Book Gives Sitcom Writing Secrets
Learn How to Write a Sitcom with Comedy Writing Guru Marc Blake
Keen on writing sitcoms? Read How to Be a Sitcom Writer: Secrets from the Inside by British comedy professional Marc Blake. Blake shares the secrets of sitcom writing
Can you learn how to write a sitcom? Is sitcom writing easy? How much can you earn writing sitcoms? What makes for a good TV sitcom? The answers to all these questions are in Marc Blake's book, How to Be a Sitcom Writer: Secrets from the Inside.
Sitcom writing is the most popular on TV. Series like Fawlty Towers, The Office, Extras, Dad's Army, Steptoe and Son, Absolutely Fabulous, Only Fools and Horses, One Foot in the Grave, Blackadder, Cheers, Frasier, Seinfeld, Friends and ... well, the list goes on and on. Well-written sitcoms draw some of TV's biggest audiences. Programmes like Hancock in Britain and Bilko from the USA are still playing and making people laugh 50 years after they were made.
Great sitcom writing is timeless, as Blake shows by using examples from shows as old as Bilko and Hancock, and analysing why they work and why they still make us laugh today. Writing sitcoms is about creating good characters: people like Basil Fawlty, David Brent and Frasier Crane. Some of them we love, some of them we hate, but all of them make us laugh and go back for more. Why? That's one of the subjects Blake deals with in his book.
How to be a Sitcom Writer is a tiny book with a big punch. It's only pocket-sized, but its 220 pages are packed with practical info for the aspiring sitcom writer. These sitcom writing secrets are divided into eight sections:
- Sitcom Essentials
- Where do I begin?
- Practicalities of sitcom
- Character
- Situation and relationships
- Plotting
- The Script
- The business of sitcom
Finally there are six pages of Resources for the budding sitcom writer, including useful addresses and websites, recommended books of sitcom scripts, sitcom writing courses and the author's personal choice of his Top 40 Sitcoms (with The Office and Frasier at number 1 and number 2).
The author is as good on telling would-be sitcom writers what to avoid as he is at telling them what to be striving for. He makes you see life through the eyes of the people who buy sitcom scripts, and makes you realise why yours has to stand out from the crowd, why it mustn't simply rehash jokes and situations that have been seen a thousand times before.
How to be a Sitcom Writer is amazing value for money, at only £5.99. It is packed with practical exercises, guaranteed to improve your sitcom. The author makes you work at developing your stories, developing your characters, checking your plots – everything that goes into good sitcom writing. One reassuring piece of advice is that nothing is right the first time, so don't expect it. Everything is rewritten and rewritten, he tells us, including his own book. Sometimes when we see a good comedy which looks so effortless, we forget that the sitcom writer probably went through several drafts and lots of perspiration to make it like that.
So if you want to be a sitcom writer, or be a better sitcom writer, buy this book and you may just have the last laugh.
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SITCOM WRITER MARC BLAKE
Marc Blake has been writing sitcoms for British TV for several years. Blake has also written three best-selling comic novels, and a series of funny non-fiction books. He also works as a comedian and a sitcom script consultant, and has been teaching sitcom writing across the UK for over ten years. He began teaching comedy and sitcom writing at London’s City University in 1994. His past students include Catherine Tate and Jenny Colgan.
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How to be a Sitcom Writer: Secrets from the Inside by Marc Blake is published by Summersdale Publishers at £5.99 in the UK.
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