nickelodeon writing fellowship – first month

i can’t believe the first month of the fellowship is already over.  it is very intense but i’m absolutely loving it! i’ve been staying up late to write, waking up at 6am to write for a few hours before driving into the studio, and writing all weekend. here’s what the fellowship has consisted of so far:

MEETINGS

we have several meetings a week with different people at nickelodeon. so far, we’ve had 10 meetings, but i think we’re going to have around 40 meetings or so during the course of the year. we’ve already met vp’s, line producers, coordinators, development execs, writers, and fellowship alums. each meeting is an hour long and starts with us fellows giving a short bio of ourselves, and then we get to ask questions for the rest of the time. each of these meetings is incredible. i’ve already learned so much!

CLASS

fred rubin comes in once a week for 6 weeks. we’ve covered brainstorming ideas, researching, pitching, and comedy. we only have 2 meetings left; one on rewriting, and one on career strategy. if you have a chance to study with fred, do it!

REWRITING

we each got notes on the original scripts we submitted to get into the fellowship, which for me was a 30 rock script. it’s already gone through several revision drafts and i feel much better about the script now. i should be finished soon, and then i’ll start rewriting my community spec.

WRITING

i have to write a new spec script, and the show i picked out of a box was cougar town. this was going to be a challenge because i had never seen the show, and it didn’t seem interesting to me at all. i researched the show and pitched 3 premises, but only 1 was accepted. the other 2 premises weren’t that funny or interesting, and the endings for the stories weren’t clear, so i had to come up with 2 more premises. i did more research by watching every single episode in order (again), and that really helped. when i pitched my 2 new ideas, karen liked the same one i did, and it was approved. now i have to move on to the outline. i was stressed out a bit because i felt like i fell behind, but i’m really glad she rejected my first few premises because they weren’t that good. i like the new idea much better and i’m actually excited to write the script, which is something i thought i’d never say about a script for cougar town.