Category Archives: writing

May 21 2012

Where Can I Send My Sketches?


As part of my work for Writers’ Block I run 1-1 mentoring sessions for writers, many of whom are writing sketches. And they all want to know – where can I send them? Sadly, there don’t seem to be many places in the UK that accept unsolicited sketches, but there are one or two opportunities to keep your eye on.

Cofilmic Sketch in the City

What is it? A monthly live showcase of new sketch writing. Currently limited to writers in the North of England. Submit your 3 minute, three character sketch and maybe it’ll get performed.

Will it help my career?

The best of the crop, selected from each night, will be submitted for the COFILMIC Comedy Film Festival live sketchwriting competition on 29th October 2012. A panel of top industry experts (as
well as the audience) will vote for their favourite and the winner will have their sketch made into a short film for the following years competition!

You never know…

Link: Cofilmic Sketch in the City

The Treason Show

What is it? A slick and irreverent satirical topical comedy sketch show, based on the news and current affairs. Written by a team of over 40 writers and performed by a team of multi-talented satirical sketch performers.

Will it help my career? Can’t hurt.

Link: Treason Show Writers Guidelines

Newsrevue

What is it? Newsrevue is a weekly, fast-paced show of hilarious sketches and songs based on absolutely anything in the news—politics, sport, celebrities—from The Lords to Lords, from the Middle East’s Jordan to the Sun’s Jordan.

Will it Help my career?

Over the years, the show has won the Fringe First Award and a Perrier nomination in Edinburgh, won rave reviews from the national press, recorded many TV & radio specials and helped begin the careers of Rory Bremner, Michelle Collins, Josie Lawrence & Bill Bailey.

So… perhaps!

Link: Newsrevue writers page.

Where Else Can I Find Out About Opportunities?

It’s as well to keep an eye out on the BBC Writersroom, in case a show like Newsjack is seeking sketches.

Also the Writing Opportunities section on the British Comedy Guide forums will often flag up interesting stuff.

Basically, though, if you can somehow take control of your own sketches, by joining or starting up a sketch group, doing live shows, making short films, anything that gets your writing off the page and into a form that can be experienced rather than read, you’ll find your own voice much quicker, and you’ll have sketches to show people, which is always a step up from having sketches for people to read.

Do it yourself! Punk rock! Revolution! Seize the means of production! Or write a funny song about how fat John Prescott is for NewsRevue. Whichever you’d prefer.

May 18 2012

Writing a Sitcom – Creating Characters

So I’m going to write a sitcom, and I’m bunging my very important internet research (not time wasting or procrastinating, no) up here. Today I’m looking at the characters. I really want to create an ensemble that works dramatically and comedically. Help!

Here’s Dan Harmon on creating characters:

Write your pilot before you know everything about these people. Let the story establish little pieces of them, don’t fill your script with facts about fictional strangers, fill your script with things happening to fictional strangers. Bring the atoms into collision and let your audience get glimpses of their nuclei as they repulse, neutralize and bond with each other. If you are capable of knowing exactly who these people are by the end of your pilot, you are probably writing a bad TV show. The good news being, I predict much success for you.
But if your goal is to create a TV character with depth, it’s the same as if your goal were to create a tree with height: you’ll have to be patient and surrender a lion’s share of your control. God doesn’t make a tree with hammer and nails. He makes a seed. Likewise, actors and audiences and time are the things that are going to give your characters depth, the best you can do as the writer of a pilot is provide the reader with evidence of that potential.

Mitch Hurwitz on the genesis of Arrested Development:

Someone told me once about this paradigm that exists: matriarch, patriarch, craftsman, and clown. It’s this quartet that resonates through history and popular culture, and you can find it as a diagram in everything from The Beatles to ‘Leave It To Beaver’ to ‘Seinfeld’. In The Beatles, you can kind of see it the clearest. You know, Paul is the matriarch, John is the patriarch, the craftsman is George and the clown is Ringo. So I wanted to get that in there, and I thought, “Maybe that will be the four kids. I’ll do a show about four kids.” As it turns out, Michael and Lindsay would be the matriarch and patriarch. The craftsman, to me, is Buster, because he’s a scholar and he’s serious, and the clown is Gob, because he’s a magician, and clowns literally are magicians. [Laughs.] Oh, there are some magical clowns out there. But I don’t want to make this an advertisement for clowns.

There’s an interesting breakdown of archetypal sitcom characters over at TV Tropes.

It is important to note that, unlike the Five-Man Band, it isn’t strictly necessary for each show to have a representative member for each archetype. Keep in mind that, just as in Real Life, the world of Sit Coms is awash in many various and diverse personalities, of which this is hardly an exhaustive list; so there’s no need to shoehorn characters into these categories. Some shows will utilize certain archetypes and leave out others, or may have characters who don’t fit into any of the listed types.

