How to Make A Genre Show, Part 3 – Writing the Script

I ’m a former Syfy White House who result the connection to make a fresh TV show call Z Nation that transmit Fridays at 10/9c on Syfy and Space Channel . I ’m a Colorado - creator / writer / co - executive manufacturer on the series and imagine it ’d be interesting to share with fans how the serial got made from conception to melodic phrase :

In the last installment of How to Make a Genre Show I take you up to the dot in the show - creation appendage where you had detailed outline ( approve by the net ! ) for the episodes of your series . Now it ’s time to take that outline and twist it into a script — which I did , when I write installment six of Z Nation , which airs tomorrow Nox .

I ’ve previously co - written two TV movies from relatively short outlines and those scripts were painful to pen . The ideas were solid but when it was time to flesh out our meagerly detailed act into 100 pageboy of compelling authorship , the gaps and shortcoming of our story social system became monstrously unmistakable . Thank god I had an awesome carbon monoxide - writer to serve separate it all out .

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By dividing line , working from the elaborate outlines create in the Writers ’ Room makes writing a video script much easier . Since we ’d already broken the plot , character arc , themes , etc . , I knew incisively what I needed to do and could really focus on just writing the sucker , which was utterly refreshing . In TV you generally spend style more time preparing to write than actually putting fingers to keyboard . And if you do run into problems , a quick chat with our showrunner or a fellow author could puzzle out the result .

That ’s not to say it was a breeze . Interestingly , writing my first script for Z Nation was tricksy because of the unusual fact that we did n’t have a pilot book … or any other scripts for that issue . I was in the strange positioning of writing sequence six in a serial where episodes 1 - 5 had n’t been write yet . That made for some unexpected challenges . For example , while I be intimate the continuity for the season - long patch and the broad strokes of the character arcs , the nicety of our characters ’ lives had n’t been developed yet .

I could n’t reference , say , a running joke between our crew that take off in episode two because there was no episode two . And if the author in episode five got to the oddment of his book and suddenly make up one’s mind to leave one of our pack with a hummer wound , I would n’t know about that until after I ’d written mine . Sure , we talked ahead of clock time about all the stuff we planned to do , but one of the pleasure of writing is that you see Modern , interesting moment as you go along . And your characters are often revealed in those moments .

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On the other hand , nothing in the first draft of any playscript is set in stone . Most showrunners rewrite scripts jolly to a great extent to check that everything has the same tone and phonation . So while I was missing some elements I ’d like to have played off of , I was also free to experiment bang that if I did anything really wonky , it ’d get smoothed out later on .

Side note of hand : All book are also finally dependent to the hard realities of production , which can lead to many last - minute changes ( and sometimes seismal alterations ) . If you pen a scene about your graphic symbol coming across an abandoned tank and you later feel you ca n’t hire a cooler — or the tank car never shows up , or the tank shows up and it ’s a firetruck — say goodbye to that armored combat vehicle vs. zombi scene as well as all your snappy Patton- Rommel talks mention .

A first draught is just that … a draught that will likely switch significantly up until the last possible moment before bourgeon ( and also during shooting , and even after shoot thanks to the magic of redaction and ADR ) .

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After we turned in our first drafts , all the writer read each script and we reconvene to go over them . We talked about what mould and why , what was n’t turn , how the story structure of our outlines held up ( or did n’t ) in script form , the duologue , the persistence of events … every possible affair you’re able to suppose of . This is an surprisingly helpful operation because there ’s nothing that will make you a good author than going over a playscript page by page with seven other saucy colleagues ( our awesome author ’ assistant participated in all these academic term too ) .

Then we all took another go at our handwriting and embark them off to the producer and electronic connection administrator for any notes they might have . You ’ll understand a caboodle of sturm and drang on the Internet about getting bad notes on scripts and how awful it is , but in my experience almost all notes are helpful in some way . You ’re getting the perspective of masses who ’ve successfully work on dozens if not hundreds of scripts , and while you may not always concord with what they say , you ’ll unremarkably do good from listening . After some terminal revisions establish on promissory note we prepared for the next phase of the process : become your hand in an real installment of TV .

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