Anna Henry's TV Pilot Writing Lab : My outline is a mess... by Anna Marton Henry

On the show I'm currently working on, we went through 7 outlines before the first draft of the script (I just checked) - and then of course things still changed. The first three were pretty much a total loss. Ok, we did save some scenes, but they just didn't work. I told you all to get into the world as late as possible, but in the first outline we were getting into the world a season too late. We were trying to cover "backstory" in flashbacks and the backstory was more interesting than the regular story. Sometimes you have to begin at the beginning. We started all over again. In the second outline the A-story was sort of there, but the B-story went totally off the rails into something complicated that had nothing to do with the pilot and was overtaking everything else. The entire storyline was trashed. In the third draft, the B-story worked pretty well, but somehow the C-story and the A-story got flipped. The main character was in a quarter of the pilot, and what was supposed to be the C-story had all the main decision moments and all the act outs. Sigh. The fourth version finally had all the major bones there. The ending made no sense. There weren't enough character beats. A lot of work was left to be done. But we knew we had something...