Writing Assignment Tracker IV

First Writing Assignment Tracker update of 2013.  And it’s a belter.  In fact, it’s a tiddler, because I’m hard at it.  But here’s the chart.

Step	Name	Time Allocated	Date Sched      Actual	+/- Schedule
1.	First Draft Treatment	1 month	15/11/12
	Initial Step Outline	2 weeks	26/10/12
	Initial Step Outline client comments	4 days	30/10/12
	First Draft Treatment	2 weeks	16/11/12	-1 Day
2.	First Draft Treatment client comments	3 weeks	06/12/12
	Client comments	2.5 weeks	03/12/12	+3 Days
3.	Second Draft Treatment	10 days	16/12/12
	Writer response (not treatment)	2.5 weeks	20/12/12	-4 Days
	Client comments	3 weeks	06/01/13
	Second Draft Treatment	10 days	17/01/13	-1 Month
4.	Second Draft Treatment client comments	4 weeks	13/01/13
	Client comments		21/01/13	-1 Week
5.	First Draft	12 weeks	07/04/13
6.	First Draft client comments	8 weeks	02/06/13
7.	Revised First Draft	4 weeks	30/06/13
8.	Revised First Draft client comments	2 weeks	14/07/13
9.	Second Draft	4 weeks	11/08/13
11.	Second Draft First Set	6 weeks	22/09/13
12.	Second Draft Second Set	6 weeks	03/11/13

Just to briefly unpick this.  You’ll recall (those of you paying attention) that just before Christmas I delivered a ‘response’ rather than a second draft treatment, following client comments on the first draft treatment.  One part of my response was to push back at quite a major note, and a rationale for that, while the other part was a ‘how about this?’ shifting of the balance / direction / heart of the whole script.  The client – as previously mentioned, a transatlantic consortium of producers, financiers and other interested parties – got their heads together over the break and responded in good time in the New Year.  They largely accepted the first point, while largely rejecting the second.  My instinct had been to move a bit further away from the source material, theirs was to gravitate back towards it, which has been the subject of some healthy creative tension throughout this process.  They also brought me back in line on tone – I wanted to push it higher concept, but they want to keep it real-world, character comedy.  And, since my job is to deliver them the best script according to their brief, I accepted their comments – that’s what they’re there for – and went back to the treatment.

My first draft treatment was 25+ pages, a really detailed beat sheet.  This time I wanted to keep it to under ten pages, to double-check that the ‘birds-eye view’ of the story structure was functioning as it should: Act One, Act Two, Act Three; the ten-page mini-acts; the big sequences; the mechanics of the hero’s journey.  So this wasn’t rewriting the first document, it was writing a new synopsis of the new movie from scratch.  Along the way I had a moment where I was convinced that we were heading in the wrong direction, but a panicked skype call with the script editor settled my nerves.  It’s a funny old thing, how a couple of well-placed comments from her could help me make sense of it all in my head again, without many of the component parts fundamentally changing.  That’s good script editing – helping the writer see what is already there in front of them.

So I delivered this shorter, second draft treatment, a month behind the project schedule.  The story is basically the same as in the first draft, but with probably 30% less narrative material, allowing room for the more interesting scenes, characters and moments to breathe.  That old ‘excavation’ metaphor again, gradually digging deeper to reveal what the story is really telling us.  I also sent some updated character biographies, which could be read separately but alongside this document, along with some casting ideas (a writer’s favourite game!).

The clients then turned around their comments in a matter of days, rather than the four weeks the contract (strangely) allowed them.  And they were teeny tiny comments.  Somehow, it had all fitted into place in the right way, with the right balance.  The casting ideas gave us a chance to discuss the types of personalities that we saw in the various roles, their tones of voices, etc.  Voice-over was considered, and discarded.  All good constructive stuff.

