Sleep writing

Writing a television pilot is unlike anything I've ever experienced. It's creative, it's exhilarating and frankly, it's hard. There are so many moving pieces, so much to consider, so much to invent and it all has to work together just perfectly to make an interesting script that might possibly get made.

I love it.

I've been working on my new half-hour comedy pilot for a few weeks now. I started with some vague ideas of what I wanted to write about. Then I got some inspiration from a PBS documentary on the Independent Woman on Television. I studied Lucy, Mary Tyler Moore, Betty White, Roseanne, Murphy Brown. I looked at what I wanted to write about and how I best could tell my story. Because really, that's the key. I have to figure out how to make the script interesting from my point of view. Not yours, not someone else's but mine. That's the key to making the magic.

Last week I started writing paragraphs about the main characters, four in all. I picked names and started envisioning sets. (I'm writing a multi-camera sitcom so it'll be filmed on a soundstage in front of an audience, like a play that's being recorded.) Then I set to outlining. I have notes from each class I've taken and each book or article I've read and I poured over and over them. Then Friday I spent three hours writing one sentence. But one really important sentence. The logline. It's an encapsulation of a script. It has a formula and it has to tell the reader almost everything he or she needs to know about the script in five seconds. Finally, by the end of the workweek I'd come up with that one sentence and posted it on my whiteboard, ready to get to work Monday morning.

And then Saturday night happened. I laid down in bed at about 12:15am and I shut my eyes. Angela and I had been watching TV and I was to tired to read as I normally would. I laid there, letting my mind wander and before I knew it, I was thinking about that logline and all of the notes still laying on my desk. And suddenly I had this image in my brain of my main characters and how we'd come to meet them in the first few moments of the pilot. I saw the episode begin and then play out almost as if I was watching it on a screen. And I have to admit, I said to myself, oh you'll remember it in the morning. Go to sleep.

But I couldn't turn the screen off. So I turned on the light and grabbed a legal pad and started writing. I scribbled as fast as I could and caught most of the scene as it played in my mind. Then I set the notebook aside, laid back down and turned off the light. I'd come up with the first scene in my pilot.

But my brain wasn't done for the night. As I laid there, the show came back from the commercial break and started playing again. I saw the next scene and another character enter and I knew I had to keep writing. So I turned on the light again and found the paper and my pen. I scribbled some more. Then I got up and went to my desk, wrote down a short outline for the entire episode's script and looked around the room. It was two o'clock in the morning. My eyes were burning, my body was begging for bed but my mind was reeling. Would it be funny in the morning? I had no idea. Would I be able to translate the scribbles into script form that would work within the confines of a multi-cam? Again, no idea.

But here's what I did know: These characters I'd been thinking of and playing with and tossing into the mix were talking to me. They were ready to go. And frankly, there's no turning off the screen or the light when that happens.

The verdict: As I looked back over the pages this morning I realized that, yes, they're good. They're what I want to say. They're funny. They're not perfect but no draft ever is. Most of all? They're my story. And I'm so freaking excited about that.