I hope you’ve been enjoying Writing Advice Wednesday for the last few months, but I’m trying something different for the rest of the year’s posts. As well as a relevant video essay I’ve found, I’ll be giving you writing exercises to kickstart you out of a slump or inspire you to reach higher or dig deeper. It’s exercises like this that form part of my One Hour Screenwriter course, which will help you write an entire feature film script in 22 weeks. You can purchase it at the shop here. You can also read testimonies here that show my methods have worked for a variety of writers.

This week, stop looking at your screen!

Fill the silence with your own story

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When stumbling against a block in creating your story, I strongly suggest you undertake a media fast. What is a media fast? It is similar, in concept, to a food fast.

Dietary fasting helps lighten the body’s physical load and allows it to rest digestively. Taking a break from all the stories in the media can lighten the load on your brain and allow more space for your own story to gestate and form.

For years, holistic physician Dr. Andrew Weil has recommended occasionally taking a media break. He believes media fasts are an integral part of good health and are outlined in his book, Eight Weeks to Optimum Health.

Dr. Weil writes, “I think it’s useful to broaden the concept of nutrition to include what we put into our consciousness as well (as into our bodies).” He writes, “Many people do not exercise much control…and as a result take in a lot of mental junk food.”

I strongly recommend that you take a break from all factual and fictional media stories to get over a block in your story.

Don’t read the newspaper or any magazines. Don’t watch any television news or entertainment programs. Don’t listen to talk radio. Don’t search the Internet for news, entertainment, or research.

Don’t read any other books, fact or fiction. Don’t even read the jokes and stories people send via email.

When you have down time allow yourself to be surrounded by silence or instrumental music. Go for a long walk, sit in a park, take relaxing bath. Keep the din of media story words at bay as completely as possible.

Why is a media fast important? It will help you feel calmer, more relaxed, and focused. When you still the relentless media clatter, you make more time for idle silence, quiet moments of reflection, and staring off into space. Allow yourself to be bored.

In those empty moment you will find time to daydream, muse, and think. Without media distractions, your story will begin to fill your head effortlessly. Be quiet enough to listen to your story whisper to you.

Turning off and tuning out all those competing stories will help you tune in and communicate more clearly with your characters. Let them fill in the blank space of your quiet moments. Listen to your characters’ voices in your head. Hear what they have to say.

Don’t forget to get more sleep and allow your unconscious mind to do its important work. I cannot stress enough that proper rest is a crucial tool to aid your imagination. Resting allows our creative impulses to bubble to the surface.

Do you dream at night? Write down your dreams. Are there any specific dream images or fragments that stick with you after waking? Write them down. What might these wisps have to do with your story?

Think about a story problem before going to bed and see what emerges when morning comes. Write down your first thoughts on waking. Even if they don’t make sense in the moment, write them down and come back to them later.

Don’t worry about being politically or socially irresponsible or missing out on essential news during your fast. It’s impossible in today’s invasive media world to miss truly significant events. Believe me, someone will tell you if anything really important happens.

Give yourself the gift of a few weeks of silence to allow your story to fill the void you create.

Sit, stare and think. Be still. Be at rest. Your story will coalesce in those empty moments. Listen to the quiet inner voice that is your creative consciousness. Allow your own words to fill the stillness and listen carefully as your characters begin to speak more clearly!

Hermann Hesse, Nobel Prize winner for Literature says it clearly: “Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.” Go inside when facing a writing block.

The lesson here is FaceBook and Zuckerberg’s deft handing of The Social Network movie.  Despite being a fictional and immensely unflattering protrait, Zuckerberg wisely refrained from going ballistic in the press– which wouldn’t have helped and would have only made him look worse.  Now he is at the point of being able to laugh at the whole thing and wins points for not taking himself too seriously.