Of course, even when dealing with archetypes, it’s important to remember, as Garry Shandling puts it (when describing a Hank Kingsley character moment)

Everybody’s stupid, everybody’s smart. Everybody’s bumbling, everybody’s intelligent… We’re all different things at different times.

And that’s when your characters become human, I suppose.

Apr 22 2012

Comedy Sketches – A Spotter’s Guide

In which I present a list of different types of comedy sketch, because why not, and also because if you’re writing a sketch, maybe this will help.
(Note: this list is not exhaustive, although it exhausted me.)

INVERSION

Up is down, black is white, dogs and cats living together… Inversion sketches present a character or situation behaving the opposite to what we might expect. For characters, this will often be an inversion of status: a childish judge, an over-emotional nightclub bouncer, a Tory MP with a human heart (satire).

MISDIRECTION / PULL BACK AND REVEAL

Best kept short. An example would be a CSI-type set up, with experts gathered around an unseen “corpse” talking about signs of burning, teeth marks, spatter patterns etc – THEY’RE ONLY LOOKING AT A PIZZA! LOL!

EXAGGERATION

An exaggeration sketch will take a recognisable situation and distort it via exaggeration. Possibly I didn’t need to write that.

DISPLACEMENT

A sketch in which we take a character and put them in a completely inappropriate/unexpected environment. Prince Philip on Pointless, Bear Grylls on a perfume counter (ooh, that’s good, I might use that).

ANACHRONISM

A sketch in which characters/situations shouldn’t be together as they belong in different eras – Henry VIII having to deal with a chugger, or Hitler signing on (don’t do this one). Or Armstrong and Miller’s WW2 Fighter Pilots – the look is one era, the dialogue is another. Random.

THE ESCALATOR

Escalator sketches start off sensible and then ramp up the absurdity until they end up being completely silly/surreal. See Python’s Four Yorkshiremen boasting who had the worst childhood, or the dirty knife sketch.

PARODY

See Scary Movie. Or rather don’t. See French and Saunders’ movie parody sketches, or anything John Culshaw does. Or, again, don’t see those. Let’s avoid parody.

THE LIST / REPETITION SKETCH

Pick a topic, load up wikipedia, you’re away.

I’M WITH STUPID

There’s this normal character, right, and then there’s this not-normal character. And the normal character reacts to the not-normal one. A classic sketch ensues.

REFRAMING

A sketch which relocates an activity. General election in Narnia.

THE WORLD’S WORST

Think of a job or activity. Think of the very worst person who could be doing it. Write that.

X-RAY / HANG A LANTERN SKETCH

Highlighting the absurdity of a character or situation by having the characters point it all out. Can also include “meta sketches” – sketches which are about themselves. Clever.

That’s probably enough taxonomising of comedy for now. But if you can think of any other categories, or better examples than the ones I’ve got, let me know and I’ll see about updating the list.

Jul 25 2011

Shooting Stars

Hoorah! I have got two jokes in the next series of Shooting Stars, airing in the Autumn. I hope they are good jokes. I imagine it will go something like this:



The man on the left doesn’t really get it, but that’s ok, my jokes are not for everyone. He probably has a lot on his mind anyway. And if he doesn’t like the first of my jokes, he’s really going to hate the second one, I expect. But I’m not going to worry too much about him, because the man in front of him is going to lose his shit completely when he hears my second great joke, especially if it’s the one about trains.

Anyway, if you hear a joke on the next series of Shooting Stars which makes you lose your shit completely, it might well be mine. In fact, let’s assume it is and say no more about it.

Feb 28 2011

Darren Aronofsky’s Rules for Writing

Writers’ Block just screened Pi at the ARC in Stockton, for the first of our monthly cinema nights there. I did a bit of research (ie tried to get Wikipedia to do my job for me) for my expert introduction to the film and I stumbled across the rules that Aronofsky followed during the writing of Pi’s first draft. They’re good rules!

1. Always move forward. If you have a problem type through it.
2. Only take a break after something good happens on the page or you accomplish a goal. No breaks for confusion (type through it).
3. Ten pages a day minimum.
4. Only go back to add something. Do not remove contradictions, just make a note.
5. Do it. Suffer, live, cry, struggle for one week. You’ll feel like a million bucks by the fifteenth.
6. Have fun.

Taken from Darren Aronofsky’s diary of the making of Pi.

