WELCOME TO WORDTETRIS.COM!
Is that too much? I think it was too much.
Anyway, it’s time for my little baby podcast to get a home base I can actually use to build something. What that thing is I honestly don’t know, but I know I want a place to do more than just post podcast episodes on a seasonal basis.
Now, before we get to the goodies, I want to quickly explain how this site is going to work for the podcast:
Thanks to a new feature provided by Patreon, I’m now able to keep certain posts behind a paywall on this site directly. So, from now on this site will serve as the primary launching point for all things Word Tetris. The Patreon page will remain active for the sake of people’s custom RSS feeds (you can learn more about that upon signing up), but I intend to run all links through this website going forward.
What this means for patrons is I will no longer be clogging your premium feeds with all the free 20-minute samples (YAY). From now on, your feeds will just feature full and bonus episodes, which are also accessible through this site by going to a particular post, clicking the Patreon button and logging into your account. The rest of the details are technical mumbo jumbo I barely understand. I’m a writer. Not a coder. You guys are lucky I made it back from my breakfast burrito excursion this morning unscathed.
Okay, so now that that’s all cleared up, let’s get to the goodies.
I wanted to celebrate the launch of the website with a fun little gift for the writers that are currently listening, as well as the ones that are hopefully going to be joining up starting with the launch of season two on February 19th (get on that Patreon, guys).
In the new season, there’s going to be a nice chunk of talk about the lessons I took from season one and applied to my own writing process. One of those lessons was about outlining.
Starting with my two most recent scripts, I created, as upcoming guest Albert Kim puts it, a “beatline.” A cross somewhere between a beat sheet and an outline. To me, it’s a straight outline but some would disagree. Whatever. To each his/her own. We’re all unicorns when it comes to writing.
Sorry. Tangent.
In order to achieve this outline, I needed a place to start from. So, I reached out to some folks and what I got back was the template Hart Hanson asked all his writers to follow back during his tenure on Bones. By using this format, I found myself in a much better place to craft a story without worrying about how things lined up. In essence, what this format gave me was the ability to chuck out the baby with the bathwater – which is a lot harder to do when you start building within in the actual script itself.
From starting with an outline, I also took the most important advice John Rogers offered in episode one:
CHASE THE ENTHUSIASM
By breaking the story in this new format, it opened me up to the world of writing non-linearly. The first thing I wrote on the first of the two scripts I mentioned was a major scene from the fourth act of an hour long. I would never have done that before but, because the heavy lifting had been done already I felt free to experiment with the scene I actually wanted to write first without agonizing over whether or not things were lining up. I knew where characters had been and where they were going.
With this new strategy, I was able to bang out those two scripts in two and a half months. For me, that’s a game-changing speed. And the work is good. They’re already in circulation as my new samples and competition specs.
So, with all that said, I now give to you the things that aided me so greatly. With permission from Hart Hanson and Dean Lopata, I offer below the Bones outline template, as well as a complete version of the document from episode 6×13 “The Daredevil in the Mold”, written by Dean.
Enjoy guys. I don’t know yet what this site will become but I do know I hope to offer more things like this going forward.
BLANK BONES OUTLINE TEMPLATE
Right-click on the links below to download the files directly.
PDF
Final Draft
FULL TEMPLATE FROM BONES 6×13 “The Daredevil in the Mold” BY DEAN LOPATA
Please note the date listed in the document header appears as February 2018 due to the Final Draft formatting. This outline is from 2011.
Right-click on the link below to download the file directly.
PDF