Riding The Rationalization Horse Now

I’ve fallen off the write-every-day horse.

But wait, not really.

My job developing TV series requires me to write every day, a lot of the time all day every day.

Brainstorming new concepts, honing those concepts into structured series, researching. Creating storylines, writing crisply, designing dramatic verbal pitches. Always keeping in mind brands and formats, marketability and resonance to specific demographics. Revising, revising, revising. Throwing out ideas that end up going nowhere and starting over.

But I’m rationalizing, aren’t I?

This isn’t screenwriting.

It’s good training for screenwriting, to be sure. But it’s not screenwriting.

Gotta get back on the horse.

I have nine pages on the new action script. It’s a good beginning, but I was thinking this morning that instead of continuing with the story, I want to stop and do some thorough character sketching.

I’ve never done this in preparing for a script, but for this one to work, my two main characters need to be razor-sharp. My fear is that they could end up being too much alike and/or too hackneyed. So I’m gonna sketch them out before the plot thickens.

Saddle up.

By the way, I had a great pitch meeting with a cool cable channel on Wednesday. They loved the series concept. Two good signs: after my first couple sentences, the VP says, “What a great title -– I like it already.” And then, midway into my pitch, as I told a spooky story that could be part of the show, she says, “Ooh, I’ve got goosebumps!”

We have a little follow-up work to do, which we can do quickly -– but the decision to greenlight or not is gonna have to wait until the first of the year because they’re operating under strict commissioning parameters that have their hands tied until then.

Curses.

I just hope their brand doesn’t morph again by January…