Scriptwriting for Web Series

Writing for the Digital Age

Marie Drennan, Yuri Baranovsky, Vlad Baranovsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351237833
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Scriptwriting for Web Series: Writing for the Digital Age offers aspiring writers a comprehensive how-to guide to scriptwriting for web series in the digital age.

Containing in-depth advice on writing both short- and long-form webisodes as part of a series, as well as standalone pieces, it goes beyond the screenwriting process to discuss production, promotion and copyright in order to offer a well-rounded guide to creating and distributing a successful web series.

Written in a friendly, readable and jargon-free style by an experienced scriptwriting professor and two award-winning web series creators, it offers invaluable professional insights, as well as examples from successful series, sample scripts and interviews with key series creators, writers and industry professionals.

1
Story structure

So now, let’s talk about structure.

You’ve probably heard of three-act structure: stories that have a beginning, a middle and an end. Aristotle first analyzed and articulated this as basic “dramatic structure,” but he didn’t invent it. It evolved out of the way our brains process information and organize experiences into systems of meaning. Our earliest myths and legends follow this structure. Novelists, dramatists, poets, essayists and speechwriters have always used it. Audiences generally expect and respond to it. In fact, for the most part, they require it. If a story feels confusing, boring or pointless, it’s probably because the structure is weak or missing.

Storytelling is a way of guiding the audience through an imaginary experience: pushing the right button at the right time to elicit particular responses (curiosity, sympathy, indignation, amusement, horror, desire, suspense, relief, etc.). For this imaginary experience to work, the audience needs to get the pieces of the story in the right order. Screenwriters must decide what, how much and when to give the audience expositional information to move the plot and attach psychological and emotional cues to indicate the significance of story events to the characters and to prompt the desired response from your viewers.

The goal of any story is to draw the audience into another world where people (or characters, which aren’t always people) are facing challenges of various kinds – maybe extreme, life-threatening ones, maybe only minor inconveniences. But in all stories, there is struggle. In real life, we can get to know people by talking to them, and they can talk to us; in stories, we only have one way to understand a character, and that’s through whatever the writer gives us. There are also degrees of knowing people; not everyone shares their real, vulnerable selves right off the bat, or perhaps ever. But stories aren’t real life; they are carefully crafted versions of life, showing us people (characters) at their most real. To bring a character’s real self forward, the screenwriter puts them in situations that prompt them to demonstrate who they are, and the most effective way to do that is to challenge them – to let the audience understand what the characters want, why they want it so much, how it feels to them not to have it yet, what they’re willing to do to get it. Watching a character have a good day that starts fine and ends fine, with nothing prompting them to show us anything deeper than a casual interest in what’s going on around them, doesn’t give us any insight and isn’t going to feel like we’re getting a story.

Imagine telling a friend about your day. If you say, “It was great, I got an A on my history final and then went to a really good yoga class. Later a bunch of us are going to karaoke.” Your friend might be glad your day was good, but won’t be intensely interested and hasn’t learned much about you. That’s fine for real life; we don’t always have to be revealing our true selves or have drama to report. But stories are different. We do need the people we’re watching to experience some drama. Now imagine telling your friend that you saw your ex at the gym, with a new love interest who also happens to be your worst enemy. That’s going to get your friend interested. Let’s add that you were mortified because you were all sweaty and looked terrible, and you’ve realized you didn’t appreciate what you had, and you desperately want to get back together with your ex. That adds emotional depth because you’re showing your vulnerability and revealing what you need. Then you tell your friend that you want to text the ex to see if they feel the same way. Your friend will be highly engaged at this point, probably warning you that, if the ex is already with someone else, that would be disastrous and humiliating. But you really regret breaking up with the ex and can’t stand to see them moving on so quickly; this pain drives you to try anything to win them back. You begin by stalking your ex and the new love interest on Facebook, but you get caught, and now you seem pathetic and crazy. You try something else that completely backfires. You keep trying, but you fail more epically each time. Now we’ve got something we can call a story.

Story consists of events and feelings – external challenges and internal struggles. Stories must tie elements of the plot to emotional effects on the characters so that, at every turn, the audience can engage the way your friend did when you revealed your inner torment and your doomed plan. When the screenwriter combines dramatic events and the feelings they bring up, it creates energy for the story. This energy is what keeps the audience paying attention. If the energy wanes, interest fades. People will watch shows that are silly, implausible, absurd, ridiculous, you name it – but they won’t watch boring ones.

Of course, not everyone agrees on what’s boring; to a degree, it depends on viewers’ personal taste. You might find a show boring because you dislike the actors, or you’re not interested in the subject, or you don’t like the genre. But if you set aside personal taste and pay close attention to the structure of the episode, you might find that it is actually well crafted and that all of the necessary elements are in place; the energy is there, even if it isn’t quite your thing. Every sitcom and drama on TV – even shows you can’t stand – has, at the minimum, a solid story structure. The writers might also hate the show (this is not uncommon), but in an extremely competitive field, a job’s a job. To get hired at all, a writer has to be competent enough to deliver something that qualifies as a story. So you can generally count on TV show episodes to be examples of strong story structure.