The question then was, what next?  Do I stick with the treatment format, and expand my ten pages back up to twenty five, as I had done before?  Or were we ready to go to draft?  I delivered a fairly impassioned plea for the latter course of action.  Treatments are functional documents, useful for setting shape and for moving elements around at the planning stage.  But it should never be seen as an end in itself.  While a lot of the storytelling groundwork goes on at this stage, the ‘screenwriting’ doesn’t begin until you bring those moments and characters alive through dialogue, internal scene structure, relationships and dramatic juxtaposition.  That’s when you see what you’ve really got here, and whether the structure you think you’ve cracked over ten pages actually works over a hundred and ten.

They seemed to agree.  Green light to move to script.  Good.  We have an overview structure that we agree on, some character sketches that feel right.  Now my job is to surprise the client for all the right reasons – delivering them a script that they recognise in outline but feels new and fresh and engaging in detail.

The contract tells me I’ve got twelve weeks, but I’m going on holiday at the end of March, so I’m going to try and do it in eight.  And what I’m actually going to do is to write the first draft over the next three to four weeks, then put it in a shoe box for two weeks, then give it a proper rewrite or two before submitting.  None of this completing-the-first-draft-the-night-before-the-deadline business.  Not this time.  Nosiree.

Well, let’s just see how that goes, shall we?

I feel like the man in his rowing boat, setting out from the Canaries, pointed at the West Indies.  See you on the other side!

The Next Big Thing

So apparently this is a blogmeme.  A bleme.  It’s called ‘The Next Big Thing’ and seems to be the C21st version of a chain letter.  A writer-director I know in Australia called Antony Mann did it, after he was pinged by another guy called Adrian Deans, who had been pinged by someone else who had been pinged by someone else etc.  Who  knows how these things start?

You can follow the bleme on twitter too, I think - #thenextbigthing.

Anyway, Antony pinged me, so now I’m doing it.  At the bottom I’m pinging a few other bloggers, in the hopes that they’ll do it, too.  Feel free to take this on yourselves, even if I haven’t pinged you directly.

It’s a list of questions that everyone has been asked to answer about their next project.  Whether that will eventually be a Big Thing or not remains to be seen, but I suppose it’s always Big to the writer at the time of writing.  The questions were conceived for novelists, it appears, but I’m tweaking for screenwriting.  Off we go.

1) What is the working title of your current/next book?
KAJAKI

2) Where did the idea come from?
It’s a true story.  I was working on a training film for the British army and one of the soldiers we were working with mentioned the incident.  It set my spidey-senses a-tinglin’.

3) What genre does your book fall under?
True-story-thriller-drama-war-drama-doc-thingy.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
(Spot the inappropriate question for screenwriters.)  The answer reminds me of the quote from ‘The Player’ – “no stars, just talent” etc.  We’ll probably end up with Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts.  In truth, it’s a dozen young male soldiers in their early 20s, so we’re hoping to find a lot of new talent, the Faces of 2014.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
A detachment of Paras try to rescue a comrade from a minefield in Helmand province, and find themselves in a fight for their own lives.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
It has been commissioned by a production company, Pukka Films, who are hoping to finance and shoot it themselves later on this year.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft?
About six months of research, mainly one-to-one interviews with those involved, and with the parents of the soldier who lost his life, reading through detailed first hand testimonies from the Army’s Board of Inquiry and the coroner’s Inquest, press reports, other books written on the subject etc.  The first draft itself took two weeks – a case of the writer trying to stand at the back of the room and let this amazing story tell itself.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Other film reference points are ‘United 93’ and the Katherine Bigelow films ‘The Hurt Locker’ and ‘Zero Dark Thirty’.  Detached, documentary-style observation, with the power of dramatic storytelling.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?
We want to make a modern British war movie.  They just aren’t out there.  We want to examine why and how these young men risk their lives in a confused conflict in a foreign country.  And we want to pay tribute to their bravery, their comradeship, their sacrifice.

