Personally, I felt the issue of Diogenes’ screenplay was a distraction from the original topic of that thread. We had been discussing the justification of the writers asking for roylaties for their work. Whether or not Diogenes can produce a screenplay, how long it takes to him to write it, and its quality are not going to have any bearing on that original topic.
I don’t doubt Dio’s intelligence or talent. He doesn’t have to prove those things to me. He has not proven he can plan and execute an idea. That’s why it’s not a pointless exercise. He’s proving he can actually see a project through. That takes hard work and discipline, which I think are the biggest obstacles to overcome as a writer. If you can’t jump those hurdles, you aren’t a writer. You’re not even a bad writer. You’re just a boaster, like the old woman in the Jane Austen novel who says she’d be a brilliant piano player if she’d only practiced more.
This is autobiographical for me. I “knew” I was a good writer for 30 years, right up until I set out to prove it. Then I discovered that all those lovely books in my head didn’t want to just pour themselves out onto the page. The words had to painstakingly pounded out on the keyboard, one at a time, a few hundred words at a time, night after night, for weeks and then months. Even then, the end product was not nearly as marvelous as I’d expected. I knew I could write a better book than most of what I saw at the bookstore, but the half-formed mess on my desk wasn’t even good enough to be in the bookstore, and I knew it. I went back and revised – five times, before I sold it. Seven times before the publisher was happy with it. Three and a half years after I started it. Now I realize I didn’t know crap before I wrote that book. Writing isn’t what’s in your head. It’s what’s on the page. It’s not ability. It’s product.
This is the point of my challenge. I’m flexible on the deadline, but there has to be one.
That’s why I started a new thread.
The point of my criticisms in that thread — and if I wasn’t clear about this, I apologize — is that, for a working professional television writer, putting the words on the page is, oh, 20% of the job, at best. Little Nemo is right, this exercise will provide virtually no illumination on the question of the value of the professional writer to the creative process generally, which is where the thread started. My post about “writer’s notes” was not an offer to provide said notes but was rather intended to convey the idea that what Dio thinks he’s accomplishing by producing this script has a fractionally small relationship to the role of an actual professional on a television writing staff. He seems to acknowledge this, to his credit, and is treating the work as a challenge on its own terms. As long as that limited boundary is clearly set, as long as nobody thinks his success or failure will have any bearing on the arguments about the WGA strike, then hey, I sincerely hope he does well.
He set the 2-week deadline, not me. I gave him more like 2 months. I’m flexible on that, too. But there has to be a deadline. Most of the novelists I know have jobs and/or families and find the time to write.
I don’t expect for one second that Dio’s effort will be comporable to a real teleplay. I just want him to prove that he’s even up to sticking with the project to crank out a crappy amateurish effort.
In sum: **Dio ** is not setting out to prove he can write a teleplay as good or better than an actual episode of a TV show, to be judged by us. That is not my challenge. My challenge is for him to just to stay on task and write anything at all. To do so would prove he can do that much.
Think of it as a NaNoWriMo kind of thing. Nobody does NaNoWriMo thinking that they’ve “really” written a novel. They just set out to see if they can write 50,000 words – in and of itself, a daunting chore.
And I would not make that challenge if I didn’t have doubts about his ability to do it, but confidence that he might.
Right. In all the boasts about how X could write a better screenplay than what gets shown on TV it’s ignored that most of the writers could almost certainly write a better screenplay than what gets shown on TV, too. They are hamstrung in various ways.
“I could do a better job than the writers” is a different claim, and one that requires doing a better job at ALL of the jobs a writer does, not just banging out a story.
I gotta say House is a bad choice. cricetus’s glory would be greater if the bar was lowered a bit, and Dio’s talented would be more evident with a different venue. May I suggest:
*** It should be 1/2 hour** - seriously, in 3 months we’ll forget to even care about this.
*** It should be funny** - nothing is as clear that a writer has a gift like funny dialog
*** I has to be a popular show-** writing a good episode for a shitty show is easy (not that House is), and if few have seen it we wont have a sample size large enough to judge it fairly.
*** It should be a show were all the obvious plot lines are exhausted- ** Writing for a new show isn’t a good indicator.
How about *The Simpsons * or Family Guy?
Actually, by definition there is one way to be sure but to even suggest it would be to foster or promote activity that is illegal and I would never do such a thing.
It seems to me as though a comedy would be a bad choice considering the audience who’s going to be looking over the final product. Sitcoms generally go for lowest-common-denominator humor, and I’m not sure that the posters on this board are really a good judge of what makes a good episode of, say, King of Queens.
Also, as others have mentioned, I’m not sure what the point of this is if Dio isn’t under the same restraints as actual writers for television. I’m sure that anybody could turn out an acceptable screenplay if they got to set their own time limit, etc. That doesn’t mean that anyone can be a screenwriter for a living.
Well, I don’t have anything against Diogenes and don’t remember the thread being referenced. I’m reasonably bright and my understanding of such things is very good. I’ll judge it impartially.
I put the goal posts where they are for a reason, and would appreciate it if people stopped moving them. One hour drama, just get 'er done. That’s the challenge. It’s cut and dried and meant to be a little bit hard.
Regarding Dio’s intelligence, there’s no question that he’s intelligent. He also knows a lot. The only problem I have with him is that he cheats in his arguments; that is, he knows both sides, but presents only one. He’ll call his own sources scholars, and his opponents’ sources hacks. He refuses to acknowledge the validity of any opposing view. If he fixed that one single thing — and he is quite capable of doing so — he’d ascend to the level of **Darwin’s Finch ** or Voyager.
And we’re officially back to where we started. 
Er, I should qualify what I meant.
Someone like myself, who can’t write fiction and has never tried but is fairly competent, could probably churn out an acceptable screenplay if the limits I set on myself included taking a few years to learn the craft , revise the thing, do research, etc. But so what? That doesn’t mean that I can actually perform the job of screenwriting.
I basically look at this exercise in the same way. If Dio isn’t under the same constraints of actual screenwriters, what’s the point?
To quote myself: **My challenge is for him to just to stay on task and write anything at all. To do so would prove he can do that much. **
If I may ask: given that Diogenes started the script before this thread was started, and given that you appear to have not participated in the previous thread at all, why, exactly, do you feel you have the authority to set the terms of the challenge?
I just opened the thread to encourage Dio to pursue a challenge he set for himself and one that was already underway (though I didn’t know he’d already started), without going more off topic in the previous thread.
I was hoping we could monitor and enjoy and encourage Dio’s efforts, rather than pissing on them or telling him to really do something else.
I would also like to enter myself under this category. As a fan of House, I don’t get too stuck on the medical mumbo jumbo that goes on in the show (and I would be a poor judge regarding the medical criteria - get Qadgop for that analysis), but I am a fan of the characters’ development and interactions between them. That part of the show is pretty tasty, and makes me hooked on the show.
And that pretty much sums up why I love his posts.