In my opinion, that’s why Arnold Schwarzenegger is a much bigger star than Steven Seagal.  Schwarzenegger doesn’t take himself too seriously and Seagal takes himself way too seriously.  To survive and thrive in the entertainment, lighten up and and don’t be afraid to share a laugh at your own expense.  The ability to do that shows a touch of humility and vulnerability– and that is always appealing.

The future is arriving faster that anyone expected.  It is playing out in the biggest pay-TV provider, Comcast’s  takeover of NBC and Rupert Murdock’s battle with Time Warner cable.   Here’s an interesting article from the Hollywood Reporter on how the TV business model is unravelling in front of our very eyes.

For more than 60 years, TV stations have broadcast news, sports and entertainment for free and made their money by showing commercials. That might not work much longer.

The business model is unraveling at ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox and the local stations that carry the networks’ programming. Cable TV and the Web have fractured the audience for free TV and siphoned its ad dollars. The recession has squeezed advertising further, forcing broadcasters to accelerate their push for new revenue to pay for programming.

That will play out in living rooms across the country. The changes could mean higher cable or satellite TV bills, as the networks and local stations squeeze more fees from pay-TV providers such as Comcast and DirecTV for the right to show broadcast TV channels in their lineups. The networks might even ditch free broadcast signals in the next few years. Instead, they could operate as cable channels — a move that could spell the end of free TV as Americans have known it since the 1940s.

Full article here

YouTube has reportedly moved closer to offering users subscription services to access full-length TV shows, in an effort to tempt more broadcasters on board.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of YouTube parent Google, said in April that “micropayments and other forms of subscription models” were coming. Now, Google’s VP of content partnerships David Eun has hinted that this is on the horizon.

“We’re making some interesting bets on long-form content; not all content is accessible to us with the advertising model,” said Eun In an interview with Reuters, which reported that subscriptions were the favoured option.

Full story on YouTube’s possible pay model here

In these clips Gary Carter talks about his company in the changing landscape of digital storytelling.  He is a real visionary about media and is speaking at the nextMEDIA conference in Banff, where the world’s leading edge content creators, aggregators, broadcasters, agencies, advertisers, and solution-providers meet annually to discuss the business of the business.

PART ONE

Fremantle Media. The company’s history mirrors the history of screen-based media itself. Gary Carter tells the story of Fremantle from its earliest days to the present age of format wars and reality television.

PART TWO

Gary Carter talks about the run-up to the digital revolution from an age of distribution, talent and technology scarcity to our now ubiquitous ability to produce content and distribute it freely over the internet.

PART THREE

Gary Carter discusses the repercussions of the digital revolution for an old-media company like Fremantle, bound to the traditional models of content production, distribution and strorytelling.

PART FOUR

Gary Carter talks about the collapse of the advertising economy and its impact on screen-based content production. According to Carter, it’s a crisis of platform which is being solved by the millions of individuals with access to cheap digital recording technology and zero-cost distribution channels.

PART FIVE

Q & A:  Gary Carter talks about broadcasters’ unhealthy addiction to the advertising model, and what lies ahead for traditional television.

In creating my own online drama I took an in-depth look at other series– Why did they succeed or why did they fail.  Here are my observations about a very spectacular public failure: Quarterlife.   These are the take-aways from my analysis of the web series created by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the creators of television’s Thirtysomething and Once and Again and producers of My So-Called Life.  You can watch the series here:  Quarterlife on MySpace

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Without Authenticity and Urgency the Audience Disengages

The series, Quarterlife, is named for the phenomena of the “Quarterlife Crisis.”   This is the emotional angst and anxiety that hits around age 25 – 29, when college grads wonder: “What am I doing with my life?  Why am I broke, bored and/or stalled in my career?”  The iconic television series, Friends, explored the same territory in a comedy.

There is a sense of entitlement and astonishment among the Quarterlife characters summed up by Dylan Krieger (Bitsie Tulloch), the protagonist:  “A sad truth about my generation is that we were all geniuses in elementary school but apparently the people who deal with us (now) never got our transcripts because they don’t seem to be aware of this.”