10) What else about the book might pique the reader's interest?
We’re avoiding the political, and simply concentrating on the fate of the ten men, in that minefield, on that afternoon.  This is about their view of the war, not the generals’ or the politicians’.  It’s also an interesting side note that the mines that were causing all this damage were legacy mines from an earlier Russian occupation, thirty years earlier.  There are no Taliban in this movie, and no shots fired.

So that’s me.  Now I’d like to ping this onto:

Danny Stack – film-maker and blogger - http://dannystack.blogspot.co.uk/

Tim Clague – film-maker and blogger - http://projectorfilms.blogspot.co.uk/

Chris Jones – film-maker and blogger and festival organiser and a few other things besides - http://www.chrisjonesblog.com/

Ed Caesar – journalist and author and screenwriter and second row - http://www.edcaesar.co.uk/

Guy Walters – historian and novelist and epicurean and petanqueriste – will respond via twitter, if anything - https://twitter.com/guywalters  

Take it away, boys.

Writing Assignment Tracker III

Just as I always find myself scrambling madly in the final days before a writing deadline arrives, so the final days of the working year also tend to find me trying frantically to deliver on a number of projects, all at the same time.  Every year, for the last four years, I have delivered a first draft screenplay in the week before Christmas.  This year is no exception.  Recently, I have been polishing the first draft of a script that I drafted earlier in the month, and which I sent off earlier today*.  I’ve also been taking a couple of meetings on what will hopefully be my next project, and signing a deal on a script that has already been written, not to mention concentrating on what I should call my main project (in case they’re reading this), the writing assignment that I’m tracking here.

Here is the updated chart, for those of you following with bated breath:

Step	Name	Time Allocated	Date	+/- Schedule
1.	First Draft Treatment	1 month	15/11/12
	Initial Step Outline	2 weeks	26/10/12
	Initial Step Outline client comments	4 days	30/10/12
	First Draft Treatment	2 weeks	16/11/12	-1 Day
2.	First Draft Treatment client comments	3 weeks	06/12/12
	Client comments	2.5 weeks	03/12/12	+3 Days
	Conference call to discuss		06/12/12
3.	Second Draft Treatment	10 days	16/12/12
	Writer response	2.5 weeks	20/12/12	-4 Days
4.	Second Draft Treatment client comments	4 weeks	13/01/13
5.	First Draft	12 weeks	07/04/13
6.	First Draft client comments	8 weeks	02/06/13
7.	Revised First Draft	4 weeks	30/06/13
8.	Revised First Draft client comments	2 weeks	14/07/13
9.	Second Draft	4 weeks	11/08/13
11.	Second Draft First Set	6 weeks	22/09/13
12.	Second Draft Second Set	6 weeks	03/11/13

What can we see here?  Well, the client generally turns around their work on time, while I’m usually late, that’s the main thing so far.

The client in fact did a great job of collating all their disparate notes into one comments document (a six page, bullet-point document broken down into headlines / characters / page notes).  They spoke with one voice, with a largely clear sense of what they liked and what they disliked about my 25-page treatment.  They then did me the courtesy of talking through all of it on a conference call, allowing me an opportunity to push back, or seek clarification.

And it was good news and bad news.  A lot of positive responses to scenes, characters, the main love story etc.  But a sense that we’re not there yet on the heroine, or even on the overall script structure.  So it’s two forwards, one back.  As a writer you always think, sigh, here we go again, but to be honest all their notes make sense.  And I’d rather find this out after the first draft treatment than after the first draft script.  That’s what it’s there for.

But then it was up to me again, to interpret the interpretation, to analyse the analysis.  So I spent the last couple of weeks conducting an MOT on the project – opening her up, fiddling on her carburettor and so on.  I re-read the book on which the script is based.  I worked my way back through the analytical process by which we arrived at our initial creative direction.  I’m a holistic sort of writer.  I can’t just take a load of notes and change this, this, and this, and leave the stuff that we like where it is.  I need to step back.  I need to see the bigger picture.  I need to think about ‘what kind’ of movie I’m writing, and try to make sure that this is the right / best / most perfect expression of that.  It’s why I always rewrite from page 1.  Everything in its right place.  I sometimes wonder if I’m over-thinking things, or over-complicating things, or denying myself the expressionistic licence to just see where the story goes.  But I is what I is.

