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Hi, this is Laura Turner, and today I'm going to talk with you about how to write a sitcom
or a situation comedy. First of all start off with a place and a premise. So this sitcom
is about the All-American family and their quirkiness, you know that's probably the most
recycled sitcom premise ever on TV. So if we're going to be working with that kind of
a sitcom, we need to think about using the archetypes in that particular place and premise
to their fullest. So if you're writing about the American family of course you're going
to have the archetypal, the father, the wife, the daughter, the son, the next door neighbor.
You know the guy, the weird guy down the road, you know stuff like that. So think about using
archetypes, and don't be afraid in a sitcom to actually make those characters behave according
to their archetypes, because a sitcom is going to be a very formulated type of writing and
it's going to actually you know gain ground from using this formula rather than being
hindered by it. So play into the archetypes and into what's expected of the genre. For
the most part, you'll be probably writing your sitcom with other people. If you're writing
for a TV show, you're probably going to be writing a bit of the TV show rather than writing
the whole thing yourself, so if you have an idea for a sitcom you might want to present
that to a network you know if you've got your foot in the door. And then they can sort of
try to assign people who will be good to write on that TV show with you. So writing a sitcom
is not necessarily a one man or one woman kind of thing. It's a collaborative sort of
around the table event. So think about that also as you're sort of fleshing out your ideas
for writing your sitcom.