Workplace Bully: Public debut

Just pitched Workplace Bully to Sean. This is a big improvement for me: with The Limit the gap between thinking about the story and pitching it was about two years. With this it's been ... ah, ... less. Like maybe six months since first thinking about it, and about a week since first starting to work on it.

Pitching, as ever, remains difficult for me. This was my first time describing the whole story to someone else. I prefaced it by explaining that, and asking Sean to keep a lookout (while I pitched) for the emotional flow of the story. Were there any odd or inexplicable character decisions? Any big leaps where things didn't make sense.

The pitch was a bit of a conversation, a bit of recitation (from my outline), and a bit of discovery (I figured out a few scenes while explaining the story). Sean and I also know each other pretty well - he felt comfortable asking questions about things that were unclear to him. I felt comfortable pausing to write things down. To an outside observer, it would have seemed very stop-n-start, but for us it was like hitting pause on a movie, and then getting right back into the story.

Two big discoveries from pitching it

First, this marked the beginning of the story's transition from a bunch of related scenes to something coherent, with themes and a structure. The conversation with Sean really drew out a few big points, including how epic the confrontation between the two main characters in this story really is.

Second, we examined the emotional logic behind one of the characters deciding to fight back. It felt facile to me as I pitched it, and it felt an odd transition to Sean as he listened. Together we were able to really dig in to what was going on for the character at that point. This is some of my favourite writing work - to figure out all the implications of the plot event on a character and then determine how they'd really react to it ... and what that means.

Now it's time to absorb the rest of his feedback and get to work on refining my outline so that it's readable. There's much work to be done, but I'm on the right track.

Workplace Bully: It begins

Workplace Bully was the New Thing that gathered the most comments back when I was blogging about my next projects. I've spent the last couple of months researching and thinking about what could happen when you're bullied.

Rather than take extensive notes, I turned each idea or interesting-fact-from-the-research into an episode idea (describing each idea in a sentence). That gave me about 200 ideas ... and out of that research, some insights into the characters and what I want to do with the show have emerged.

I've found that I've been a little torn between my original conception of creating Workplace Bully as a webseries and discovering the story along the way vs. outlining the whole thing for an upcoming Film Commission thing. That tension has brought back some of my old fears about writing, but I seem to be dealing with it this time by breaking each stage of outlining in small, quickly-and-easily achieveable steps.

My big goal was to create an outline of the story that I could show to my first audience of readers (Sean, Andrew, Chris).

First step was to take those 200 scenes and identify the main emotional beats - the moments and decisions that make me care about the characters and the story I'm watching. With that done, I culled even further ... and identified what I called the 'keystone' beats: the absolutely essential moments in the script. There are seven of them.

The order for those 'keystone' beats was pretty clear, but on their own they don't make a story. Now I had to take the main emotional beats and use them to create a flow of events between each of those keystone beats. This took a bit of doing; after refining my first crack at it, I took a day to just reflect on the story and what I considered to be the core of it.

Finding the core of a script or a story, figuring out what it's about, is something that I constantly refine through doing a project. Here's what I think is the core for Workplace Bully, at the moment: it's the story of an ordinary woman who has to become a hero. That captures the sense of the everyday setting of the story coupled with the epic nature of the struggle that I want.

Now I've refined the story a little more based on that. With previous projects I might have kept going on this for days. Now I'm going to pitch it to Sean as soon as I can. Get his feedback, restructure it and get a very rough written outline to Andrew and Chris (if they're willing) as soon as I can.

The New Thing: In Closing

When I started this series of New Thing posts I simply wanted to find out whether any of my ideas had an audience, but I very quickly realised that your questions (and my focus on answering them) was helping me get a feel for each project. At the same time as we were discussing each pitch, I explored each idea, and now I've got a good sense of what needs to happen next. There are 2.5 projects I want to dig into further(*), and 1.5 projects that I realise now are more for fun (and can slip a little down my to-do list).

(*) I'll go into details about those, below.

Another thing I didn't realise when I started was how much I'd appreciate people getting involved in and commenting on each project. Your comments continuously surprised me (people wanting a female bully, the positive reaction to Artificial, Matt disliking the narrator of my excerpt from Left Coast). My conclusion is that discussing your projects is good - enthusiasm is good and criticism is also good (and not as off-putting as I feared I might find it). So, thank you very much for all your thoughts and feedback.

The big lesson for next time - because I do think I'll do this again - is to handle the online conversation more carefully. I made an effort to answer everyone's comments and questions - which forced me to pay attention to what was really being said, and to think about each project in more detail. However, I failed to be as interactive as I wanted to be - due to some privacy concerns, I stopped auto-linking each post on Facebook, and I didn't follow twitter as much as I wanted to (... and I'm not exactly sure why I didn't). I also have to be careful to not suffer from blogger's syndrome - to not to let the buzz of getting really involved in answering questions (and discussing the ideas) to substitute for working on the idea


What's next

Workplace Bully is definitely one of the projects to dig into further (and I want to thank everyone for their enthusiastic and challenging comments about it). During the last month I've been researching and outlining it, specifically trying to get an idea of how the second half of the story might work. Turns out there's a danger that I could write it so that it's too plotty rather than about the characters (Billy's 'educational video' effect). The next step is to explore its ideas and develop its plot.

