As the show moves along at a high speed, I’m just trying to retain some of the torrents of knowledge I’m experiencing day in and day out. One thing I’m noting here to remember later, especially because it was similar to my previous show experience, is the general process through which the room seems to be unraveling the story:
1) Talk through the entire show, the main character arcs and rules of the world – see what organically comes out of the discussion, find the blind spots wherever they may be - lots of unintended world-building comes out of this. (more or less, Day 1)
2) Go through main characters’ episode arcs, putting down a sort of one liner description of their change/experience per episode. We did this on a big grid.
3) Start brainstorming events for the episode next to be written (not necessarily knowing which event goes where within the episode - or if it may even be between 2 consecutive episodes).
4) Turn those events into big sticky notes – color coated by plot/character grouping – start to re-order them into actual outline shape on the big board.
5) Let it sit for a day, then run through it again to make sure it all makes sense, lines up, themes coalesce, suspense is kept at a maximum - and details are added, logic issues are fixed.
6) Move on and repeat for next episode
(and once the episode is done being beated out on the board collectively, it is assigned to outline stage for a writer to work on, outside of room hours. The outline basically turns the beat sheet into a 10-15 page prose treatment where all the details are figured out, there’s a real flow and vision for the episode, and maybe even some preliminary dialogue bits (or placeholders) are written in).