When it comes to trying to sell a television show or feature film, one of the most common and basic mistakes is not thoroughly developing the concept ahead of the pitch. You can do all the research in the world about the person or group you’re trying to pitch to and still come up empty-handed if you’re not prepared to be grilled on your proposed project. After all, how could someone who knows nothing about your idea understand what you’re putting out there if even you don’t fully get it?
There’s nothing wrong with being eager about a new project, and it’s natural to want to quickly move on to the screenwriting and bible-creation stages. But it’s also a lot easier to put together a coherent project treatment if you have a fully formed idea on your hands first. Luckily, there are plenty of quick exercises you can try to help you make sure that your show is as ready for your pitch as you are. Here are a few exercises you can use to flesh out your project, as well as some key advice straight from Tongal producer, Stephen Iwanyk, who has a background in television development.
Contextualize Your Characters Through Worldbuilding
With plenty of fantasy, sci-fi, and superhero properties having settled into the mainstream, knowing how to successfully worldbuild is now more important than ever. Worldbuilding is largely a series of thought exercises, but creating a whole world can quickly balloon to a hefty task depending on how far you’re straying from reality. If you’re creating a new setting from scratch each element of daily life has to be considered, everything from who you’re writing about to the physical location they live in, the language(s) they speak and the economics they live by, their culture, their superstitions. All of these things affect and motivate what characters do and can often help flesh out the fundamental nature of who they are.
Exercise #1: Worldbuilding
For many projects, it might be overkill, but if you’re creating a whole new environment/universe for your show or film, you might want to check out Patricia C. Wrede’s incredibly thorough set of fantasy worldbuilding questions. Pick whichever sectors are relevant to your project and write down your answers to each question in a notebook as an easy way of beginning to consolidate information for your series bible. It’s not just supernatural spaces that need to be well fleshed out. Even settings that are completely naturalistic or actually pull from reality (such as with a biopic or period piece) have their own rules and circumstances that you need to be aware of when writing.
Exercise #2: Worldbuilding
Write out a regular day, from waking to sleep, of someone who lives in your world who isn’t your protagonist. What do they do? Where do they go? How do they get around? Did something big happen recently that everyone is thinking about? What’s the local zeitgeist, the overwhelming cultural mood that your character(s) will be living in? Whether you’re writing someone who’s trying to stick with the status quo or rebel against it, cultural context can oftentimes play a big role in determining what your characters are like.
The Importance of Detailed Characters
Some people make the mistake of assuming that if their worlds are well-built, their characters naturally will be, too. Building a concrete and detailed setting, however, is only part of the battle when it comes to creating a fully thought out series.
When asked what he looks for in a completed narrative project, Tongal Producer Stephen Iwanyk explained that he strongly considers “whether you’ve actually put thought into the characters and give them some dimension and personality. In a series, we’re going to have to spend a lot of time with your characters, so they’ve got to be interesting and complex. If it’s just a hero spouting heroic things, where’s the fun in that? Well-drawn characters make it easier for us to understand how the [story arcs and subplots work] because we’ll be able to imagine how it affects them uniquely.”
Exercise #3: Character Development
Backstory is a major driver of character, so it is crucial to write (for yourself) a couple sentences detailing the biography of every major player in your show/film. In order to get a better idea of the deeper nature of your players, try writing each biography in the voice of the character whose life it covers. Creating fully fleshed-out characters requires more than just this basic timeline of events that have made up your characters’ lives; you also need a handle on what each character wants, fears, and needs so you can use what drives them as an individual to determine what they do as participants in your story.
Exercise #4: Character Development
A strong plot is driven by who its characters are. It’s something that naturally challenges the characters and forces them into situations where they have to confront change in some way or another. The best way to figure out what plot points would push up against a character most is to figure out all of the deep details of their self-image and opinions. “The Proust Questionnaire” is a great basic set of questions you can use to “interview” your characters and find out what makes them tick. Try adding a couple of your own questions in too and then answer the whole set as each of your main characters.
If you’re looking for yet another way to contextualize your characters, consider how they come off to others. Your character will have different levels of difficulty getting things done and encounter different circumstances if people around her like her, than if they’re skeptical or afraid of her, or if they are actively fighting against her. This exercise can also help you as you work toward building a motivated plot.
Exercise #5: Character Development
Try writing a sentence or two each detailing how your main characters all perceive one another and even exploring how people who don’t show up in your show see them. How does your protagonist’s mail carrier see her? Her neighbor? Her boss? Her mom?
Keep Your Plot Busy and Motivated
Once you’ve thoroughly developed a setting and some well-rounded characters, the last step is to make sure that you’re plugging them into a situation that is interesting enough to keep the audience engaged. Iwanyk explains what he looks for as the fundamentals of a fully developed narrative concept. “First off, is there a source of dynamic conflict? We need to constantly challenge the main characters and find a way to generate new story arcs and subplots within the series, the so-called ‘story engine’.”
Stephen makes it clear that genre is irrelevant to determining the quality of a story. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a drama or comedy,” Iwanyk said, “if you’ve only got a single source of conflict in the way or you’re just randomly throwing different obstacles at the characters, it’ll feel like you haven’t thought things through. This is why the sitcom … often succeeds: you’re creating an unstable situation with a mix of characters who want different things but are forced to be together, and that generates conflict.”
Exercise #6: Story and Scene Development
It’s important to realize that like any movie or series as a whole, individual scenes also have an internal structure that drive their direction. If you’re stuck on where to take your plot and feel like you might be “randomly throwing different obstacles at the characters,” try writing out the scene of the last plot point you’ve worked out, breaking it down into its essential parts to see where the story is naturally headed.
Some people like to separate scenes out by what happens in their beginning, middle, and end; others prefer using the more detailed, traditional five-part dramatic arc breakdown as a template (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement). The latter might be particularly helpful if you’re really stuck so that you can understand what’s driving the scene and therefore the plot as a whole.
Putting It All Together
After a few rounds of these exercises, you should feel prepared to embark on putting together a series bible or full spec script. Moreover, you should feel confident that you have a good sense of what your project truly is and feel capable of explaining it in just a couple of sentences.
It’s important to remember that not every detail you’ve come up with during this extended brainstorming session needs to make it into your work—trying to stuff all of that exposition and information into a pitch would be overwhelming. Think of it more as a way of intimately getting to know your space, characters, and plot points so that you’re ready to distill it all down to an elevator pitch, spec, and treatment you can use to actually get your project made.
What are some of the best examples of Series Bibles you've seen? Tell us in the comments section below!
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Note From Tongal: “6 Exercises to Help You Round Out Your Series Bible” is part of a series of Tongal Community-written blog posts that were originally sourced in the Tongal Blog Open Call Project. Read more Tongal Community-written posts here and then Pitch us a topic you'd like to write about for the Tongal Blog!
