged down with security features. Professional content creators have been hunkering down too, attributing lower revenues to piracy of their products rather than an economy that's reducing discretionary income. Blender3D is powerful, free, and open-source, but can't use most of the posable content out there since it's in a format for Poser and DAZ|Studio, but plugins are being worked on.
As for money-making, if you put your eps up on youtube with a paypal link that should work -- not sure if it'd be enough to support you, though.
Hope that helps.
~
no subject
Date: 2012-01-29 08:26 pm (UTC)I used to do photomanips, I've got Paint Shop Pro 7, but again, haven't for ages. My pictures are so tiny on modern screens. Also a bit terrible.
Getting a D for my final grade was an improvement on most of my GCSE work. And I haven't done much art for a decade. Still, you're right, the tools are there, if I want to start trying again.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-30 12:03 am (UTC)Rather than PSP7 (which is what, ten years old now?) consider GIMP (open-source, free, and well-supported). If you wanna take a look at what I've done with 3D my gallery's here, just remember that there are plenty of people better than me out there, and once you've hit your stride you could easily be one of them. I've done two rough photomanips combining 3D resources with 2D promos, here and here if you're interested.
~
no subject
Date: 2012-02-02 04:01 am (UTC)~