Last month I was able to share the super exciting news that we sold The Regulars to E! This month, we had to put the rosé down, roll up our sleeves, and get to work.
The first thing we needed to hand in is an outline. The execs didn’t have a hard-and-fast rule for the format, or even how many acts the show should have, leaving this up to Gail (the showrunner/my co-creator) and I. The first thing I put together was a “beat sheet”, which is a breakdown of the episode by scene (or “beat”). My first beat sheet was waaaayyy too long (I’m a novelist! I like long!), so after a lot of back and forth, Gail and I got it down to 17 scenes for Evie, the main character, and half a dozen each for Krista and Willow. We also orientated the scenes more clearly around these two questions for each character: What does she want? What’s stopping her from getting it? This helped keep us on story, as the lingo goes.
We fleshed out each beat into a scene description, with sample dialogue. After notes from our producer Jenn, we submitted a detailed, fun-to-read 17-page outline to our awesome studio exec, Kate, for more notes, then it goes to the network for approval. Fingers crossed everyone loves it as much as we do.
I’ve learned a lot this month about adapting a novel for TV. My advice?
1. Be open to better ideas. It's tempting to protect your writing as it appears in one format, but be humble enough to accept other people will have better ideas than you. One such change Gail suggested for the pilot was that Evie, who is our “eyes in” to the story, receive and take the Pretty first. In the book, Krista receives the Pretty and Willow takes it first, but this makes a lot more sense.
2. Stay on story. I’m a plot-driven writer who admires succinct storytelling, but compared to our pilot, my novel is a free-flowing boho mess who doesn’t wear shoes. There is so much more room to dream in a novel; maybe because readers will stick with you longer than viewers, perhaps because our attention span for visual storytelling is shorter and shorter. Our storytelling is so much tighter and less expansive than the book, and revolves heavily around answering the two questions above: what does she want? What’s stopping her from getting it? All our scenes invoke, complicate, or answer those questions.
3. Be a writer, not a producer. A pilot costs a lot of money to shoot, and the more speaking parts, locations, night shoots, exteriors, stunts, extras (etc) you have, the more it costs. It can be tempting to act as producer in the writing phase to make the project more feasible. But it’s the producer's job to balance the budget. My job right now is to write a kickass pilot. So, while I have resisted the urge to add in a helicopter fight sequence, I haven’t been editing the scope of it too much, at this early stage.
PRO-TIP: Gail is in LA, and I’m obviously in NY, so we’ve been using the messaging program Slack to work on this together. I also use Slack for Generation Women. If you haven’t tried is, it’s a helpful way for a team to communicate if you’re drowning in a million email threads.