{"id":2458,"date":"2009-12-30T16:38:58","date_gmt":"2009-12-30T16:38:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=2458"},"modified":"2009-12-31T11:59:51","modified_gmt":"2009-12-31T11:59:51","slug":"lines-on-the-paper-lines-on-my-face","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=2458","title":{"rendered":"Lines on the paper, lines on my face"},"content":{"rendered":"

in case it rings bells, the title is a misquote of the cuttingly clever lyric ‘There were lines on the mirror, lines on her face’ taken from the song Life In The Fast Lane by The Eagles…<\/em><\/p>\n

Because I’m living life in the fastest of fast lanes.<\/p>\n

Not.<\/p>\n

It’s 2pm, I still haven’t showered, shaved or dressed. I’m sitting on the couch, I’m still in my bathrobe and I’m up to my arse in sitcom scripts and BBC templates for TV productions.<\/p>\n

The horses will get today off.<\/p>\n

By the way, wasn’t it nice of Soph to pop in and say a few words yesterday?<\/p>\n

Back to the writing.<\/p>\n

It takes a punishing amount of dialogue to form a single half-hour sitcom episode; far more than a chapter of a novel, or even a graphical scene.<\/p>\n

But, strangely, sitcom dialogue doesn’t have to flow in the way that literary dialogue does.<\/p>\n

There is a… (don’t want to say ‘art’)… there is a knack to writing TV sitcom scripts; it’s such a different form from lit. prose\/short stories, and slightly alien at first.<\/p>\n

Anyway, it’s now 4.30pm so you can see that I haven’t been giving exclusive concentration to this post for the last couple of hours!<\/p>\n

But in other news, we have found the missing-for-a-week HSBC Online Banking dongle, so I can now login and pay myself once again.<\/p>\n

Yay.<\/p>\n

Now then, all I’ve got to figure out before I start writing the next scene, is how to make a suicide funny…<\/p>\n

And before I go, here’s some brilliant wordage on writing for television from James Henry<\/a>, a talented chap who I would consider to be a ‘proper’ scriptwriter (well, he’s responsible for – amongst others – Bob The Builder, Smack The Pony and Green Wing):<\/p>\n

Thing is, of course, sitting about on your arse all day is perfect<\/em> training for career in writing scripts (less so for acting, sadly). Further useful skills you could learn in this valuable period:<\/p>\n

1. Sighing heavily.
\n2. Looking things up on Wikipedia, getting distracted, finding yourself spending an entire afternoon on the history of Transformers.
\n3. Trying various condiment combinations for toast (peanut butter plus brown sauce = yes, cheese, marmite and sliced raw onion also = yes, but with repercussions).
\n4. Watching a lot of Lady Gaga videos, and starting to think she really might be a lot smarter than that Poker Face song initially suggested.
\n5. More sighing.
\n6. Buying stationary<\/span> stationery, until you have an entire shelf of A4 notebooks, all of which have only the first three pages written in, but which can’t be thrown out, because there’s also some AMAZING D&D maps scribbled in one, can’t remember which.
\n7. Looking for spare change down the back of the sofa.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

in case it rings bells, the title is a misquote of the cuttingly clever lyric ‘There were lines on the mirror, lines on her face’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2458\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}