Episodes have, of course, a beginning, a middle and an end. However, that doesn’t mean that you simply take a situation and break it into three pieces. Each section has a set of elements it must provide to create the energy that drives the story. These sections are more accurately called the setup, rising action and resolution.

The Setup

Of the three parts, the setup is the most crucial section of your script. This is where you inject the fuel that will drive your story. It is where you hook the audience into becoming curious, concerned and engaged. Without a strong setup, the audience will not have a sufficient grasp of who your characters are, what is happening to them, what they are doing about it or why it matters to them. In other words, without a strong setup, you’ll have an episode that feels flat.

The setup is given in the first scene or sequence of an episode. (Some shows start with a cold open before the titles, which is usually a bit that displays the characters being themselves and which may or may not relate directly to the story.) Very quickly, the audience should be shown three things:

1. a character with some easily identifiable personal qualities,
2. a problem that arises and prompts a response from the character and
3. a set of reasons why the character wants and needs a specific outcome.

The first thing we need is a chance to get to know the character – to learn something about the character’s fears, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, quirks, mannerisms, habits, hangups, attitudes. This knowledge enables us to connect and empathize with the character so that, as the story unfolds, we stay engaged and interested in the outcome. You can think of this as “talk-time” – by talking with each other (or maybe to themselves or to the audience in a voiceover), they demonstrate who they are. Because the setup is short, we don’t get to know everything about the character right away. But we do need an immediate, clear sense of their fundamental nature so that, when we see the problem arise, we already have a way to connect that problem with some emotional significance to the character. Maybe a character’s fundamental nature is that they’re naive, or brash, or reckless, or ambitious, or mean, or submissive, or phony, or self-loathing. Maybe the character is a pretty regular person without any extreme qualities; maybe all we can tell about them at first is that they’ve got a wry sense of humor or are a little snobby or a little shy. But even these “normal” characters have to be differentiated from all of the other characters somehow; they need to be “the wry one” or “the snobby one,” etc. The audience needs to form a first impression that, at the very least, will lend some context to the problem when it arises. We need to understand the character enough to give us a clue about why the problem is meaningful or significant to them, and how they are going to feel and react.

The second element in the setup is the introduction of the problem, which is sometimes called the “crisis.” These are slightly misleading terms in that they imply something dangerous or negative. Another way of looking at it is as a catalyst or change in the status quo, which could be something positive, such as an opportunity or a sudden stroke of luck. In any case, we aren’t entering the character’s world at an arbitrary or randomly chosen time; there has to be some reason that the story opens when/where it does. Usually, it opens just before the problem arises. We get a few moments of watching the characters be themselves for context, and then either something happens that shakes up the character’s world or the character announces that they need to make a big change in some aspect of their life (in which case the writer must also indicate what prompted them to make that decision now). Either way, the normal state of things is being disrupted or interrupted, and the main character must respond by taking some action.

Ideally, the problem is something particularly compelling for this character – as if it had been designed specifically to motivate or torment this character, which of course it has. We need to see that the problem affects the character in a more intense way than it would be for someone else (which is why we need that talk-time in the beginning to provide context). Say your episode revolves around a character going on a date. A shy person will be terrified and struggle to overcome that weakness throughout the episode, whereas a romantically disillusioned character will have to fight pessimism and a tendency to be self-defeating. This strategic combination of character and crisis generates the tension that engages the audience. We understand what that person is going through even if it isn’t what we ourselves, or a different character, would go through. It doesn’t matter whether the situation is life-or-death or something most people would consider trivial; knowing what we know about this character, we understand why he or she is driven to respond. That drive must be strong enough – and clear enough in the script – to sustain a whole episode’s worth of struggle.

The third element of the setup is the list of reasons why the problem matters to the character. This isn’t actually delivered as a list, although you will usually find the character articulating the reasons much more clearly and succinctly than most people do in real life. Try watching an episode of a TV show or web series and count how many times a character (or someone else in the scene) states outright how they feel and why they need a specific result; sometimes it actually does feel like a list. The more items on the list, the better – that means there’s a lot at stake. A great way to increase the energy in your episode is to make the stakes high in the beginning and keep raising them throughout the episode. Make sure the audience feels that a lot is riding on the outcome. Remember, the goal doesn’t have to seem like it would be important to us, but we do need to understand why it’s important to the character. And for us to really grasp the reasons, we need to hear them from the character. Never assume that the audience will correctly interpret the significance of the problem without guidance from you, the writer. You design the crisis to be particularly problematic to your character as a person, and then you let the characters express feelings and concerns that are specific to the situation. People respond differently to events depending on their own experiences and attitudes, so it’s important that you run interference and take control of what viewers understand – or rather, the let characters control it by stating their individual truth.

