The first sentence is always hard.
Unbelievably hard. There’s something about conception, the beginning of
something, that just creates a lull in my creative vaults. Mentally, I am
always writing. I construct intricate plotlines, character arcs, cliffhangers,
bookends and set pieces. I emotionally invest myself in works of fiction,
people who don’t exist, and who may never exist; I place my faith in their
world. And their world sits within my cranium.
I’ve been watching a lot of
television recently. I’m in the middle of the first season of Dexter, a show that’s been recommended
to me by a lot of folks. I’m enjoying it; the plots are intricate, thought
provoking. There’s a certain ebb and flow to events. Every instalment contains
some semblance of an episodic one-and-done structure, but the overarching
narrative spills through. To get the story, as a whole, you have to watch the
whole first season. Even then, that’s only the first volume of the saga. You
can view it as a singular entity, or as part of a whole. Take it, leave it. The
choice is yours. I’ll say again, I’m enjoying the show. There’s definitely an
intense catharsis in supporting a morally broken human being; a man who does
bad things to bad people.
I’d love to write for television.
That’s my dream, at least. But that first sentence looms. In the case of a
television script, it’s much more than that. The first sentence in a teleplay
is almost meaningless. Almost. In television, the first sentence expands to the
first scene. The first act. The first episode. The first season. All of these
things exist as variables.
My current piece is one I’ve been
working on, mentally, for years. It’s changed dramatically. In the first
version, it was a supernatural thriller; something akin to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There was a group of young adults solving
crimes of a mystical nature in a rural American town. Then it became a Lost-like science fiction piece about a
town whose population disappeared, only to reappear in the exact same locations
fifty years later; the ghost town rising up and creating a suspenseful,
political story in the real world. Now, though, it’s something much closer to
reality in many ways.
“Rosewood” as the pilot episode
is called, will now be a crime show. A ten-part thriller about a Major Crimes
consultant in small town America. The title of the show, and the episode, will
again be the name of the town where the majority of the action will occur.
There’s the possibility now, that there might also be a Rosewood County – a way,
from a writing standpoint, to move the characters out and away from the same
locales without retracting from the name of the show.
In the plotting of this pilot
episode, I’ve evolved the concept even further. We’re introduced to a plethora
of characters, some of whom will become regular staples in the show. The
protagonist, the aforementioned consultant, is named Ulysses Candy. I’ve
envisioned him as something of a gruff, no-nonsense sort of hero. He’ll seem
hard and emotionless to the people he comes across in the show, but we’ll catch
glimpses of compassion and humanity within him as the series progresses. At
least, that’s my plan. One of the things that’s puzzling me is the reason Candy
has come to this rural part of America (I’m also trying to work out what part
of rural America he’s moved to, with my gut telling me to label it as Nebraska
in the script, if only for a placeholder). In the pilot, I’m putting across the
idea that he’s pursuing a notorious crime boss running the county’s wholesale
business; that won’t be the real reason, though. I think the best course of
action, from a storytelling perspective, would be to have the characters THINK
this is the reason Candy has come into their lives when he does, in fact, have
an ulterior motive – something from his past life, something violent and
horrific that would give him course to up sticks and moves across the country –
I have a germ of an idea about what it could be, and I feel there should be
some sort of tease pointing us towards this at the close of the first episode.
Nothing concrete, mind you. Just the merest glimpse, and the knowledge that our
protagonist is hiding something from those around him.
The rest of the supporting cast
have been a bit simpler to chip away at.
My initial half-page synopsis for
the show included a character called Alan Dalton, who would serve as Candy’s liaison
with the local law enforcement. Dalton would follow Candy around during the
first episode’s case and end up being offered this liaison position at the
conclusion. In this initial synopsis, I described him as having a disapproving
wife who remained unnamed. Thinking about the concept of the show in a more
in-depth manner, I reworked the character of Dalton completely. Only the name
and liaison position remain the same; in fact, Alan Dalton the man has become
the far more interesting Irma Dalton the woman. This simple change of tact
allowed me to have the male-female dynamic present in a large number of
procedural crime shows, such as Bones,
while also offering me a significant amount of new directions to take
storylines in beyond the first episode. Irma could have personal struggles a
male character couldn’t; it opened a lot of doors as a writer, and morphed a
significant number of the concepts I already had germinating within my brain.
So far, Irma has been my favourite potentially regular character to write; the
only one who has capped her is our primary antagonist.
