Writing Contest Idea! I Would Like a Little Input... (Also Some NaNo Stuff)

So I was tooling around on Youtube today and I came across a video on the making of the pilot for It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There was one thing the main writer Rob McElhenney said about writing the script that really stood out to me and got me inspired.

Watch from the time it starts until about 3:30

Video

"That's the cornerstone of the whole show, to me. It shows exactly what kind of people they are without having to explain anything, without having any kind of expository dialogue. You don't even really know their names at this point, but you're watching this guy come over to this guy's house and watching this unfold in two minutes. And not only do you know who these people are, but you know the tone of the show, the world that you're setting up..."

So this got me thinking, that's actually an amazing writing exercise to try. To basically write a short scene between two or more characters, have it mostly centred around dialogue and action, and really just give the audience an idea of exactly who these people are. The conversation topic can be anything, whether it be silly, serious, not seemingly important, anything like that.

If I were to make this concept into a contest for writers, I would probably make the prompt something like this:

"Write a scene between two or three characters having a conversation in a 2-5 minute time span. The idea of this conversation is to reveal each character's personality through how they speak to one another and how they react to each other's words, to give the audience a clear idea of who they are.

This is the ultimate "Show Don't Tell". Focus on what a character is saying and how they are saying it rather than an inner monologue. Don't give any context at the beginning, just jump right into the character's world. But through their conversation, you are setting up a tone to the story, the characters' personalities, even the setting."

So I'm hoping that prompt is making some sort of sense? I've got to work on exactly what I'm meaning to say before I start any contest, but it would be nice to hear some thoughts before I do. I might even do this exercise myself to serve as an example. I also have to think of prizes, but I'll worry about that later.

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So I won NaNoWriMo! I hit 50,599 words on Friday, November 28 at roughly 1 in the morning (so I'm still counting that as Thursday night). I was really pleased at how the month went, and I've taken a bit of a break from writing lots every day, but tonight I am getting right back into it. My story is definitely not finished, and will probably be around 100k words until it is. Then I have to rewrite/edit. Yay.

I'm really happy with my experience because it forced me to write everyday, and pick up the habit. I found it getting easier and easier to hit my 2000 word goal every day, and I think the record time i had reaching 2000 words in one sitting was about one and a half hours. Not bad. I've always struggled with just writing, and not having to worry about how good it is. This was a bit different for me as I've really only written short stories, nothing more than about 10000 words. It's easier to make a plot make sense in that short amount of time. Not this one. This is a mammoth with multiple plots and side plots and all that crap. And it's only one of three books, I decided. It was only going to be one, but as I was writing it, going back to the plot outlines and drawing boards, the more I found that the main structure could be broken up into three parts. So, it's most likely going to be three instalments. But I'm excited, because this idea has been cooking in my head for a while and I was glad to at least get 50000 words of it out of there.

Although there was one thing I found while writing it that sort of ties back to my contest idea, and just my general thoughts on writing.

For the past few months I've been watching a lot of Seinfeld, Friends and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. And Seinfeld itself was the original "show about nothing". You have four friends that lived and worked in New York, and that was essentially the show. Same with Friends (exact same city and everything). But watching something like Seinfeld, the comedy comes mostly from the dialogue. Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer all sit around a diner or their apartments and talk, and that's what real life is like. My social life (when I had one) consisted of just that, and since my novel takes place in your average, everyday setting (my own city, even) it reflects a lot of that. What I wrote during NaNo was a loooot of dialogue, a lot of it about "nothing". That "nothing", however, was meant to reveal information about characters and everything else without going into long paragraphs of listing off backstory. (However, I'm sure a lot of it is nonsense and needs to be cut.)

Think about an episode of Seinfeld; when George complains about literally everything, what does it say about his character? When Elaine smacks Jerry and says "GET OUT!" in disbelief, what does that say about her character? (She does it pretty much every other episode, you can't miss it). That's really what I was taking from shows like that and trying to convey in the dialogues I was writing (although I'm not trying to write an episode of Seinfeld, it's just the principle). For my story, there is a plot, but everything else is in the dialogue. Communication is such an important part of building characters, to me, and I think taking inspiration from things that resemble the setting is very important.