When we’ve met the character, seen them encounter a problem or experience a disruption in their status quo and learned how they feel about it and why, we have what is often called “dramatic need.” This doesn’t mean that the need has to be acted out in a highly dramatic fashion or that the problem itself has to contain high drama. “Drama” here is a term borrowed from theater and refers to everything that happens within the play (or screenplay). Your character’s dramatic need involves two components: the external central question and the internal central question. The external central question relates to the plot: will the character accomplish the stated goal? The internal central question relates to meaning of success or failure to the character: will the character find relief from the negative emotions driving them to solve the problem and attain positive feelings as a result? A strong connection between the external and internal central questions will generate a felt sense of the character’s dramatic need and will give your story the energy it needs.

The setup ends when the character has decided on a first step to solving the problem. Since we can’t see someone decide something, the writer must find ways to “announce” the character’s intentions. Often the character will simply say what they plan to do. What matters is that the story has been set up: the character is introduced, presented with a challenge and allowed to express feelings about potential success or failure. Dramatic need has been established. The audience has a clear understanding of the external central question and the internal central question. When all of that has been presented, we’re ready to get into the heart of the story and watch the drama unfold.

That’s a lot to pack into a short amount of time; it takes careful, clever writing to make all of it happen quickly. (Expect to spend a lot of time revisiting, clarifying and strengthening your setup.) In a half-hour TV sitcom, the setup might last for as long as 3 or 4 minutes. Short-format episodes must get the same job done in much less time. To accomplish this, the traditional structure gets streamlined: it skips establishing a status quo and gets straight to the crisis, or it might even open with the problem already underway and the character mired in an attempt to solve it. Talk-time isn’t given its own space at the start of the episode; instead, from the first second, we see the character already in crisis and learn about them as they react to the problem and articulate their dramatic need. In any case, no elements of the setup are left out. We still get what we need to engage with the story; the difference is that instead of getting it in sequence, we get it all at once. The writing has to do all three jobs simultaneously: establish character, present a problem and indicate what is at stake.

Let’s see how streamlined traditional setups work. We’ll use pilot (premiere) episodes, since that is probably what you’ll be writing first.

Box 1.1 Why so serious?

Why are we describing these comedies as if they were tragedies or high drama? Why are the funny parts left out? The point is to demonstrate that every story, whether it is funny or sad or deep or scary, revolves around someone needing something and struggling against great odds to get it. Even if your story is jam-packed with fascinating characters and oodles of jokes, or the desired goal is hilariously absurd, it’s the character’s dramatic need that drives everything. As an exercise, while you’re figuring out your plot and characters, treat everything like a serious, intense drama. Go full-on Shakespearean tragedy; don’t hold back! It feels a little silly sometimes, but if you can’t describe your story in such terms, it might not have enough energy driving it. To make sure, check that you have the necessary dramatic elements in place. If you don’t have a strong foundation of clear external and internal goals, strong dramatic need and escalating tension to build on, the show will just feel like a character sketch or aimless series of jokes. (“Character sketch” means that we see a character out of context; the point is to get to know them, not to see them in a story per se. This is different from sketch comedy or sketch drama, which tend to operate as narratives and usually follow the basic story structure, only in miniature.)

Brooklyn Sound is a show about the desperate efforts of a recording-studio owner to keep the business afloat. The episodes follow the streamlined traditional model for a setup. The pilot episode, “Josiah and the Teeth,” starts with a cold open in which we see a disturbingly strange family of musicians warming up for their recording session, introducing the running theme of the show: the studio seems to only attract crazies, which isn’t great for business. The cold open runs for just over 1 minute; the titles are shown for about 6 seconds.

The first thing we see after the titles is a flustered young woman (Lucy) entering the studio, already in the middle of a phone call in which she’s offering someone (presumably someone calling to book the studio) a two-for-one pizza-party deal. Her entreating manner lets us know that she really, really needs this booking. She isn’t quite begging, but we sense that it’s not far off. When she takes the prospective client’s order for pepperoni, we start to understand that Lucy has been reduced to desperate measures including doing menial, somewhat ridiculous things that aren’t related to recording music and that would take a toll on anyone’s self-respect. In a brief aside during the phone conversation, Lucy acknowledges the sad truth of her situation, ironically agreeing with the caller that the deal is “very much too good to be true.”

Another measure of Lucy’s desperation is her response when her intern (Pam) informs her that “the documentary crew” has arrived. Frantically trying to close the deal with the person on the phone, Lucy erupts in frustration and says something rude about not having time for the filmmakers. When Pam points out that the crew is are already there, filming, Lucy immediately changes her tune, suppressing her real emotional state and forcing herself to act welcoming. Throughout the scene, Lucy displays personal qualities of determination, creativity and willingness to make painful sacrifices (namely, her pride).

Note that this talk-time doesn’t happen before the ...