This sense of entitlement and astonishment seemed to also accompany the series’ failure.  What went wrong?  Don’t you all know we’re television geniuses?

Quarterlife lacked the necessary authenticity and urgency to engage its core web audience.  The producers didn’t fully understand their audience and the series felt too much like a cynical ploy.  The Friends characters took themselves much less seriously.  Quarterlife simply can’t sustain all the self-important angst.

New Media Ploys Annoy the Audience

Quarterlife was originally conceived as a broadcast series but didn’t get picked up by a major network.  Herskovitz and Zwick broke the series down into 8-minute segments.  They independently financed the show and created special channels for the series on MySpace and YouTube.

Rather than creating content specifically for this new medium and this particular audience, the creators recycled a conventional series and distributed it in smaller chunks.  Their goal seems to have been to get back on broadcast television as quickly as possible.

Despite the social networking aspects of the Quarterlife website, it seems the creators did not fully embrace (or fully understand) their audience and this new storytelling medium.  After a much-hyped launch, viewership dropped precipitously.

“Podcasting News, for example, gleefully pronounced the web series a bomb in December, running a chart of each episode’s views on YouTube that looked like a graph of Ron Paul’s 2009 delegate count, noting that the show was getting fewer web views than ‘sleeping kitties, graffiti videos or even a clip of Sims in labor’,’” wrote Los Angeles Times media columnist Patrick Goldstein.

Goldstein also suggests that Quarterlife served as a magnet for web devotees’ scorn for all the Old Media Titans who’ve been invading their turf, hoping to turn the new medium into another profit center.

Herskowitz didn’t help matters when he wrote in Slate:  “Most of it (web entertainment) is simply incompetence and ignorance masquerading as an ‘Internet style.’ And until now no one had tried anything that would actually engage the emotions of an audience.”

It’s ironic that Quarterlife doesn’t engage the emotions of their audience in a way that is authentic or that rings true.

Emotions Not Experienced Directly Distance the Audience

Protagonist Dylan Krieger narrates the series via her video blog.  She is a would-be writer stuck in an assistant’s job at a woman’s magazine, working for a boss who tries to steal her ideas.

The creators assume that video-blogging is the same thing as writing.  The key difference, as a commentator on New TeeVee pointed out, is:  “A writer wants an audience for her ideas and observations; a video blogger wants an audience for herself.”

This personal performance aspect is the narcissism of “Watch me – Look at me – I am what’s important here.”

In her video-blog, Dylan says that her “curse” is to see what people are thinking and feeling. In the visual language of storytelling, that is the reaction shot that shows the audience a character’s thoughts and feelings writ large on the actor’s face.

When Dylan narrates, as video blog performer, she prevents the audience from experiencing these emotions, thoughts and feelings directly with the characters.  Her performance distances us from the characters and is a classic violation of the “show don’t tell” rule of storytelling.  Her narration tells us what we’ve already seen or should have already seen ourselves.

If, however, personal narration directly contradicts what we have seen (or will see) then that shows us something new and interesting about the narrator and/or the other characters.   This counterpoint works wonderfully in the classic Herskovitz and Zwick produced series (created by Winnie Holtzman), My So-Called Life.

That show’s high school protagonist, Angela Chase (Claire Danes), is hopelessly infatuated with Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto).  She remarks romantically that he is always closing his eyes as if it hurts to look at things.  Later, we see him dousing his eyes to get the stoner-dude red out with Visine.

There is no such ironic or poignant counterpoint in Dylan’s narration.  She tells us what we should see for ourselves or repeats what we already know.

Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) muses publicly about personal concerns via her newspaper column in Sex and the City.  The opening image vividly shows the contrast between the public and the private in Carrie’s life when she is splashed with dirty water as a bus plastered with her glamorous billboard image roars past. Sex and the City uses humor and irony to illuminate the disappointments, anxieties and dissatisfactions of a slightly older age group than Quarterlife.  Carrie, the wry witty writer, is not the self-conscious performer that Dylan is as a video-blogger.  The Friends characters also took themselves much less seriously.  Quarterlife simply can’t sustain the self-important angst.

Boredom, Stasis and Frustration Aren’t Urgent

As a friend has pointed out, “there is a reason so many serial dramas are set in hospitals and police stations, these environments provide an automatic sense of urgency, conflict and high stakes to a story.”

Articulate, over-sensitive, highly-educated, middle class white kids bemoaning the lack of a “special and gifted” life track (which is their due) doesn’t provide much emotional urgency.   There is little at stake if they can fall back on Mom and Dad, as one character does.

Fans watch football matches or basketball games because there is a sense that if you aren’t present or watching, cheering as hard as you can for your team, something terrible might happen.  The strength of your passionate concern will somehow help to put your players over the top.

Serial drama fans need to feel the same passionate concern and  personal involvement with the characters whose lives they follow.  What is the worst that can happen? Why do we have to watch to prevent that terrible outcome?  Why must we yell at the screen:  “No, no, don’t do that!”  What do we fear for our characters?  Why is it urgently important that we watch?

Interpersonal relationship can have that kind of emotional tension and urgency.  The stakes just have to be high enough.  The conflicts have to be intense and personal enough to evoke our deepest concern.  We have to be worried about the characters!

Weak Conflict Undercuts Urgency

The biggest potential conflict and most interesting social question in Quarterlife is weakened if not completely neutered.

Dylan’s friends don’t seem to care that she is violating their privacy, disclosing intimate information, betraying confidences and spewing interpersonal revelations to anyone who has access to a computer.

She names names.  She distributes secretly recorded videos.  She commits the emotional equivalent of a physical violation.  Outside of a minor emotional hissy-fit, this potential conflict quickly passes by the wayside.  Nobody really pays attention to Dylan’s video blog.

Her revelations cause little conflict within the group.  They cause no conflict outside the group (no outsider causes a problem for the characters because of information learned through Dylan’s blog).

It is very startling and disconcerting when strangers know the intimate details of your life and remark on them to you.  What happens when everyone knows your whereabouts and/or your personal business?  How does that cause problems and create conflict for the characters?

What are the limits of personal privacy and the ethics of personal disclosures about others?  All those questions are interesting opportunities for conflict that could come from who the characters are as individuals and how they might view the world (or privacy) differently.

If Dylan’s blog has no effect on the other characters, what is the dramatic point other than to show her on a web cam?   This feels like the creators trying to be hip but it comes off as empty, false and inauthentic.

When It Isn’t Urgent It Has to Be Funny

The characters in Quarterlife are remarkable for their lack of humor or any wicked sense of fun.  They take themselves and their lives way too seriously.  The series doesn’t have a vivid appreciation of the absurd.

The classic series, Friends, mined this age group’s anxiety, boredom and frustration brilliantly.  The theme song by The Rembrandts sums up the same storytelling territory:

“So no one told you life was going to be this way.

Your job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s DOA.

It’s like you’re always stuck in second gear,

Well, it hasn’t been your day, your week, your month, or even your year.

I’ll be there for you…  And you’ll be there for me too.”

Friends had wit, warmth and sense of the absurdity of life (and lasted many years past the characters’ “Quarterlife Crisis” because the fans weren’t willing to let the characters go).  Contrast this with the previous quote:

“A sad truth about my generation is that we were all geniuses in elementary school but apparently the people who deal with us (now) never got our transcripts because they don’t seem to be aware of this.”   (Poor me!)

Which show would you rather watch?

Seinfeld, originally featuring the same or slightly older age group, totally lacked urgency and was proud of it.  That show was about nothing more critical than finding a parking place, making a reservation at a restaurant or buying soup at a lunch counter.  The series had a wicked sense of humor; made us laugh and we were satisfied and came back for more.  If it’s not emotionally dramatic then it must be laugh-out-loud funny.

