Welcome to the latest episode of The Writing Coach podcast with Kevin T. Johns.
In this episode, Kevin discusses writing tips from Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the creator of the acclaimed TV show Fleabag. Kevin goes over 10 tips from Waller-Bridge on aspects like starting with funny personal experiences, using comedy and drama together effectively, developing complex and imperfect characters, prioritizing truthfulness and excitement, and more.
Kevin shares his perspective on each tip from Waller-Bridge while also emphasizing the importance of structure in writing.
The Writing Coach Episode #201 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #201 Transcript
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Hello, beloved listeners and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always writing coach Kevin T. Johns here.
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Today on the podcast we’re going to be going over some tips from the writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge, you might know her as Indiana Jones is sidekick and the last Indiana Jones movie. She was also Lando calories, Ian’s copilots slash lover robot or why don’t I was going out there in the Solo movie But really how I know her is as the writer, the star, and the creator of the incredible television series Fleabag. Fleabag started out as a play as a one woman show Walbridge adapted it into the TV show and it is one of the greatest television series of all time.
And so I was clicking around Pinterest as I like to do sometimes and looking for different and interesting writing tips. And I came across a list of writing tips from Phoebe Waller-Bridge and given how much I loved her writing in Fleabag I was interested to take a look at the recommendations that she had. And I just wanted to go over them with you and share my thoughts on them because across the board pretty much I totally agree with the things that she’s recommending.
Now I’m a novelist and most of the writers I’m working with are novelists. I am working with some screenplay writers shout out to Mike. But primarily I’m writing and working with fiction authors. Walbridge is a screenplay and the playwright. But I think everything she talks about here applies to novels as well.
So let’s take a look at Waller bridges. Advice.
1. Start with writing funny and interesting things that happened in your life, and then weave them into a dramatic story.
Now Waller-Bridge is obviously a comedian and so she’s always starting from that point of comedy. Myself, I feel like every writer has strengths and every writer has weaknesses. And I would say comedy is probably one of my weaknesses. I am super serious in my fiction writing for the most part, though, that said, rocket Princess versus snaggletooth, the dragon and the princess rocket squad, the rocket Princess SQL, those are both pretty funny kids books. So maybe I do have some humor in me.
But Waller-Bridge is obviously looking for that funny thing, and then building drama around it. You know, this is almost unavoidable this idea of starting with something that happened in your life and then weaving a dramatic story around it so many of the first time novelists that I work with and obviously memoirists are writing about their own lives and even the fiction authors. They don’t even realize it sometimes. But it really does seem like the starting point for most people is their own lives, their own experiences.
And I’m no different. You know, my first book was a vampire novel. I haven’t had a lot of experiences with vampires in my life that said, the vampire was a metaphor and the story took place in a small town that was 100% Based on the small town I grew up in and a lot of the experiences that my kids were going through in the story, like divorce and like step parents like bully He’s all of these things were straight out of my life. So yeah, I think that is a good place to start. That said, I would urge people to experiment with moving away from yourself. It’s really fun and freeing. When you can think of your characters as characters that you’re creating and using for dramatic purposes. Instead of having every character you write being some aspect of yourself it. There’s some freeing nature, I think when you can distance yourself a bit from your protagonist and the characters in your story. All that said, probably a good place to start as Walbridge recommends.
2. Disarm the audience with comedy, then punch them in the gut with drama when they least expect it.
Anyone who’s seen Fleabag knows Waller-Bridge is obviously a master of this technique. It is a very funny series. And yet one of the most heartbreaking series you can ever imagine, by the end of that first season, I’m always looking to punch my reader in the gut with emotions, I’m always looking to break their heart. But I think Waller-Bridge introduces an interesting concept here, where that gut punch might be all the more powerful, all the more impactful if you first disarm your audience with comedy. So again, Walbridge is introducing this concept of comedy, but intermingling with it with drama. And I love this idea of actually disarming the audience, only to get them all the more with the powerful, dramatic stuff.
