Ever dreamed of writing a TV show but didn't know where to start? Now's the perfect time to pick up your pen (or keyboard) and dive in - no experience needed, just your imagination.
In a new series, screenwriter Ray Lawlor - creator of RTÉ's popular black comedy series Obituary - offers some tips for the budding TV writer...
Like it or not, the job of a screenwriter is to relentlessly come up with one great idea after another. Ideas that inspire people to invest millions, and crews to work terrible hours. So: where do those ideas come from? And how do you take something summed up in a pithy single line and transform it into six hours of television?
Over the following series of articles, I'll use my own series Obituary (returning for a second season on RTÉ One on October 14th) to guide you through the process of creating a TV show, from initial spark to complete series.
When I first set out to write a TV show, I studied the best series around and asked what they had in common. The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad quickly stood out. I realised these shows were built around the jobs of their main characters: Tony Soprano was a mob boss, Don Draper an ad man, and Walter White made meth.
If I wanted to write a series that could sustain endless episodes and conflict like these shows (there are always more ads to invent or better meth to make), I needed to find a job for my main character, ideally one that hadn’t been seen on TV before. That’s when I hit upon the idea of a show centred on an obituarist. It felt original and unusual. Now I just needed to figure out what kind of obituarist I wanted to spend the next several years writing about.
I couldn't get the idea out of my head, which is always the first sign that something is clicking.
At first, I imagined a sitcom-like version: a woman visiting the dying and helping them write their obituaries, while tying up loose ends in the lives of the soon-to-be-dead before they passed. I thought this was cute, but I also knew it wasn’t really my style. I write about nasty, weird outsiders, and I knew my obituarist must be that kind of person for me to truly invest emotionally.
So I did what every writer must do when they come up with a cool idea: I sat on it. The worst thing I could do would be to tackle the idea immediately. The best thing any writer can do is let the idea sit with their subconscious until it reveals what kind of show they should write.
Watch the trailer for Season 2 of Obituary
Finally, it hit me: my obituarist would kill people. She would live in a small town and, because she was paid per article at the newspaper where she worked, she’d begin murdering people to make enough money to survive. Soon, she’d discover that she really enjoyed it.
This is how I came up with the idea for Obituary. I knew I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, which is always the first sign that something is clicking.
In the next article, we’ll examine how to take a killer idea and turn it into multiple seasons of television..
Season 2 of Obituary is on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player from October 14th - catch up with the first season here