So I’ve fudged my response.  Instead of delivering a second draft treatment in ten days, I’ve taken two weeks to write a ‘response’.  This is partly because of the aforementioned pre-Christmas gridlock – I’ve been caught out on time, I’ll admit – but also because an intermediate step felt appropriate.  It’s a ‘This is what I think you were saying.  This is what I think the implications are.  These are my recommended solutions / changes, and these are the implications of those.  What do you think?  And are we all still on the same page here?  Is this still the movie we all want to be making?’ sort of document.  Charging onto another 25 pager without cross-checking my reading of their reading seemed premature.  That’s my justification, at least. 

(Incidentally, why did the original project plan give me 10 days for the second draft of the treatment, but give them another 4 weeks for responding to that?  I would have thought those timings should have been flipped.  But, there you go, nobody has a crystal ball.)

So I’m behind schedule.  And now it’s Christmas, and New Year, and I imagine it will be the middle of January before I get the official ‘Second Draft Treatment’ out – a whole month behind.  But I haven’t received any angry letters from the client’s lawyers, yet.  People are sympathetic to the process and, of course, to the time of year.  And I’ll make up for lost time on the first draft.

On which subject, I still have to say that I’m finding the project schedule – and, by the same token, the payments schedule – lopsided in favour of the first and second drafts.  It has always been the way – you do the work on the treatment, but you get paid for the draft.  I’m not going into figures here, but I’m getting approximately 7% of my fee for the two treatments, but about 35% for the first draft.  And I can almost guarantee you that the treatment work will take longer, will be harder work, and will be more critical to the successful outcome of the project.  But people pay for scripts, with characters and dialogue and stuff.  At least, that’s what they think they’re paying for.

A new model, a simpler and fairer model would – I humbly submit – be 33% treatment (and revisions), 33% first draft, 33% all subsequent revisions, limited by time of contract.  None of this attempted delineation between drafts and revisions and polishes – I’m a page one rewriter, there is no delineation.  Just: outline, draft, revisions.  Third, third, third.  All in favour?

Anyway, onwards and onwards, and I’m enjoying the journey.  And at least I’m being paid something, so what the hell am I complaining about when and how and why it gets paid?  Idiot boy.

Happy Christmas to you all.  Here’s to a productive – and on schedule – 2013.

* Just got an email from the client on that script I sent out earlier today.  ‘On page 30 – so far amazing!!!’  Loving the real-time script feedback.  Though now I’ll be worried if I haven’t heard from him in another half an hour...

Writing Assignment Tracker II

Well here we are.  The first update to my previously blogged-about idea to track a writing assignment from start to finish, comparing the various contracted steps to the reality of what I deliver, both in the number and description of those steps, and in anticipated vs actual delivery dates.  Essentially, how accurately can a contract predict the writing journey?  Here is the updated chart:

 

Step	Name	Time Allocated	Date	+/- Schedule
1.	First Draft Treatment	1 month	15/11/12
	Initial Step Outline	2 weeks	26/10/12
	Initial Step Outline client comments	4 days	30/10/12
	First Draft Treatment	2 weeks	16/11/12	-1 Day
2.	First Draft Treatment client comments	3 weeks	06/12/12
3.	Second Draft Treatment	10 days	16/12/12
4.	Second Draft Treatment client comments	4 weeks	13/01/13
5.	First Draft	12 weeks	07/04/13
6.	First Draft client comments	8 weeks	02/06/13
7.	Revised First Draft	4 weeks	30/06/13
8.	Revised First Draft client comments	2 weeks	14/07/13
9.	Second Draft	4 weeks	11/08/13
11.	Second Draft First Set	6 weeks	22/09/13
12.	Second Draft Second Set	6 weeks	03/11/13

 

Thoughts on the above.

