Let me tell you about Squalls and how it came to be.
As I mentioned last week, my friend and I were discussing how unbalanced our lives were back in October, and how even though we were…
***Living the Dream!!!***
our finances were shit.
So we started a quick brainstorm and listed every possible jobs we could do. None of them sounded any fun. You see, from a very young age, they tell you to find your passion, BUT what they don't tell you is that once you do find it, it can be a gift but ALSO a curse: You become obsessed with figuring out ways to do it full-time and that has consequences... Because unless you're lucky and you your passion aligns with what Society values — ie. you just love removing dental plaque and playing inside someone else's mouth is your thing (okay that sounded weird) — you're in for a hard ride.
We both concluded that a carreer that could both bring us a decent salary while doing the thing we love ( writing fiction) might be screenwriting. Still hard, but it didn't feel as impossible as becoming a successful novelist.
(mind you, you can very well be a successful novelist, sell between 7k to 15k copies per book, making $1 to $2 per copy, and live comfortably under the poverty line.)
To get things going, we needed an idea. The first step we took was making lists. Three lists in fact:
1- a list of our favorites shows
2- a list of our favorite characters
3- a list of the themes we wanted to tackle.
We then looked at what our personal lists had in common.
After that, we were ready to give it time, let the seed we’d planted find its own place within our psyche. But then, the very next morning on my way to daycare, a fire truck zoomed by on the opposite lane and it clicked inside of me. Of course! A show about firefighters! We could tackle the band of brothers trope like in Only the Brave, and there would be many opportunities for drama and action and relationships. If I'd been alone I'd probably have gone with that first idea, but my partner didn't fully share my enthusiasm. He pictured Backdraft.
Not what we wanted.
However, instead of rejecting it, my partner had the reflex to run with it for a while, because as an experienced writer, he knew that merging two ideas can often lead to gold. He wanted to make a mystery, a crime show. So he proposed: What if we had three or four amateur sleuths—one of them a firefighter—and there were a series of fires in a small town. I loved it immediately and there we were, less than 24 hours after our initial brainstorm, with a basic premise, a sketch of four characters and a glimpse of our setting.
In the following weeks, we would go on to develop the characters, push the plot to make it more complex (the fires would turn out to be the first layer of many darker secrets) and the story would become vibrant in both our minds. After less than a month, we had a character web, and outline of season 1 and a shitload of excitement.
Now the fun part of creation was over: we had to get serious and write our series bible, a document everybody hates doing but that is necessary if you want to sell your show. That'll be for next week.
Always fascinating where ideas come from. Just gotta stay open to connections and random things that make you go "ah ha!".
"sell between 7k to 15k copies per book, making $1 to $2 per copy"
That's why the self-published model is gaining a lot of mindshare. The economics are very different if you sell 10k copies and make $6-9 per copy!