A little craft...
When you're a hammer everything looks like a nail...
This looks a lot like the kind of work we do in a writer’s room—
Cards on boards. Stories and story lines “beated” out. The slow gestation of an outline.
But when I write a novel, I don’t truly outline. I generally know the beginning and the end, only to fumble my way through the middle, kind of figuring it out as a I go.
However, starting with my second book, High White Sun—likely the very book shown above—I began creating “card boards” like the one here, as I worked through the first draft, basically color-coding chapters (usually by POV) on the fly and, in effect, building the outline in mid-flight. By the time I was finally done, I had a pretty decent global view of the “math” of the book; I could tell at a glance how many chapters I’d devoted to certain characters, and identify any narrative imbalances before working through my revisions.
For several years, I built a very nice cork board like the one in the picture in every house with each new move, so I could manually tack up 3x5 cards. But as those moves piled up, I eventually migrated to an electronic note card board; just as efficient and useful, but a lot easier to clean up when you’re later trying to sell a house.
Thus, a process like “carding” wasn’t unfamiliar to me when I walked into my first writer’s room, and that’s a lot of what I’ve been doing this week, breaking down a potential pilot and carding out the episode, so it can later be written as a full script. While I can’t show you those cards, it’s still a secret after all (!), I can guarantee that the paradigm is no different—lots of hand-written colored cards up on the wall, an ink-stained Candyland map through the episode we’re writing.
For all the talk of AI and technology, it’s still a very tactile, low-budget way of creating very expensive entertainment.
Every novelist and screenwriter I’ve met approaches crafting their work differently. Some are pure Pantsers, others are Plotters. Some do highly detailed outlines, others mere “scriptments” or “beat sheets.” My process on the novel side of things generally hasn’t changed much since High White Sun, but I’ve adopted more a formalized “pre-outline” mindset on the film/TV side, where at least some amount of outlining is necessary, particularly when you have to wrangle multiple episodes and plotlines over a season for a host of writers. Of course, a writer’s room is a much more collaborative process than sitting alone working on a novel…probably not a bad topic for a future post.
My time out here is winding up and I’ll be heading back to Kentucky to start working on my next book, while I wait on the future of this series. I’m really proud of the work we did, and think it’s a helluva of a show idea. We’ll see who agrees!
Since I’ll be talking about working on a TV series in upcoming posts, I’ll urge you now to grab a copy of Jeff Melvoin’s new book—
This is a great read about how TV is made, from someone who truly knows.
As always, feel free to share—