Fieldwork: Pilot script submitted to Sitcom Mission for feedback

This is me, passing a major milestone

The risk with writing anything that depends on comprehensive background research is that I may never actually stop doing the reading and start doing the writing. I can give myself deadlines until the cows come home, it’ll always be easier to think that I just need to talk to a couple more people, read a couple more books, research this tiny fact about soil regeneration by reading a few more papers.

To state the obvious, I really like doing this kind of background research. It’s fun in its own right, especially when I get to speak to such a wide variety of lovely, interesting people and see them enthuse about their scientific passions.

Writing, on the hand, is a bit scary. Especially when you’ve gone round telling everyone you’re going to do it, and not only are you going to do it, you’re going to do it in an amusing manner.

“Oh, so you think you’re funny, do you?”

As one wise fellow said: Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to doubt. Doubt leads to procrastination. Procrastination leads to suffering, self-recrimination and questioning your life choices.

That, dear reader, is why I enter competitions. They give me a hard deadline which forces me out of my comfort zone and makes me sit my arse down at my desk and start actually writing.

I’m not entering in an attempt to win, because the chances of that happening are slim to none. Instead, I look at what the competition can guarantee me and then I ask whether that is worth the cost of entry.

I have two competitions on my radar at the moment:

Sitcom Mission

Organised by the British Comedy Guide and open to Pro members, Sitcom Mission offers various feedback options for an extra fee. I’ve gone for the Gold package at £100, which will give me two rounds of feedback prior to final submission to the competition. That’s actually quite a bargain.

Also guaranteed is that I will complete a 15 minute pilot script to as high a standard as possible, which I can then take forward on my own. I’ll be able to get a table read done and recorded, which will be useful to show people just what it is that I’m doing and why it’s cool.

And I can use it as starting point to get production costed out. If I want to record this, properly, professionally, with a real sound designer and actors, how much will that cost? How much would six such episodes cost? Once I’ve got that nailed down I can start fundraising, looking for supporters and sponsors and grants and the like.

Indeed, this 15 minute script can form the foundations of everything else I do for the next six to twelve months. Is that worth £100? Yes, yes it is.

Oxford/42 New Writing Prize

The Oxford/42 New Writing Prize is looking for a 30–60 page script for those entering an episodic TV script, or 30–90 pages for a radio script.

I’ve yet to decide whether I’m going to submit a TV or radio script, but either way I’ll have to hit that 30 page minimum. That will be another good milestone met, and it’ll be a valuable experience, giving me a sense of how much story I’m going to need to come up with to make a longer running time work.

This competition doesn’t provide feedback, but that’s fine. I’m intending to use the feedback from Sitcom Mission to inform this script – two birds with one stone and all that.

Excitingly, the entry fee is the princely sum of £0, so is this worth entering too? Yes, yes it is.

First deadline hit

Both Sitcom Mission and the Oxford/42 New Writing Prize have final deadlines at the end of April, but the deadline for Sitcom’s Gold feedback package is Sunday. So I’ve spent the last two weeks writing, getting feedback from friends, rewriting and rewriting again. And yesterday, I submitted a draft that I’m really pretty happy with.

I always feel a bit concerned when I’m happy with a piece of writing. I worry that liking a script will make it harder to accept the validity of feedback and make it more difficult to edit it later on. But I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

In the meantime, I’m going to celebrate this milestone and then start work on Episode 2.