More thoughts on what makes a good original half hour pilot, specifically expanding on my pov shift discussion (tl;dr: make sure there's a B story). I want to talk about auto-biographical scripts. #wgasolidaritychallenge
I've read many scripts that are clearly "my life should be a tv show!" and sometimes that's true, but mostly it causes a few problems. First of all, you know your main character exceedingly well but unless everyone else has a real-life analogue, the other characters not so much.
I think the hardest thing in the world is to create characters. People that seem real with wants, needs, flaws, foibles. Distinct voices. So complex that you KNOW them. Like Sam and Diane, or Frazier, or Fleabag, or Homer. So in the room someone can argue SHE WOULDN'T SAY THAT!
You can't base every character off a real person (Kramer!) and mostly you don't want to. You have to invent people who seem real and who actors want to play. When your hero is just you, a lot of writers fail to make anyone else real. So aside from lack of POV shift...
... auto-biographical pilots often have weak supporting characters. The second problem is that most people's lives are not that interesting. (Sorry!) But if you take a step back and LOOSELY base a character on yourself, you can take them places you never went. It's liberating.
So yes, write what you know, but still make it fiction! And in the long run, if you have a long and successful career, you WILL run out of stories and people you know to base your scripts on. You WILL have to make up characters and stories that have no overlap with your life.
That's a good skill to have and one you might as well start working on now. Because honestly, a LOT of paid work is assigned material, whether IP or just an idea someone wants to develop, and you have to make it work through curiosity and discovery, not familiarity.