3. Sometimes you have to go looking for inspiration, by going far away from what you’re writing.
That’s interesting. I’m not so sure what she means about that one other than maybe when we go out and we live life and we have experiences, it can inform our writing, there’s a famous quote, what is it? If you want to be remembered, write something worth remembering, or do something worth writing about something like that. Right? I think that’s kind of what she’s getting at here. In terms of get out there and live life a little bit. I think that’s where she’s coming from.
4. Create sympathetic antagonists and imperfect heroes.
Love it, right? We’re looking for that character complexity, I think, a lot of the time, especially when I’m working with, say, fantasy writers. Quite often the heroes are just good guys trying to do the right thing. And the bad guys are just bad guys. They’re just evil. But of course, life doesn’t work that way. There’s so many shades of grey, no person is perfect. And no villain is purely evil, right. So I love this idea of taking your antagonistic forces, making them sympathetic, sympathetic, making them understandable making them three dimensional. And then also making your perf your heroes imperfect, because we are all imperfect. And so we relate to characters who are imperfect people often talk about how Superman is a challenging character to write because he’s impervious to everything. And no one is as perfect as he is. And so at times, he can be an unattainable goal or in an empathetic character, because we don’t get what it would be like to be him though, of course, a lot of the time we can aspire to be like him.
Here’s an interesting tip from Walbridge that I’ve never heard anyone say before:
5. Teach your characters what you’re trying to teach yourself.
That’s interesting. So we all have areas of growth, opportunities for areas of growth in our lives, we all have problems to overcome, we all have difficulties to find solutions to and I kind of love this idea that Waller is saying, write a character who learns the lesson that you want to learn and I think she’s saying that because one, maybe you’ll learn the lesson too in the process. And even if you don’t, maybe your reader will, and I’m a big proponent of this fiction writing is escapism, but it also needs to have a deeper benefit. It needs to be teaching the reader something it needs to have something to say about the world or what it is to be human. And I think that’s what Waller bridge is getting the add here that when you’re you teach your character something that’s important to you that you want to change in your life. I mean, It’s a real thing. And it’s a real important lesson. And even if you can’t learn it, maybe your readers can.
6. If your writing feels dangerously truthful, you’re going in the right direction.
Hemingway said something about this as well. He said, when he was feeling blocked up, he’d just sit down and write one true thing. And once you write that one true sentence, you’re moving in the right direction. fleabag does seem very close to the bone. In its cuts, it does feel truthful and real, and the way the characters act in that, particularly fleabag herself, feels truthful and real and vulnerable. And, and that’s scary to do as an artist, right? That’s scary to to get truthful. Sometimes, because you’re worried, you’re revealing too much of yourself where you’re worried what the reader will think of you. But art art shouldn’t be dangerous art should rock the boat. And I kind of like Waller bridges tip here to to use dangerous truth as a divining rod to point you in the right direction of your story.
7. You’re allowed to bore your friends and family, but to bore your audience is unforgivable.
Do not write boring stuff, write exciting stuff, entertain your audience, make every single scene in your book matter, make it memorable, make things change the character changes the world changes, something changes, make things matter, entertain people, be funny, be dark, be intriguing. Just don’t be boring on some pretty great advice for every writer out there.
8. Build a lot of humanity within your character if their attitude seems dismissive on the outside.
Again, I think that’s very much relating to the character Fleabag, who has this sort of dismissive, don’t really care attitude on the outside, but who is in fact, deeply, deeply hurting on the inside. And this is how we make complex characters. And this is how we add depth to our story. Because every single story, whether you’re writing literary fiction, or you’re writing commercial fiction, has an exterior plot. But it also has an interior plot. And when those two plots are in conflict with one another, that’s when we get dynamic storytelling. And that’s also when we get storytelling that feels real, because so often in life, we’re saying one thing, and we’re thinking another because we’re trying to persuade someone, or we’re trying to get away with something, or we’re trying to fit in, or we’re trying to say the right thing rather than what we really feel. And so when we have characters who are acting one way on the outside and feeling very different on the inside, they feel rich and true and real. And you also feel like your story has more depth because you’re telling the exterior story. But you’re also telling the story going on inside of your character. And so much of our lives I betcha, particularly for writers like you and me, so much of our lives is spent in our own heads, thinking things and saying things and revisit revisiting things and feeling anxious about things and dreaming about things. And all of these, these worlds and stories and debates that go on inside our heads, when we can capture that on the page. It feels relatable in real.