What Was NBC Thinking?

Quarterlife was picked up by NBC at a time when broadcast dramas were running out of stockpiled scripts and scripted shows were shutting down all over Hollywood during the strike.   It seemed like a slam-dunk opportunity.  Then, just like the story concept for the series characters, reality hit and it was nothing like anyone imagined.

The show only had 3.1 million viewers in its NBC broadcast debut, the worst in-season performance in the 10 p.m. hour slot by an NBC show in at least 17 years. The series also got hammered in the adult 18 – 49 demographic, where it managed only a 1.3 rating.  The show was pulled from NBC’s schedule after only one episode.

Why would NBC think that a series allegedly conceived for and widely available on the web would attract the same audience age group in a repeat on broadcast television? Everyone who was interested had seen the show already.

If viewers can watch on their own time on the web why should anyone watch the show on NBC’s time? What was new, different or added to the viewing experience during the rebroadcast?  The network didn’t seem to understand the core audience either.

There is an element of condescension (or maybe contempt) in all of this exemplified by the words the creators put in Dylan’s mouth:  “We blog to exist, therefore we… we are idiots.”  A show on any media platform is really in trouble when the creators have contempt for or belittle their own characters.

I will be there and hope to see some of you too!

.WHAT: AFI DigiFest 2009

WHEN: Wednesday, November 4th & Thursday, November 5th

WHERE: Mann Chinese Theater, Hollywood CA

COST: Free of Charge. You must register.

REGISTER: http://www.afi.com/education/dcl/

DAY ONE – November 4

10 am – 5 pm

DAY ONE of AFI DigiFest showcases cutting-edge digital media prototypes incubated in the AFI Digital Content Lab during the previous year. For eleven years, the Lab has convened teams of industry experts who brainstorm solutions to cross-platform challenges. This year’s projects illustrate the ever-widening spectrum of development and distribution options open to today’s creators while optimizing for the consumers’ eagerness to view and interact with content across a variety of screens.

This year, featured projects include:

• a social network and proposed marketing plan for INTERVIEW PROJECT PRESENTED BY DAVIDLYNCH.COM;

• a proposed online strategy for engaging youth in a series of relevant environmental action challenges for the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation;

• a mobile application that provide an interactive past-to-future timeline for an innovative ITVS cross-platform micro-series;

• an interactive mentoring environment for One Economy that encourages students from low-income families to learn more about science as a career;

• a MOBILE STORY MAKER session with longtime filmmaker L.M. Kit Carson, who shot the deeply moving micro-series AFRICA DIARY using a Nokia mobile phone as camera. The series will soon air on the Sundance Channel.

Cocktail party and poolside screening of select short films at the historic Roosevelt Hotel to follow.

DAY TWO – November 5

10 am – 5 pm

DAY TWO of AFI DigiFest offers a curated look at the most innovative digital media productions released during the past year. An eye-opening window onto the emerging digital media landscape, the productions highlighted during AFI DigiFest are consistently dynamic, aggressively cross-platform, and always inventive.

Among the invited presenters this year are:

• DISTRICT 9, a behind-the scenes look at games and an augmented reality application created by production house Trigger;

• LIVE MUSIC, a 3D animation pieced together from contributions by thousands of animators from around the world, masterminded by Mass Animation’s Yair Landau, former vice-chair of Sony Pictures;

• URBAN WOLF, a surveillance camera-based micro-series drama by Parisian director Laurent Touil Tartour;

• MANOBI, an innovative mobile phone application that has helped raise the standard of living for Senegalese farmers and fishermen;

• FIRST THINGS LAST, a dynamic and visual storytelling application for the iPhone created by ScrollMotion;

• ESCAPE FROM CITY 17, a stunning meld of machinima and live action created by the multi-talented Purchase Brothers for less than $500;

• NAKED SKY ENTERTAINMENT, a surprising look at what our collective augmented reality may well look like a year from now;

• MR. HULOT’S HOLIDAY, a restoration of Jacques Tati’s 1953 whimsical tale presented by Thomson/Technicolor;

• and more!

