Second year of medical school is taking up my blogging time! But I thought I'd share with you writers and fiction fans a resource I recently discovered. It's called Automatic Pilot, and it's about how to write the first episode of a TV show.
Next
to Syd Field's Screenplay textbook,
I'd say Bill Taub's Automatic
Pilot ranks
as one of the best beginning screenwriting resources I've yet
encountered.
“Well,
stranger, what have you encountered? What
does that even mean?”
Good question. I'm not an expert screenwriter, but I am an expert
“screenwriter-resources” purveyor, if such a pitiful occupation
exists. From college classes to online classes to online resources to
books to at least three or four different “screenwriting resource
companies”--eh, I've actually spent a few hundred bucks studying
screenwriting. (Shivers in shame)
A
number of those resources tend to repeat the same basics over again,
so I really liked that while Automatic
Pilot included
the most important fundamentals of screenwriting for beginners, it
also delved into TV-industry-niche specifics, a wide variety of
structure techniques and suggestions, and Taub's own positive writing
philosophy. The strong motivational tone of the book makes you feel
like you've got people on your side—because when you're writing for
yourself you've got you on
your side, Taub might say—and as someone who used to write for a
living I found that incredibly empowering. In med school you don't
get a lot of time to read, so I bought the audiobook to play while I
ate or whatever. Taub's encouragement was, for me, the writerly
equivalent of blasting rap music on the highway, or rocking out when
you're pumping iron: I got pumped up! There's something to be said
for that.
For
those of you who prefer more concrete definitions of value, we should
probably talk about $$$. Automatic
Pilot is
actually a compilation of all the resources and reading material from
a University class Taub taught/teaches on writing good pilot episodes
for television. As you may know,
it usually costs more than twenty bucks to access a University-level
screenwriting class.
Even cheap professional
classes online bill as much as $90—I got a discount on a decent
“Third Act” class for $45 once, but generally comparable
screenwriting classes enter the ring weighing in nearer the hundreds
mark.
To give you a more detailed cost-analysis, Hal Croasmun from
ScreenwritingU charges $90 for a class that involves about thirty
pages of reading material and no feedback from the professor. I'm not
downing on Croasmun—apparently he's pumping out writers who make
deals left and right—but pointing out, to you, that for $20 or less
I can get nearly 200 pages from Taub, all new and unique information
pertaining specifically to the TV industry. That's pretty good math.
Automatic
Pilot is
heavy with repetition, though. That's probably less of an issue in
the hardcopy (which I also bought
to keep as a skim-able resource), and for some folks repetition's
essential to enhance learning, so it's not necessarily a drawback. I
found it a bit much sometimes, but on the other hand a lot of the
repetition was also a lot of the motivational cheerleading I
enjoyed.
If
you're looking for new plotting tricks and tools to amp up your game;
if you're unfamiliar with a lot of TV-writing terminology and
structural customs; and if you'd like to tap the brains of multiple
TV-writing experts before you start writing yourself into a
crash-and-burn, a little repetition and two Red Robin meals is a fair
price to pay.
I think, anyway.
What do you guys think? Any other screenwriting
resources you've run into lately that you like?