Television Scriptwriting Manuals - Text 2
In addition, this kind of book, like that by Neil Landau, The TV Showrunner’s Map (2014), includes between its more educational or analytical chapters interviews with the scriptwriters and producers of various cult series such as True Blood, How I Met Your Mother, Lost, etc. Although interviews are not anything new in the field of scriptwriting manuals, this having already been done, in France, in a volume edited by René Predal entitled Les scénaristes de télévision (1992), such interviews enable budding scriptwriters to have an overall and contemporary view of the profession and to discover its defects and difficulties. The dialogue between the interviews with professional scriptwriters and the technical elements of scriptwriting paints a realistic portrait of the scriptwriting trade in the television field.
Books analysing writing for series were published, largely in France, at the dawn of the 2020s. These include Florent Favard’s Écrire une série TV: la promesse du dénouement (2019) and Vladmimir Lifschutz’s This is the End: finir une série TV (2018). They offered additional information on scriptwriting for television series by expounding on concepts such as the “bible.”[4] The “bible” is a document created by scriptwriters to bring together narrative diagrams, character profiles, descriptions of the world being created and much more. Because there are no rules around the form and content of the bible, scriptwriters have a degree of freedom in creating their own. Some elements, however, are essential, such as the title of the series, the genre and the format. The bible is also used by the actors to construct their character. In the case of writing for a television series, this object is required for the construction of a world, because it conveys the narrative and creative possibilities of serial narrative.
In sum, scripting television series is different from scriptwriting in cinema by virtue of the questions and constraints specific to the television medium (the length of an episode, the return of a television series the following year, the production, the format). The elements specific to the television medium are set out and explored in these manuals, which describe themselves are veritable guides for writing for television but also for training to become a part of the scriptwriting profession.
