The internet is good for nothing if not oversharing, and writers love nothing more than talking about themselves and hoping that other people find it interesting. With that in mind, we will periodically supplement your listening pleasure with snippets about the creative process that gets THE ONCE AND FUTURE NERD gets from our brains to your ear holes.
This week’s fact, which we hope you’ll find interesting, is this: Every chapter of THE ONCE AND FUTURE NERD starts as a television script with no narration, and is only later adapted to the audio play format that you hear. This was kind of out of our control at first, but now I’m really glad it’s turned out this way.
Here is what our prologue looked like before we adapted it:
So why do this? Well the short answer is that all my formal training is in writing for the screen and that’s the format in which I still feel most comfortable. In fact, our project was originally conceived as a television show; the audioplay format was, at first, a compromise with practicality. I hoped and still hope that you’d be able to see this story unfold visually. But I think I recall reading somewhere that HBO’s GAME OF THRONES pilot cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 million to make. And I’m pretty sure that there is not, right now, anyone in the world saying “hey, I’ve got $5 million to burn. What id really like to do is throw it at two guys with no professional writing credits so they can make dick jokes about dragons.” (If I am wrong, and you are such a person, PLEASE email me.) So we decided to switch to an audioplay format, since that was something we could conceivably produce ourselves.*
How we write the narrator and how we decided what that character would be like is, I think, a topic for another one of these posts some other week. But something I would like to answer now is why we continue to write TV scripts first, now that we know we’ll be adapting everything to audio play. And the most honest to that is that that I’m not a smart enough writer to go straight to the audio play. For the narration to work (again, more on this in a later post, hopefully), we need to have the narrator drop a few hints here and there to what the overall theme of the chapter is. And more often than not, I don’t know what the unifying theme is until I’ve got a draft down on paper. Conversely, having to go back and write the narration often forces me to focus my thinking and articulate – even if it’s just to myself – what the chapter is capital ‘A’ About. And then on subsequent drafts, that will help me find a little tweak I need to make a scene work, or figure out how to organize things to maintain some kind of thematic unity. My point is, what started as a practical requirement brought about by outside forces became a helpful writing tool. I think this is going to be a recurring motif as I write these “creative process” posts: Limitations can be inspiring. So don’t sweat it too much if you realize that there are outside limits on what you can write. You’ll be surprised what you’re forced to find.
In the case of the selection I posted above, for example, writing the narrator forced me to put on paper where my sympathies were in that scene. I would very much like to think that I instinctively gravitate towards the vulnerable and the victims rather than the powerful and the victimizers. But it wasn’t until I had to have the narrator make a few snarky jokes at Peter’s expense that I realized that this idea was kind of at the heart of the whole story.**
So I’m probably going to come back to this as this projects runs on, but I hope you find the basic idea interesting. And if any of you are writers, I’d love to hear whether you also think that limitations can be inspiring.
Got any questions about this post or about any part of the project? Get a discussion rolling in the comments section or on Twitter or Facebook or whatever. Or send us your question directly. If we get enough interesting questions, we’d love to do a mailbag bonus content one of these days.
And oh yeah, don’t forget: November 3, 2013 – The epic conclusion of Chapter 1. Be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already.
Christian out.
*Some background: the project Zach and I worked on prior to TOAFN was a spec pilot for a sitcom about a college marching band. But I soon realized that was a relatively expensive project, what with the costumes and instruments and all. So I promised myself that the next thing I wrote would be much more “budget-conscious” and therefore more likely to get funded. You can see how that promise turned out.
**This is not to imply that Peter is not, himself, also a victim. He definitely is. That’s kind of the point; victimhood is complicated. But that is DEFINITELY a topic for another day.
