This morning was unpleasant.

That would be because I had my bimonthly IBS attack. Something about eating a bunch of greasy popcorn way too fast early in the morning did not agree with me, so I spent a while in the bathroom once I got to school. That’s never fun. I had to sit there while my body sorted things out, and moved the bad stuff out in waves.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s not big deal. It happens now and then. That’s all.

Had my final Dialogue class this morning. We got unto what is a touchy subject for me : formulas.

All through my VFS education, I have been being taught certain ways to go about writing things. 7 Pillar Beats. Beat sheets. Outlines. And so on.

And all of these things are useful, I assume. But odds are that when I sit down to write something, I am going to just fucking write it. To me, most of this method I am learning is bullshit. It’s for people who need to learn things methodically, bit by bit, step by step.

But I am not that kind of writer. To me, method is crap. The story is what it is to me. It get told however it needs to be told. Method’s only job is to assist in the birth. To that end, method must remain as flexible and form-fitting as possible. Teaching people that there is one way to do it and this is it is, to me, far too restrictive. It’s trying to force the baby into a specific mold.

And I just won’t do that to my happy little brain babies.

It came up because today, my Dialogue prof was the first member of the faculty to admit that there are other ways of doing things. He told us that the important thing is to barf out the story however it occurs to us and only then worry about what form it takes and what needs to be done to clean in up and make it healthy.

And that’s basically what I have been saying, although not exactly in those worlds. ^[1] I am still working on that second part, but the basic idea that you have to get the story out however it comes, even if it comes out in ways that seem ridiculous, makes total sense to me.

I brought up the fact that when I wrote my novels, all I worried about was whether I knew what happened next. I didn’t have a plan, an outline, a beat sheet, or a treatment. I just set off on the journey, and that kept me motivated to keep on writing, because I never knew what was going to happen in the long term.

Now, seeing as very few people have read a single word of my four novels, I have no idea how successful I was in my novel writing endeavors. Maybe anyone in the publishing world would read the first chapters and say “Wow, you didn’t plan this out at all, did you? You should have. This is crap!”. But somehow I don’t think so.

I’m pretty good at the writing part of things.

So I am very glad to have confirmation from a VFS prof that the formulas we have been learning are not the be-all and end-all of Writing The Official Way. Sadly, he also mentioned that studios and such are often looking for things that fit the formula in order to give them some way of cutting through the tens of thousands of scripts they get every year.

He says they even have software that will check scripts for formula compliance now. I have no idea how a piece of software figures out where the second acts break is in a script, let alone whether it’s in the right place, but then again I am not a programmer. So I believe him.

Luckily I am not going into film. I’m a TV guy. I love movies but I have zero desire to write them. And the TV world is far less formulaic. It used to be the opposite, because TV scripts have to fit commercials into their structure and there should be a moment of suspense or drama before each commercial break to make people want to keep watching after they get back from the bathroom.

And that is still true if you are writing for the major networks. But the field is increasingly dominated by the commercial free subscription model services, whether that’s a big game changer like Netflix or the same old pay-TV channels like HBO that have had such success lately. And according to my prof (who works in film, so I am taking this with a grain of salt), what these new players are looking for is unique shows that make their service different from the others.

Music to my ears, if it’s true. I am a unique kind of guy and I deplore the idea of just doing what everyone else is doing. I would love to create a truly fresh and original show some day.

Call me, Netflix!

I am looking forward to being able to fully dedicate myself and my time to TV after the next term. The way it works at VFS is that the first three terms are more general, and the other three are specialized into writing for either TV or film.

TV all the way for me. It’s why I went to VFS in the first place!

Speaking of terms, got some bad news this week : apparently I am getting ten days off between terms.

Total bummer. I don’t want ten days with nothing to do and no focus to my life. I want what we had last time, the Thursday and Friday of the last week off, then back on the horse next Monday. And hell, even then I ended up getting depressed.

But I have no choice, so I will have to figure out some ways to keep from losing my marbles over the break.

Maybe I should keep them in a bag or something….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.