2012 Countdown: Two Weeks to Go
Friday 20th January 2012
There's just under a week to the Early Bird deadline (23.59.59 on Jan 24 GMT) and we've had quite a few scripts in already. Not a massive number, but experience has told us that writers work to a deadline. Last year, 75% of the scripts came in the final week and we had 400 entries on the closing date alone.
What has been successful this year is the return to the Bronze and Silver feedback options that we offered in 2010. We've had a very good response from writers who've taken up the Silver service ("Very helpful and insightful...", "Thanks for the feedback, it's proving invaluable...", "Thanks for your very detailed and constructive critique...", "Your advice was extremely helpful and worth every penny") so we've extended the service which runs out on Jan 21.
It's in our own interests to give people advice on their scripts because we're looking to present the best works that we can to the comedy commissioners. Sometimes the process can be frustrating for the writer but this is the same for the reader - we'll get a script that has great promise but the writer ducks out and chooses either an obvious route for their characters with no twists and turns or decides to take them down a different path to the one laid out in front of them. It's like Dorothy walking up to the Yellow Brick Road and then saying "Oh look, there's the Emerald City Express, it gets you to see the Wizard in 15 minutes and one leaves every half hour." Great for fantasy transport systems, but it doesn't make for much of a story.
The other thing we get is the "let's sit around and talk about it" comedy where all the action takes place out of the room both spacially and temporally. Three or four characters will chat about what happened at a night club the previous evening. If it's so interesting that it's worth recounting, why not show us instead? Taking our Oz analogy again, it would see Dorothy waking up in a monochrome Kansas surrounded by her family and saying, "I just had the most amazing time in technicolor. Aunty Em, put the kettle on, I'm going to talk about it for two hours."
Our advice will always be honest and directed at getting the most improvement that we can from the script that we've been sent. Two writers who took up the Silver option received their feedback, did a rewrite and then took their scripts to our Help! I've Written A Script workshop last weekend where we went through the process again, but this time with a live performance from professional actors. It's all a part of honing their work, and we also get to hear the script read out which gives it another dimension.
But we judge every script against all the others, whether they've taken a feedback option or not, and taking feedback or attending a workshop is no guarantee of success. We also know that we'll get sent a little gem from an unknown writer which will knock our socks off. We're excited. Send us that little gem. It could just be an emerald.