Cocktail party in celebration of Planet Illogica in the historic Roosevelt Hotel Ballroom (home to the first Academy Awards).

Register: http://www.afi.com/education/dcl/

Jazz musician Bill Cunliffe loves television — but he doesn’t watch it on a TV set.

“I can watch anything I want, any time I want,” he said, “on my bottom-of-the-line Mac PowerBook.”

Cunliffe, 53, is one of a growing number of TV viewers who get all their programs via the Internet.

For reasons that include saving money, convenience, personal choice and a hatred of commercials, these viewers are cutting the cord from cable, satellite and telephone suppliers of TV service, and even throwing away the rabbit ears and other antennas that brought in over-the-air broadcasts.

“The idea that you come home and your entertainment choices are dictated on what some entertainment channel decides is not for me,” said video game producer Chris Codding, whose Venice apartment has a 52-inch Sony television that’s used only for video games and viewing DVDs.

“I really like the concept of having something in your mind that you want to watch,” Codding said, “and then going to the computer and watching it.”

There have been no mainstream studies on just how many people have cut the cord to established TV program suppliers, and the percentage of viewers who have done it is probably small. But there’s plenty of evidence that the number of people who are watching TV shows online is growing.

Read the whole article here:  http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-notv26-2009oct26,0,3559474.story

These text message based formats have become a best-selling genre in Japan. The authors publish under one-word pen names and usually remain anonymous. The stories are about love and loss, tragedy and recovery, betrayal and resolution.

Below is an excerpt from a Time Magazine article about the phenomena of moble-novel writing.

Today, there are a million titles in Maho i-Rando’s online library — one for every six members, who are mostly women in their teens and 20s. That represents a lot of phone time. “Young Japanese access the Internet more from their cell phones than their PCs,” says Misa Matsuda, a professor of literature and sociology at Tokyo’s Chuo University. “Cell phones occupy pockets of spare time in people’s daily lives — especially for exchanging nonurgent e-mails, playing games, visiting fortune-telling sites. Keitai shosetsu fit in that tradition.”

It was a male writer known as Yoshi who had the idea of bringing out the first keitai shosetsu in book form. In doing so, became one of the first to break away from the pack. His self-published Deep Love (2002) was a collection of racy tales about a teenage prostitute in Tokyo that had previously appeared online. As a book, it sold 2.5 million copies and became a manga, a TV series and a film. It was also greeted as a one-off — the product of a quick-thinking writer-entrepreneur. But Maho i-Rando members soon began pleading with the site’s owners to see their favorite stories in hard copy, too, and its first books debuted in 2005. “Mobile novels are created and consumed by a generation of young people in Japan that demands to be heard,” says John Possman, former head of Tokyo entertainment consultancy Dragonfly Revolution. “It is truly pop culture.”

It has also become big business. In major book wholesaler Tohan’s 2007 best-seller list, five out of the top 10 books in the fiction category are keitai shosetsu, including the top three. The new genre is provoking fierce indignation among Japan’s literati, many of whom think that keitai shosetsu should stay on cell-phone screens. But it is undeniably shaking up a publishing industry whose sales have been declining for a decade. A professional author of fiction is lucky to sell more than a few thousand copies of a title. A popular cell-phone novelist sells several hundred thousand, and recruitment for new talent is intense. “Find the novelist in you!” online ads cry. “Make your debut!”

They are written with the participation of the audience. A girl will start posting her “diary” on a site called “Magic Land.” Readers begin to comment, add their own experiences and advice and urge the writer on. U.S. sites devoted to mobile novels are in beta launch here.