You Have One Job

I'm pitching on an Open Writing Assignment next week. For those of you who are unfamiliar, an OWA is a writing job that starts with a studio or major production company (the job is usually an adaptation or a rewrite). Several writers are invited to develop and pitch their take on the material. The best take gets the job.

It’s a lot of work. Often multiple rounds of revisions on a 15-30 minute pitch. And it’s highly competitive. Feels a bit like carving a lottery ticket on a rock.

Honestly I swore them off this year. They’re getting harder to win, and I had to focus on the projects right in front of me. But this one came along - at the worst possible time - and…I jumped at it.

Why?

I’d be lying if I said it didn’t have something to do with the director - a prolific and storied action guy who claims this is his passion project.

But the real reason I couldn’t resist is because the project has a kind of clarity of purpose that’s increasingly rare in this age of bloated limited series and mangled IP.

It’s one of those projects where the title is the premise is the story is the whole point. It is what it is. Everyone’s already pointed in the same direction. The challenge is simply unlocking the best version of it.

It got me thinking, why is this such an appealing prospect?

Here’s a thought framework I share often:

A feature script usually runs 15-20,000 words (an hourlong episode around 10,000). If you were charged with simply hammering out 15,000 free-association words, you could do it in a day.

But scripts don’t take a day to write. They take weeks. Months. Sometimes longer. So the problem then is not in the writing. It’s in the not-writing. The thinking. The choosing. The cutting.

I take a slightly dim view of anyone who announces “I wrote ten pages today” or “I’m 35 pages into my latest script!” We all need milestones to celebrate. But it makes me wonder if they understand the task at all.

The core challenge of a script isn’t that you have 15,000 words to write. It’s that you ONLY have 15,000 words to write. You ONLY have a handful of characters. You ONLY have what we can see and what we can here. You ONLY have relentless forward progression.

The creative constraints placed on the screenplay format are considerable. The resources available to you are extremely finite.

So you must use them well. You must be very careful with what actually makes it into your script. Because every element, every detail, every character is taking up their share of - as they say in the business - real estate.

Imagine you were given £100 to host a dinner. If you invited one guest, you could make them a wonderful meal, carefully prepared using premium ingredients. If you invited 50 guests they’d all be getting cabbage soup.

It’s the same with your script. I spoke a couple of weeks ago about complications vs. complexity. After a certain point, complication is just more stuff you have to service. Complexity is treating the few things you do have with respect.

More characters, more set-pieces, more subplots, more twists and revelations, more ideas. They can crowd out the things that you and your script could be doing brilliantly - if only they had a bit more space to shine

Complication is 50 dinner guests. Complexity is one beautifully executed and perfectly balanced dish.

What if we distilled this idea down as far as it could go? What if we really did just invite one guest to the dinner?

What if we had the courage to acknowledge that when it comes to writing a script, you only really have to do one thing incredibly well? Like a master artisan focusing on a single discipline and gaining world renown. Isn’t that on some level what we’re all aiming for?

I really wanted to use the analogy of the famous Omakase sushi chefs who spend eight years learning to slice tuna. But I’ve already used a food-preparation metaphor and I’m allowing myself only one.

(Yes, I’m aware I’ve cheated.)

Out in the rough-and-tumble of the business - with professional readers churning through 10+ scripts a day, and producers having to champion a script up through layers and layers of decision-makers towards a greenlight - doing one thing 100% brilliantly beats doing several things at 70% every single time.

Here’s an exercise I’d like you to try with a recent script, or the one you’re currently working on:

How’d you get on? If you could confidently answer them all - brilliant stuff. If all the answers were pointing broadly in the same direction - incredible.

Regardless, hopefully it encouraged you to interrogate your script through a certain lens: what’s the one thing I’m aiming to do incredibly well here?

Genuinely, just writing these questions down is sending me back to my current assignment with a chainsaw.

I’m aware that I don’t focus as much on TV here. It’s something I’m looking to change. But I think this concept is as important - if not more important - when you’re building a TV show than when you’re writing a feature.

With a pilot script you have fewer words. Fewer minutes. Fewer characters, locations, shoot days, potential buyers, new ideas out there to choose from.

Discipline and refinement are perhaps the two most undervalued virtues of writing a pilot. More than any other document save an architectural blueprint, a TV pilot script needs to know exactly what it is. What it’s doing, where it's going, who it’s for, why it exists.

TV development (and production) is a merciless master. It demands a ruthless sense of economy.

It will lop off any spare parts - no matter how wonderful and smart and well-made - without blinking. And if there isn’t a single immutable, strong-as-iron core at the centre of what you’ve created, the whole thing will get carved up until there’s nothing left.

Here’s a dirty little TV secret: commissioners often think in terms of the poster. Can I picture it in my mind’s eye? Who’s face is staring back at me? We have one second to sell this show to someone wandering past. What’s the single immediate impression we’re transmitting to them?

Thinking of your script in terms of its poster can feel a bit gross. But I guarantee the people who you want to commission it are doing just that.

Oh, and the industry term for a movie poster? A one sheet.

Do one thing well is practically a commandment in television. A tenet to steer your entire career by.

Here’s the list of some of the most popular and enduring shows in television history - in the form of their premise.

You get the idea. Because there is after all only one idea to get.

If there is ever any convolution to the plot whatsoever, it’s still outrageously straightforward. It becomes simply a case of smashing two incongruous things together to forge one single new thing.

These shows entered the canon of modern television because they are so resolutely one thing. Week after week, year after year, they invite you into the same world - to spend time with the same characters and feel the same feelings.

They’re not trying to do too much. They’re not trying to do anything, really, apart from the one thing they do extremely well.

But of course it’s not that easy.

After all, we’ve all given ourselves the task of just doing one thing well - writing. And we know that it’s an unslayable multi-headed monster with a thousand tricks up its sleeve.

If you’re just doing one thing, it becomes as much about not what you are doing, but what you’re not doing. The urge to give more, to add value, to support your central column with more pillars, is almost irresistible.

Meanwhile the act of stripping away and exposing is counterintuitive. Painful even.

And that one thing that’s left - it needs to contain multitudes. Because one idea - a bar; a group of friends - is not remotely enough to sustain multiple hours of television. Nor even a feature film.

It must be a perfectly conceived and constructed Russian doll that unfolds to reveal some version of the entire world. That is your great burden. What you pack into that one thing is your vision.

It’s your voice.

Which is a scary concept. Because to distill our writing down to a single thing, we need to truly know ourselves. We’re not just stripping away story elements and characters. We’re stripping away our own comfortable thought-patterns and cosy ideas and skewed self-image and slightly unrealistic fantasies to reveal the hard truths at the centre of who we are.

This is my perspective on life. This is what I want to put out in the world. This is the great question I want to pose to millions of people. And this is my very best attempt to do all that.

A daunting prospect. But one you need to reckon with. It is, fundamentally, the reason we write. The one reason.

Here’s an X post from someone who calls himself Hollywood Script Reader that touches on a similar theme. An idea is only as good as the vision behind it. And executing on that vision is everything.

It strikes me as fairly accurate - the right balance of bracing and reassuring:

If you do one thing this week, go get after it.

If you do one more thing this week, wish me luck on the OWA.

Thanks for reading,

Rob