I’m in a second rewrite of my novel, Crushing Debt. I did an edit on the main plotline, and I’m happy with it. Now, I am reworking the secondary characters and their story arc. I have ten secondary characters – the contestants on the game show, Crushing Debt. And I wanted their stories to be funny.

Funny can be hard in writing. So, this week, I started taking a Groundlings class for sketch writing. It is fascinating. And, fun, of course. I decided to put my ten characters into “sketches” Saturday Night Live style, at least a few times in the book, within the plot. You could consider them just funny scenes, but sketch-writing training was going to make that so much more possible.

A character sketch is when one character is weird or odd (think: Debbie Downer) and he or she is “happening to” a group of normal people. The normies are the main character, as they react to the character. The MCs change and escalate throughout the sketch, but the oddball character stays the same, bewildered why everyone around him/her is getting angry.

My first week, I was assigned to write a beat sheet for a character sketch. I have never done writing for TV or movies, so I didn’t really know what a beat sheet was. I assumed it was an outline of the episode. But it is a one pager that tells:

  • The STORY – beginning, middle and end. Where are they? Who are they? What do they Want?
  • The  SETUP – Introduce the Main character/s (MCs, the “normies” in the sketch) and what do they want?  And what/who gets in the way of the MCs getting what they want?
  • The BEATS or ESCALATIONS – three or more funny moments that escalate the sketch.
  • RESOLUTION – who wins, who loses? How does it resolve?

There’s a temptation to just write the sketch (about 6 pages long) but the beat sheet provides a little discipline and structure. You can see the funny. Does it work? You can fix the funny. It only takes a few sentences to rewrite. You can work on it, until the funny is tight.

Anyway, I found this exciting and fascinating. This week, I began a character sketch with one of my own characters, Tanya. She is being outrageous, and everyone around her (the other women contestants) are getting aggravated, angry, and … go see the beat sheet!! It’s here.

I hope you laugh. And LMK what you think!