After developing our story world and our characters for our TV series, my writing partner and I sat down to write a detailed outline (probably too detailed) of all 10 episodes. Happy with the result, my partner started reaching out to his contacts in some of the biggest Quebec-based production houses, and it became obvious what our next step was:
Write our Series Bible, which is normally a 10 to 12 Pages document that aims to make the Big Bucks Producers salivate, who in turn wish to pay you those big bucks so you can write your goddamn show.
(Bible, bible, bible. These past few months, every time someone asked me what I was up to and I replied: “I’m writing a bible”, they looked at me funny as if I was some kind of Jesus Freak. So no, not that kinda bible guys.)
The structure of a bible is pretty simple and has generally 3 parts:
a logline (guess the movie for this one: A police chief with a phobia of open water battles a killer shark with an appetite for swimmers and boat captains, in spite of a greedy town council who demands that the beach stay open.)
a brief description of your characters
an outline of your story
Having little to no idea how best to write such a document, we started reading some of the greatest Hollywood Bibles. We quickly discovered that most of them were actually pretty dry. Like the one from True Detective that gives you an episode-by-episode synopsis that will promptly put you to sleep.
But because we didn't know better and we were in love with our detailed outline, we tried that too. Very quickly, we got lost in a shitload of details and our V1 ran about 18 pages. Well shit. BUT NO MATTER. Surely we needed to keep every plot twist and character arc and relationship and conflict right? How else were the producers going to see the Masterpiece that Squalls was destined to become?
Unfortunately for us, our beta readers were… ambivalent, let's put it that way. Most of them had the same comment: it was damn hard to follow, AND impossible to remember who was who.
Okay, so we would try again then. We went back to the masters and noticed how Fargo’s bible didn't actually have an episode by episode section. It masterfully gave the reader an overview of the plot while at the same time describing its characters and their arcs and the relationships between them. Check what they did for Lorne Malvo:
Picture this: you and your wife go to a party. There’s a man there you’ve never seen
before. He’s charming. He tells great stories. When you talk to him you find yourself
telling him things you wouldn’t tell your closest friend. As does your wife. But on the way home you and your wife have a huge fight. In fact, after the party there are three divorces, one rape and a suicide.Here’s a word. Instigator. Here’s another. Anarchist. If Malvo were a religious man, he would worshiped Loki, the god of mischief. He is the opposite of a brooding sociopath, a man capable of great charm. Malvo is what you might call a freelance criminal, a man you hire when you want something done that is not exactly legal. He has a broker, Mr.Rundle (who we met in the pilot), a broker who fields requests — figure out who robbed me, murder my business partner, etc — and sends Malvo around the country.
Malvo is a collector, not of things, but of moments — moments where otherwise moral people are pushed to do immoral things. Malvo chases these moments. He
manufactures them. They are more important to him than sex or love or money. Which, as we saw in the pilot, means thatBasically, he really likes fucking with people.
So freaking good right?
We’d take the risk of doing things a bit differently and try and copy that structure. The result was definitely better. Little doubt remained in our minds: this beauty would certainly hit hard and get us that juicy contract.
On the second round, our beta readers also agreed that it was an improvement: a serious one. The bible was still long (15 pages), but we were happy and ready to use up one of our precious lifelines: a professional scriptwriter had offered us to have a look at it and give us his impressions.
Guess what he said? He basically trashed it. The only silver lining was that we’d also attached the five first pages of the pilot and he sounded impressed by our opening scenes. Now confident that the actual product (the pilot) was DA BOMB, but with no way to sell it to the people who produced shows, we had only one option: go back to the drawing board yet again.
For our next iteration, we decided we’d draft something a lot shorter: we wanted the producers to get to the pilot ASAP. I won't lie, at this point we both felt a powerful aversion whenever the word bible was spoken out loud and we were lost for at least a week not knowing where to start.
What did we actually want to say about our show? The scriptwriter had mentioned that a good one-pager (also called the One-Sheet in Hollywood that we promptly rechristened “One-Shit”) would bring us far in selling our story. He told us that producers don't care about your intentions (we had a big intentions section on our first page) or your structure (we had one of those too). ALL they care about is: What's the fucking story you want to tell.
That’s what we did: we drafted a catchy One-Shit, pitching what Squalls is all about. Then we had a brief characters section, including a few pages describing our two protagonists, some secondary characters and antagonists. Finally a brief three paragraphs, one for each of our three acts, and a last one describing the setting. 8-9 short pages of slickness and sweetness. That's where we are now and since we used up pretty much all of our lifelines, we'll have to trust our guts and take that Big Step into the void. Hopefully, just like Indy, a bridge will be there waiting to catch us.