Artificial wasn't as easy to write as I'd hoped. I am going to have to sit down with it for a ... fortnight? a month? and investigate it further. This is an idea I like, but I could easily see myself abandoning it if I don't think it's worth working through the Dip on it.

As for The Orphans, I love the characters, I made good progress on outlining the story and I'm desperate to know how it all turns out. I'm just not sure if it's a movie, and I'm not sure if I will want to take it any further once I've finished outlining it. For the moment, I'm gunna consign it to PLAY!

Finally, Left Coast. Judging from the number of idea-bombs that exploded in my brain while I was thinking about this, I believe can be a good game. From what I can tell, the effort I need to put in to making it something that others can playtest is reasonably small. I think if I dedicated a couple of weeks to it, I could get it into shape.

So, from here I'm going to concentrate on getting outlines together for Workplace Bully, Artificial, and one other idea (which I'll hopefully confirm with the people involved in the next three weeks). In the downtime from doing that, I'll work on a rough-n-dirty playtestable draft of Left Coast for me and others to have fun with. The outlines, though, are definitely the main priority.

Workplace Bully: Wrapping Up

I think it's time to wrap up this first New Thing; tomorrow I'll post the pitch for the second New Thing. It's a love story.

Thank you for all your help and insights during this. I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have. Thank you, in particular, for sharing your insights about when this has actually happened to you.

I've been doing more reading on bullying recently (John Clarke's 'Working with Monsters', an excellent book with a strong focus on the psychology of the bully). It's been a good source of inspiration for things that could happen in this story of the conflict between the bully and their target. It's also helped me start to take the 'step forward' that this project needs in order to convince me that it's worth doing - there's a sub-text running through it that I've identified, a sub-text that (for me) represents the true horror in this particular story of bullying:

The Bully is destroying the Target's reputation. The Bully is manipulating the situation so that the Target looks incompentent and angry. The Bully is creating an identity for the Target with is unfair, but which unfortunately is backed up by facts that the Bully has engineered ... and by changes in the Target's personality (which are totally the result of the Bully's behaviour).

I love this idea that the Bully is warping the reality of the workplace, creating an environment in which the Target is perceived as the bad guy. That will really inform my outlining work as I keep exploring this project.

All right! Time to do a little more wrap-up research on this. I'll post the next New Thing tomorrow morning.

Workplace Bully: Answering questions

I've finally had a chance to answer the outstanding questions from the previous post. Stephanie asked what kind of tone I want for this story; Sean asked a related question:

How do you want viewers to feel while watching this? Do you want them to really feel the experience of being bullied? If so, what does that feel like to you?

My feeling is that this whole project is going to be an exercise in tone. It’s got something going on that has no obvious reference points because I can’t think of anything that’s done it before. Here are a couple of things I’ve been thinking about while the Tone thread has been going on, though:

• To me, bullying feels like it happens incrementally. It starts as small-scale, isolated incidents. The Bully is testing whether they can get away with their bullshit on this particular person. Those isolated incidents slowly begin to make you feel stressed and terrible about yourself; they gradually form a pattern of dysfunctional behaviour where you’re accepting being bullied because it’s just normal and the way things are.
   
• You could think of Workplace Bully as a disaster movie – a social disaster movie, where the Bully is the iceberg and the Target is the Titanic, and we the audience can see the two of them moving slowly towards a collision.

The great thing about these thoughts on tone (slow, incremental) is that they feed into the way I want to present the story (bite-sized, episodic).

Related to this is Emma’s question about whether this will be hard to write, because I’ll inevitably be pushing something very personal out into the world. I’ve thought for a long time about how to answer this, and in the end my answer’s very simple: You’re totally right. I’m expecting there to be a lot of elements in this story that are highly personal to me. But I have no idea what they are, yet. Part of the fun of this is going to be discovering those truths while I’m in the process of writing it.

+++

Joe, thanks for your comment and questions. You said:

Storytelling is about simplification. There's also a tendency for people to define themselves in simple terms - a gamer, a nerd, a victim of abuse. How are you going to ensure that the victim isn't just a victim?

A couple of short answers to this. First, the character traits that make someone a good target for bullying will help flesh her out. Secondly, I really think that the second half of the story (where she fights back) will has the potential to demonstrate enormous character growth and put her under some really interesting new types of stress (which gives me the opportunity to demonstrate new facets of her character).

I guess I’m saying that I will have to write this in order to demonstrate to myself that she’s not just a caricature, but I feel the potential for a well-rounded character is there.

You also asked how are people around her affected by the tension or stress she's under. Excellent, excellent question. I’m very excited by this. I think there’s a lot of scope to show the pressures that the bullying puts on her partner and her workmates, and look at how her behaviour changes. I think I’ll leave it there, but I will say this: people who are bullied run the real risk of becoming bullies themselves.