The screening went well. Only ten punters, but from tiny acorns all big elephants do grow, so hopefully there’ll be a few more in for next month’s screening of The Big Lebowski, which, let’s face it, is a bit more of a crowd pleaser what with it being more about quirky characters being funny and less heavy on the maths, insects, headaches, drills and whatnot. The maths, insects, headaches and drills demographic is dwindling, man.

Nov 27 2009

The Story of Grass

Gus Hughes and I have found a publisher for our upcoming ‘zine, The Story of Grass – Aloha ‘Ino Press. We like them because they have nice shoes and because they don’t actually exist in any meaningful way.

The zine itself is progressing quite quickly. Just had a googlechat with Gus (he’s based in Dublin so we’re doing everything remotely) about what we still need to do. Best part of the conversation:

today im facing having to draw a woman nailed to a cross behind a desk giving directions james

There’s a man happy in his work. I don’t know when it will be finished; Gus is a very busy man, and I’m very lazy, but every day Gus sends new pages and i’m just blown away by how they are looking.

Need to look into how to sell the thing, I suppose. Anyone out there had any experience flogging a zine?

Nov 26 2009

Friday’s Short Story

A bat flew through Bruce Wayne’s window. Superman was rocketed to Earth from a dying planet.

I was nine and tidying up the bookshelves in the corner of the classroom, because I was a good boy and I got asked to do things like that. The rest of the class were busy with a maths worksheet. I didn’t like maths. I liked being a good boy. I was quiet, I kept myself to myself. I liked tidying the shelves, putting everything in order.

The classroom door opened and in came Mrs Ramshaw; huge, hairy and angry, a furious grey-permed sunset of a face above a formless planet of a body. With her was a little girl who had obviously just been crying.

“Mrs Murphy, Shelley says that one of the big boys made her cry at dinner time. Shelley, can you see the boy who made you cry?”

Shelley scanned the class. Everybody, boys and girls, looked guilty. They fiddled with pencil cases, looked at the ceiling. I tidied the shelves.

It was me. It was me who had made Shelley cry. I wasn’t a good boy. I was a bad boy. I had done it and I was going to get told off. Mrs Ramshaw would shout at me in front of everybody. I might get the slipper. My stomach felt cold and empty as fear and guilt and more fear replaced the blood in my veins. Being told off was the worst thing in the world. The universe was looking at me, cold indifference had turned to icy interest. This was not an improvement.

“Can you see the boy, Shelley?”

I kept tidying. Putting the shelves in order.

“No,” said Shelley.

Shelley couldn’t see me because I was tidying the shelves because I was a good boy.

“Sorry to disturb you, Mrs Murphy. Come on, Shelley. We’ll try Class C.”

They left.

School is where you learn the most useful lessons. Everything was in order. I didn’t get told off. Good boys tidy the shelves during maths and good boys don’t get told off. The emptiness in my tummy turned to warmth. The best feeling in the world: relief. I had got away with it. And the shelves were neat and tidy and the universe was looking away from me again.

I would never be bad again. Honest. I’m a good boy.

I am very quiet and keep myself to myself.

******
Secret Origin by Harris
more tiny tales

Nov 20 2009

Army Man

I’ve been reading Simpsons Confidential by John Ortved. Delving behind the scenes of the making of The Simpsons, it’s absolutely fascinating, particularly when it concentrates on the writers who made the show as funny as it was. Two names stand out: John Schwartzwelder and George Meyer, both of whom stamped their personality and humour on the series.

The book mentions that Meyer produced, and Schwartzwelder wrote for, three issues of a self-published comedy magazine called Army Man.

Sam [Simon] got quite a bit of his writing staff from the list of writing credits in Army Man… In a sense, that little magazine was the father of the show.
- Simpsons Confidential

Quite a claim for what was basically a few photocopied pages of jokes and cartoons.

The only rule was that the stuff had to be funny and pretty short.
- George Meyer

After reading about it, I really wanted to get my hands on a copy. Oh! Thank you internet! You can download the whole thing here: Army Man.

It’s rough, and funny, and weird and well worth a read.

And it’s sparked the idea to do something similar. Well… similarly photocopied anyway. So Mr Gus Hughes and I have started work on our own little magazine, with words and pictures and all that good stuff. It’s looking fine in our heads, but we understand that this isn’t good enough and that we need to get some of it on paper. Wish us luck!

Nov 15 2009

The Global Short Story Competition

It’s a monthly short story competition, with a top prize of £100 and a runner’s up prize of £25 every month.

The downside: £5 entry fee.

Still, it’s local (Darlington), it has the backing of Bill Bryson, and it gets entries from around the world. Worth a punt. I just uploaded Them Bloody Kids, which is well below the 2000 word limit. Maybe I’ll get a prize for brevity.

Anyway, if you’re interested: The Global Short Story Competition.