P. James Norris

TV Pilot Finalist
​
"Powers & Glory"

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Where do you live (City, State, or Country)?
Chubbuck ID, USA
 
Your script stood out among hundreds of others. What was the inspiration for your story and why did you write a script instead of a short story or a novel?
The inspiration for my Powers & Glory (P&G), which was a finalist in the 2022 Santa Barbara International Screenplay Awards (2022SBISA), is an interesting story. I managed to talk my wife into staying in Park City UT for first weekend of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival so I could walk around and try to find someone who knew someone who might be interested in taking an interest in my first original TV pilot Project Ωmega (PΩ) and attend the ISA Table Read of a half-hour sitcom to which I had submitted PΩ.
 
So I strike up a conversation with a television writer and I tell him that I have a teleplay called Project Ωmega, and he asks me to tell him about it. I explain the plot and he says that he'd like to introduce me to his producer boss/colleague who he thinks might be interested in PΩ.
 
We (the Producer, his writer, and myself) had a couple of Zoom meetings, exchanged several emails, and I submitted my P&G treatment. We exchanged a few more emails, and in the last email I received from the Producer he wrote he wanted his writer to "Stand down on notes." for my treatment.

I decided that as he had neither paid me for the treatment I had written nor given me notes on PΩ, that I write a P&G teleplay based on my treatment and consider the entire P&G idea my own.
 
And that is the story of how I was inspired to write P&G.
 
How long did it take you to write your script...and what is your writing process? Do you outline...use index cards...white board...or just start with FADE IN?
It's been a year since I wrote P&G, and I'm the kind of person who has trouble remembering what he had for breakfast by lunch time, so I'm not sure how long it took me to write the actual script. I think it was less than 20 hours, but I already had the treatment, and I had more than I think is the usual amount of dialogue in the treatment. So, I was able to copy-and-paste a lot of the treatment directly into Final Draft.
 
Prior to writing P&G, I had never worked from a treatment, so P&G is an odd duck for me.
 
Normally, I come up with "the big idea" for the story, for everything I write: teleplays, short stories, and novels. And where does the "the big idea" come from? It's come from so many different places. . . "The Big Idea" for one of my novels came from two "New Order" songs on one of their best of albums. The Big Idea for my first of four Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST:TNG) spec scripts came from the audience at an early 1980's Star Trek Convention, when, in one voice, they all but screamed, "Shut up, Wesley!", when asked by the emcee what would happen when Will Wheaton (who played Wesley Crusher) first opened his mouth on stage if invited to appear at the next year's convention.
 
From The Big Idea, I usually generate, in no particular order, a list of "Things That Gotta Happen" (TTGH). For my four ST:TNG specs, this list was generally pretty short, maybe a 12 happenings. And it's generally pretty short for my short stories; for one of my flash fictions, there were only the two happenings: basically, the first and last sentences of the story. For my latest project, Enceladus, a one-hour sci-fi TV series, the TTGH consists of 73 happenings. Obviously, that's too many things for a single episode, and includes happenings for at least the first three seasons.
 
I then impose a temporal/sequential order on the TTGH, and decide where the cutoff is for the first episode or the first book if the TTGH is so long that it must span multiple books. (I have a near-religious object to 1,000+ page books; a novel in my opinion, ought to be no longer than 120,000 or so words—this isn't to say that I don't like Brandon Sanderson; I've read several of his books and enjoyed them immensely, it's just that I'm a fairly slow reader and anything over 100K words takes me months to read and that's just too much time to spend on a book.)
 
For teleplays, short screenplays, and short stories, I then start writing the piece. For novels I write a synopsis of whatever length strikes my fancy; literary agents like synopses of no more than 750-1,000 words, but for myself, I write a synopsis that is a long as I feel it needs to be.
 
What is your ultimate ambition as a writer?
Regarding my TV projects, to have a pilot produced and be a co-executive producer who all but runs the writer's room. Regarding my short screenplays, to have them produced. 
 
Which film or television writers inspire you? Why?
Aaron Sorkin, without a doubt, because the man can write!
 
What’s your all-time favorite movie or television show?
I've got to say, since I'm writing teleplays, that my favorite all time TV show is Aaron Sorkin's one-season Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

What else are you working on that the world needs to know about?
Everything I'm working on presently can be found at my writer's homepage, http://www.ocetacea.net/pjamesnorris/index.php--if anyone should visit my page as a result of reading this interview, please, please, PUH-LEASE, send me a note saying you've done so using the "Contact James" page. And if you'd like, read the loglines for my novels on the landing page and vote for which novel you think I should be focusing on!