There are a couple more questions to answer, but I’ll leave it there. I’m going to spend a bit of today researching and outlining. If you’ve got more questions or comments, feel free.

FYI: I’ve been stoked by the feedback you’ve been giving me. I suspect there will only be a few more days of Workplace Bully as the New Thing, but we’ll see how it goes. I’m playing this by ear, and figure I’ll present the next New Thing when it feels right (rather than on some arbitrary schedule).

Workplace Bully: Should the characters be male or female?

When over 25% of the people who are commenting on Workplace Bully bring up the same point, it's time to pay attention. In my pitch, I said that the Bully is male and the Target of his bullying is female. A lot of you have expressed surprise, curiousity or even concern about that, so this post is for you to share your thoughts and perhaps even discuss it among yourselves.

First off, here are my thoughts about why I pitched it the way I did:

1. I have some actors in mind for the roles.
2. My instincts are telling me that the second half of the story, where the Target fights back against the Bully, just plays better if the Target's a woman.
3. I know how to write this if it's a male Bully and a female Target. Not so sure about the other way round; I don't have an instinctive feel for what that female Bully would be like yet (more research required).

Against that, there's a couple of points that have come through strongly:

1. A couple of people have mentioned that they've been bullied by women (I certainly have), and there's an impression from that that middle-aged women bullies are quite common in the business world.
2. Making the Bully a woman removes the undertones of sexual predatoriness (?) and physical intimidation that a man would bring to the role.

So there's a starting point if you'd like to discuss it. If necessary, I'll moderate this - but I figure it should be really interesting to hear each other's ideas. Now! Off to answer some of the questions raised in previous comments, and do some research on this story.

Workplace Bully: What's the tone?

Here's a question for you while I'm busy working on answers from the comments thread and resting my hands: when you first heard the pitch for Workplace Bully, what did you imagine it would be like?

When you hear that it's a webseries of short one to two minute episodes about a bully victimising someone at work, what do you expect to see?

New Thing: Workplace Bully

In the last ten years, both at work and in my flats, I've had the misfortune of running into four enormous arseholes. One of them very nearly broke me.

Confronting and defeating bullies isn't something that comes naturally to me. Or to a lot of people, I suspect. But it's totally necessary for our survival. Bullying is high-stakes. It can drive a person to a nervous breakdown or to suicide. And a lot of people share this experienceaccording to this Stuff article, one in five New Zealanders may experience bullying.

In the process of learning a little bit of verbal self-defence, I realised there's a great story in here. I'm interested in watching a story about someone who's driven right down to the breaking point, and who fights their way back up.

Workplace Bully is a web-series.

There are two main characters - the bully and the woman he's bullying (a new arrival to the office).

There are two halves to the story - her slowly realising she's being bullied as her self-esteem gets driven down to breaking point, and then her learning how to fight back against the bully, which will require her to push herself, her workmates, the bully and her workplace as far as she possibly can.


I have a very clear vision for this show. It's funny (in the sense that watching a witty bully is entertaining), but the first half is mostly about tension and slowly-mounting disaster. There's no physical violence in it; the only violence in this story is verbal and bureaucratic.

In the second half, as she learns how to fight back, I'd hope that the story starts to feel archetypal - a hero's (sic)journey about a woman nearly destroyed by a monster. And then fighting back against him.

As a show, I think it's going for something very real. Plausible. Realistic. And, I think, really dramatically satisfying. But not a drama; it's almost like a constructed documentary

Episodes are very short - one or two minutes. In fact, each episode is basically a scene focusing on a single situation - a morning tea, a power-point presentation, a single moment of insight into the woman or the bully's personal life. And the episodes don't follow on directly from each other: this isn't a cliffhanger-type show; it's more a gentle observing of incidents from two peoples' lives that add up to a bigger story.


I have two actors in mind, and I'm keen to try and shoot it Lone Gun style. So far it's been an easy show to outline and come up with episodes for (and it has the added bonus that doing the research benefits me). I suspect that rather than scripts, Workplace Bully would semi-improvised from an outline.

What I'd like to do in the next three to six months is:

1. Outline and research a bunch of episodes, to make sure that there's enough material there.
2. Shoot a Season Zero: three to six easy to achieve episodes over one or two days, Lone Gun style.

The Big, Wild Success for this project would be that I film the whole arc and that there's an audience for it. It'd also be great if it helped people (but maybe that's just a little too sincere).

So, if you're interested in this project or you have some thoughts on it, let's have a conversation about it. Because I'd like to try and get the most out of this, I've implemented a few rules:

• Interview me (and each other). Ask questions, rather than posting monologues about what you think.
• Be nice. Make people feel safe to post, and try and critique constructively. Although, if you absolutely must tell me why this idea is not damn good, go for it ... but - you know - 'constructively', and we'll sort out how that works.
• I will try and engage heavily with this conversation, here, on Twitter and on Facebook. Let's see how that works.