Continuing on that, you can see there’s there’s a point that while Waller-Bridge is really trying to get out here about her writing, the next one:
9. Surprise the audience in a truthful way.
Which is to say readers want to be surprised. But they don’t want to be surprised in a way that feels like the rug has been pulled out from under them or that they never could have seen it coming or that feels contrived. We want to surprise readers constantly. But we want them to have that sense that I should have seen it coming. You know, and we do this by foreshadowing and but we also just do this by making plot choices, that feel truthful, that feel real that feel consistent with the way characters in your book behave consistent with the laws of physics that you’ve created in your universe. And it gets to the core of things the truth of what it is to be human and to be alive.
Now, the final tip here from Phoebe Waller-Bridge, she and I might argue a bit on this one I am a big proponent on structure. In my Story Plan course we start with the genre and really understand the genre that we’re writing in, then we move to structure. So, you know, if not number one, number two structure is where I like to start with my writing and with my plotting and working with my clients. But here’s what Walbridge has to say.
10. Material first. Jokes first. Character first. Structure second.
So I don’t know if she’s necessarily talking about the order to create a story. And but I think she’s talking about what’s most important about material. I think that does cover genre, right? Like, what is the material? What is this thing about? And then obviously, as a comedian, she’s putting at the forefront jokes. If you’re a horror writer, maybe you would replace the jokes with horror, or if you were a romance writer, maybe you replace jokes with romance. But as a comedian, I think she’s saying if the jokes are funny, and if the material is good, that’s important. And then, obviously, she’s very interested in character, you can see most of her tips here, were pertaining to humor, character, and truth. And so the fact that she puts character first doesn’t surprise me. And the fact that she put structure second perhaps doesn’t surprise me as well, because she is a comedy writer.
And what I often say to folks is thrillers, mysteries, adventure stories, fantasy stories, a lot of speculative fiction, all of these stories are plot driven stories. That’s really where a lot of the time we want to start when we’re thinking about and plotting our book. Whereas so much comedy is character based, what is a situation comedy, it’s just characters in a situation reacting to each other and to the situation. in funny ways.
We go back to something like say Seinfeld, which was, they call it the show about nothing. All it was was four very distinct characters reacting to each other and to different situations. And so I think I see where Waller bridge is coming out here by saying structure, second, character, jokes and material first, we want an aura genre. We want to know what our readers are expecting. And we want to know that we deliver on the promise whether that promises, jokes, or action or mystery, or romance or whatnot. And I mean, maybe by putting structure second, she isn’t putting down structure, maybe she’s saying it’s very important, just not as important as character in jokes in comedy writing.
Alright, that was the 10 tips. I just I loved Fleabag and not right away. I watched the first two episodes, I think, and I was like, I don’t know about the show. I don’t think it’s for me, and I think this isn’t the show for dudes. And then I rewatched those first two episodes and finished out the series, and it was really, um, one of the favorite things I’ve watched on TV in a very long time. And I thought the second season was quite good as well. I would not say though, that it’s, it’s the masterpiece that the first season was.
And you know, she’s obviously a brilliant, talented playwright and very funny actress, and I wasn’t the biggest fan of her robot character in Solo, and I haven’t even bothered to see the Indiana Jones movie. All that said, I like her. I think she’s an incredible writer. And I think she’s a very quirky and fun actress. And I just think Fleabag is a little mini-masterpiece, and so I was thrilled to take a look at what her tips were on how to write a good story.
Did you agree with her tips? What was your take on them? Hit me up. Send me a message at Kevin at Kevin t johns.com. And I would love to hear what your takeaways are from Phoebe Waller-Bidge’s tips on writing.
Also, don’t forget to head over to my website, grab the Scene Alchemy Essentials Checklist, and get on my mailing list. Forward slash alchemy. That’s all I have for you this week. Thank you so much for tuning in. I will see you on the next episode of Writing Coach.