 

1.       Remarkably, I’ve ended up delivering the ‘First Draft Treatment’ within a day of the anticipated / due date.  But this doesn’t tell the whole story.  It’s not like I’ve gone away, spent four weeks writing, and come back and delivered on my first contractual obligation.

2.       As the chart above also shows, there was an interim step, a relatively detailed beat sheet, delivered after two weeks.

3.       Note the very prompt turnaround of the client comments on that first document – only four days, and over a weekend (though the LA time difference helps with that, I think).

4.       But even within this, there is a more complicated picture.  I am dealing with one person – we’ll call her the Development Executive, although she’s also a lead producer on the project – and I have been sending her documents once or twice a week throughout this process.  The early stages of the process started with me writing an eight page document – one page of ‘vision’, three pages of main character biogs, four pages of outline – which, after some back and forth and expansion, became the beat sheet (those character biogs were included at the front of the beat sheet).  The DE (as I’ll call her) then collated and, in some cases, pushed back on the notes from the rest of the producing team (two further sets of producers), before emailing them to me and then talking me through them (on the 30^th).  I then developed the beat sheet into the full treatment and, again, ran it by the DE a couple of times before, collectively, we decided it was ready to go back out to the full team.

5.       I’ve also had two further face-to-face meetings with the DE in this time, one of which also encompassed a very enjoyable trip to the V&A Hollywood Costumes exhibition (for reasons which will become clear when and if I’m allowed to mention the project by name) – highly recommended.

6.       So I have to conclude that it’s coincidental that all this took almost exactly four weeks.  It’s just how long it took.

7.       I don’t think the First Draft Treatment is the finished article, by any means, but it has advanced the idea sufficiently that it feels like a new document for the rest of the team to read, and without taking it so far that we have run ahead of ourselves should ‘realignment’ be required.

8.       The system appears to be working very well at the moment.  The DE’s notes have been prompt and smart, asking all those questions that I wish she wouldn’t ask because I know I don’t have answers for them at the moment.  She is helping me to shape the project in a way that (I imagine) a producer does with the musicians in a recording studio, and the work is already infinitely stronger as a result.  The lesson here is clear: get yourself a good script editor from the start.

9.       The fact that she also collates the notes into one coherent response from the producing stake-holders is also invaluable.  I’ve worked in environments before where your role as a writer appears to be that of Israel-Gaza mediator (poor-taste comparison in the light of current events), and somehow to try to satisfy two or more contradictory opinions.  I would recommend that you insist on dealing with only one voice from the client side.  It’s not your job to help them make their minds up.

10.   All this would also go to demonstrate the valuable lesson that taking a writing assignment isn’t just about signing a contract, having a meeting or two, then taking their money and delivering a document at some vague point in the future.  It is, like all good business, about managing relationships, putting in however much time is needed to get the job done right, listening to and responding to feedback, and over-delivering wherever possible.  This 101 of How To Run A Business applies as much to the airy-fairy world of creative writing as it does to running a fruit and veg stall.

11.   We’ll see whether the client takes the full three weeks to respond.  I doubt they will, as they like the pace that the DE and I have established and seem keen to keep it going (see this post for the importance of momentum).  So I would guess at a week or so.  The question is what do I do in the meantime?  My head is very much in this project, and the contract states that these clients have ‘first call’ on my time, as and when they choose to get back to me.  However, I’m not going to just sit on my bum, and I have of course been pushing other projects forwards as I’ve been writing these early documents.  It looks like, in fact, I might be about to dive into the first draft of a totally different project, and so I may be able to make headway on that this week.  Then I’ll have to set that to one side to work on the revisions to the treatment.  But I may be able to finish that draft while this client is reading my second draft treatment, so that I’ll finish that script just as I’m ready to start the first draft on this one.  Should (could) all fit nicely.  Self-employment and managing your career as a freelance is all about trying to find these serendipitous synergies in your project management schedule (he says, trying not to sound too much like an efficiency consultant.)

 

Watch this space for the next exciting instalment.