How will I train you to write a pilot?

It's the final exercise in your Real World TV Writing Skills Self-Guided course that I'm running, written out of my extensive teaching and TV award-winning experience .

This is the real thing. You spend a whole course learning and practising in your own time tried and tested professional TV-specific skills ( practice is vital - breaking storylines, writing to beats, constructing stories to work within real world set and screen time restrictions, plus a lot more) then you'll write a pilot within professional restrictions.

This is not the pilot for your own TV series! No way! That's far too precious to risk you going wrong and wrecking the thing through inexperience. No. It's a practice pilot for a spin off that I have devised and you write to my instructions.

I'll be giving you three very rough and very general log lines for the three story lines for you develop and interweave in your pilot.

You will take these, and, applying all the speed creativity skills you've learnt, plus your new knowledge of how to write within TV's extreme and unexpected budgetary restrictions, you'll first invent your own interpretation of the loglines.

Next, you'll create, beat by beat (because you'll know how to work with beats) a plan of the three story lines so that your episode will run for exactly 25 minutes of screen time. Moreover, it will conform to specific limits of sets and locations typical of inexpensive TV series (you'll have learnt how to write quality inexpensively and at speed - a vital skill) . Next you'll turn those beats into scenes (four sets, four locations limited cast numbers only). Next, you'll interweave all the scenes, checking (with all the special recalibration techniques you've learnt) that they're suspenseful and involving with strong characterisation and themes. Finally, knowing exactly where you're going and what you're doing you'll write the whole pilot to fit the allocated screen time, ticking all the artistic and budgetary requirements!

TV writing is not just about talent and grit. It's about talent, grit and writing within a mass of unexpected restrictions to do with budget and the production company work flow (it also helps to be a bit mad, but then we writers, are, aren't we - utterly bonkers... I mean, what other lunatic would train writers by getting them to write a whole practice pilot...).

I'd love to help you. If you enrol now, before March 20, you'll get an early bird discount. But you can still enrol after that (without the early bird) because, after many requests, I'm putting the course up permanently. You get a year's access to the materials after the date of enrolment.