Hello Goldminers,

Viv Savage here. I’m honoured to have been asked to give you the benefits of my, ahem, immense wisdom and experience in the UK TV drama industry. I currently work as a development exec in an indie in London and Phil has asked me to Write some guest posts from my perspective on the front line. Check back regularly to keep up with the latest insights.

This Week: Chatting Up Producers and Agents

Working with producers is like a relationship and, as a new writer, your sample Script is your chat-up line.

“Hang on,” you’re probably (and rightly) thinking. “Isn’t it insanely reductive that my entire worth as a writer will be judged on one script and one script alone? Moreover one script that a d-girl [like the writer of this blog post] has probably read while they were bit harassed, the first half on the bus trying not to get croissant grease on the iPad, and the rest between phone calls and meetings?”

Yes. Of course it is. But judged you will be, so your line had better be good. You have to show off but demonstrate that you’re not a show-off. You have to make us laugh but prove you’re not lightweight. You have to make us feel something but show you’re not too heavy. Versatile but with a clear voice. Original but could write on an existing series. And on and on.

So before you’re crushed by the weight of expectation and decide to spend the rest of the night eyeing us up nervously from across the dancefloor, think about this: producers (and commissioners, execs, script editors and agents) might be demanding, but we’re also desperate for you to come over and chat us up. We want to hear your best line. Not something corny, not something we’ve heard before, not something someone else told you to say, and not something you think we want to hear. We want to hear your voice. That’s it, above all else. Because that’s what the audience wants.

Now this gets talked about a lot, this “voice” stuff. So what does it mean? Wikipedia, font of all knowledge, says: “the individual writing style of an author, a combination of their common usage of syntax, diction, punctuation, character development, dialogue, etc., within a given body of text (or across several works).”

Well, yeah. Kinda. But it’s more than that. It’s about making a personal connection with the audience. It’s about writing as telepathy, tapping directly into another human being’s feelings and thoughts. It’s an incredible power to have, to write well and connect with someone’s interior world so profoundly and directly. So don’t balls it up.

A writer recently sent me a load of one-page pitches. Seriously, a load. More than ten. Please never do this, by the way. Rightly or wrongly, it makes the reader think you’re rattling them off and not investing any time, thought or, crucially, emotion into the work you’re asking us to read.

They were all… fine. Technically nothing wrong with them. Each one could have been a show. Characters, precinct, story generators—all present and correct.

We rejected every single one.

Why? Because there was no heart to them. Now, “heart” is another of those irritatingly slippery phrases—even more subjective than “voice”—which development people use a lot. You may think that’s because we don’t want to be pinned down on them and so we just chuck around meaningless words a lot while we sip flat whites and browse Instagram. THAT NEVER HAPPENS, ALL RIGHT? But really, it’s one of those things—you know when something has it and you know when it doesn’t. There’s no book you can buy that will tell you how to write with heart, how to move people, how to fire emotions.

That can only come from you. Trite though it sounds, that’s how it is: something very personal and individual—how you see the world and what you want to say about what you se. That’s what we mean by “voice” and “heart” when we flap our hands about and complain that a piece of work doesn’t have it.

Aristotle, Robert McKee, Syd Field, John Yorke—all have plenty of useful and interesting stuff to say on structure. And doing structure right is a hard-learned task. Doing it really well is intellectually demanding and takes lots of practice, almost like architecture or engineering. But if you write an immaculately structured piece that stifles your voice, it’s like attempting to chat someone up while reading from a piece of paper. We’d much rather you stumbled over your words and got it all in the wrong order but managed to convey some charm—a sense of who you are.

And once you’ve figured out what you want to say about the world (and that can change as the process goes on), then it’s about how you say it. It’s about the things that caught your imagination and how you translated them into ideas; the people you’ve met and how you’ve appropriated aspects of them for your characters; and even if the whole house of cards come fluttering down the first time, the knowledge that it was your house of cards, not one you copied from someone else.

That doesn’t mean to say every project has to be wildly original. Just that if you’re doing, say, a serial drama about the upheaval caused to a community by the  disappearance of a child, then you absolutely have to find the angle on it that rocks your world, that makes you see things in a new light, that makes you tingle and makes you weep. (But also, if you are doing that show, please think about doing something else. There are tons of them out there at the moment.)

Producers can hire people to fix the structure stuff, or you can learn it yourself from many sources (including right here on the Goldmine, where crucially you’ll also find great exercises to fire your imagination—most other sources won’t give you that).

The irreplaceable thing is your voice. We’re deciding whether or not to go to bed with you and, eventually, maybe, have a kid. It’s that personal. So don’t be a wallflower. Get your sample out there and make it shine.