Speaking of this primary
antagonist – that isn’t strictly true. The show isn’t limited to just one chief
villain. There are actually two. One of these will be the crime boss mentioned
earlier, a man I’ve tentatively named Aldo Tree. Tree will serve as the face of
villainy; the snarling, bloodthirsty bad guy who covers his acts of sadism with
a charming smile and an outwardly kind demeanour. In my head, and on paper, he
comes across as Gus Fring from Breaking
Bad, if Gus Fring was on acid and didn’t particularly care whether law
enforcement uncovered his empire or not. See, the beauty of setting a show in
rural America is that the law enforcement can be just as corrupt as the
criminals; Aldo Tree doesn’t NEED to hide who he truly is from the locals,
because the majority of people who are in a position to deal with him already
know and are, in fact, allied with him. This does create some potential
problems with the reasoning for Candy’s arrival; if the police know Tree is bad
and are okay with that, then why would they call in a consultant to help them
take him down. There will likely need to be some reference to a higher-up who
Tree has been unable to buy off; perhaps, even, the catalyst for Candy’s
arrival is the death of this playmaker.
There’s another villain, though,
who I enjoy writing even more than Aldo Tree. The ruthless and cryptic
Albatross. Now, Albatross is going to be the running B plot of the first
season. He’s a serial killer, you see; slowly picking off secondary and tertiary
characters until he comes face-to-face with Candy. One of the earliest
sequences I wrote for the show, even before I had the pilot’s plot down in any
detail, was the initial confrontation between Candy and Albatross – something that
is unlikely to happen until the penultimate episode of the season. There’s no
way that this could fit anywhere but late in the storyline of the first season.
Absolutely none. It did, however, give me some room to play; some way to lay
down seeds for things to come. What if the real reason Candy has come to
Rosewood is to hunt this serial killer? What if the serial killer is on the
loose because of a mistake in Candy’s past? The whole scene got me pumped up
and helped me structure a few extra scenes in the pilot, all aimed at
developing this development. Hell, that scene could even turn into a
flash-forward and find itself tucked somewhere in the depths of the narrative.
The pilot’s actual plot, though,
is where I find my biggest concern.
I had wanted this to be just the
first chapter of a larger adventure. There’s nothing resolved in the story, we
only build up the characters and the mysteries and tease what can come from
later episodes. However, I feel like the first episode of a television show
should be almost a one-and-done affair; a self-contained mini-movie with enough
there to expand upon in later episodes. You see so many pilots that are drastically
different from the shows that followed them; Tony Soprano’s position within the
mafia changes completely between The
Sopranos pilot episode and the first proper episode of the show, for
instance. As I’ve planned ahead a bit, if only for my own sense of self
awareness, I do have a good idea of what is being built towards. I know how I’d
want the first season of the show to end, I know who I’d want to kill off and I
know who can be developed and morphed into something new beyond this first 10-part
story.
I’m getting ahead of myself,
though. The first episode. The first episode is all about the arrival of
Ulysses Candy and his initial interactions with the residents of Rosewood. The
first case he’s involved in comes in the form of the brutal slaying of a school
teacher. There will be ties to youth violence, the gang presence in the county
and the inability of law enforcement to curb such forces. Candy will team up
with Dalton and the two will butt heads along the way. By the time the first
episode comes to a close, the case will be solved and Candy will have
established himself as a thorn in the side of the town’s more dangerous
residents. Beyond that, I can’t say much more.
I’m constantly thinking about this
show. I have been for quite some time. There’s just one stumbling block that
keeps cropping up. The first sentence. I keep writing it over and over. I’m not
happy with it. I owe it to Ulysses Candy, Irma Dalton and Aldo Tree to make
their first appearances memorable, entertaining and powerful. I’m emotionally
invested in these characters and love spending time with them, be it literally
writing about them or coming up with ideas of where they can go and what they
can do. I love these characters. But that first sentence still looms overhead,
and it breaks my heart to think it’ll never be typed.
If you’ve made it to this final
paragraph, then thank you. This was a spur of the moment essay/blog thing. I
just needed to unburden myself, to write, and to share these ideas in my head,
because I do genuinely worry that I’m not good enough to write this story, and
that’s the worst feeling of all. Maybe I’m just being silly, maybe I’m rambling
a bit now. Regardless, I hope you enjoyed this train of thought article and
that the world of Candy and Dalton has piqued your interest. Please do let me
know.
Now – for that first sentence (or
maybe a bit more…):
EXT. HIGHWAY – NIGHT
Serene, quiet nothingness. No lights
on the road. A low rumble. Tyres screech an old battered Ford Mustang bursts
into view, twisting in the empty road as it desperately moves away from
something. Something dangerous. Something in pursuit!
…TO BE CONTINUED…
