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Anybody Ever Write their own Soap?


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  Oh my God, this is an awesome post and your kick off story has to be similar to many of our writing journeys, starting with the desire to create something when we were so young...

 

  For me...I remember it was the summer of 1990,  Paul Rauch's last year on "One Life to Live", and his final summer story was that the cast of the mock soap "Fraternity Row" went on a location shoot at an island resort called "Badderly". At the same time their was a mafioso convention and the cast had to 'pretend' they were mafia as well. Long story short, it kicked off the romance of Jake Harrison and Megan Gordon, and ultimately their was a twist where Jake had dishonored crime lord Carlo Hesser's daughter Charlotte (Audrey Landers) and there needed to be satisfaction, so Jake was going to get shot. Just before Jake's shooting, for luck, Megan gave him a pin (a souvenir from the soap's infamous underground city story line). When Jake was shot, the bullet ricocheted off the pin, as he wore around his neck, and Jake was miraculously spared. At age 13 I cried "bologna!" because this was a show I remembered had a celebrated history; that had light skinned black Carla Gray pass for white; Karen Wolek testify she was a common hooker on the witness stand; and had Victoria Lord splinter off into an alter-ego that hung up her marriage to dashing cowboy Clint Buchanan for the better part of a year and a half! And then it dawned on me...as it seems to have dawned for many others posting here, that if I was having issues with the writing of my favorite soap, than I should just create my own.

 

  Though I wasn't initially inspired by the movie "Delirious" (by the way original poster, have you ever caught John Candy's work in the SCTV soap send up "The Days of the Week"?); the movie that inspired me was "Soapdish", in addition to the satire publication MAD Magazine's irrational send up of a soap opera update. I will attach a file to this post to show you, but I was inspired in creating my characters based on the magazine's caricature art of some of the genre's most distinguished personages (Linda Dano, Stephen Nichols, A Martinez, Jackie Zeman, Arlene Sorkin, MacDonald Carey, Susan Lucci, Debbi Morgan, Tristan Rogers and Marcy Walker). I didn't necessarily aspire to write satire (which I did with my current creation "Lust for Life") but I definitely aspired for campy. I had a fashionista/bitch named Tabitha plotting against her elderly father with his doctor and her lover Dr. Marc DeForest; a renegade/anti-hero named Eric hating on his do-right brother-in-law Colin for being sexually compromised by a nympho nurse, Lindsay at St. Clare Hospital...Theirs would be stories of lust, betrayal and the occasional abduction or bomb scare to heighten the stakes. I think I called it "Worlds Apart" only to learn a variation of that title had already been used ("A World Apart"), so I switched it to "To the Ends of the Earth"...

 

  Even though I initiated my creation, for decades I stayed paralyzed in that pre-planning stage of my saga. What prevented me was a sense of direction, good direction that I could trust from a professional, because there really weren't many books, aside from Harding Lemay's and that was a rare find. Resources I could personally refer to that had been written by somebody in the genre like Bill Bell or Claire Labine that took the genre seriously to comment on what was needed to tell a soap of our own. So I had to listen carefully, that's all I could do before the internet boomed, but to listen to the creators in interviews, like Douglas Marland, who laid down the law of great soap writing. Soap Digest was a favorite resource, as was Soap Opera Weekly, expertly written in their constructive criticisms and observations gave me some great takeaways...

 

  ...Eventually,  I was given an opportunity and therefore gave myself permission to see a creation (the aforementioned "Lust for Life") to fruition because I felt learned enough. My personal experience in keeping focus was I was treating the creation as to how I would perceive the actual profession itself. I took it seriously, but I had fun. I would compare any theater producer or director's demands of me akin to a network's, night and day of course BUT I could only wonder and sympathize about the demand, the pressure the paid writers experience day to day at their network jobs. The frustration they feel when they work on a story wanting to tell it in full only for an exec to put the kibosh on it because nobody is interested in that specific piece, and that 'whatever' that overrides it is more in vogue. Some of my favorite learning moments, was in asking (per Douglas Marland) the cast about their characters to write for that actor; just hearing that voice and making creative decisions. Continuity is another, which is an undertaking in itself. I can see how easy it is to make mistakes. And it is those mistakes, as I would confide with my director about, are what makes you think differently of some of the stories and the writers I, or you, might have criticized. 

 

  Even though I feel I have a handle on writing a soap opera...I so wish I could take a class from a master, whom I consider to be Kay Alden, or Lorraine Broderick. 

 

Erik

 

 

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I tried my hand at writing a Days of Our Lives fan-fiction. It wasn't for very long but stories included Shawn having a breakdown like Mickey did back in the day. Breaking Abe and Lexie up; Abe and Celeste would eventually get together and Lexie would get with ... Billie! I don't remember much else for my plans. I wrote it around 2006 or 2007.

 

As for original content, I wrote two shows. My first was titled "Secrets We Share." All I remember in regards to story is that Cynthia Preston's character was obsessed with Julian McMahon's, who was married to Rebecca Herbst. At one point, Preston's character left her rival to die on some train tracks. I think I also had a high school bullying story.

 

The one I remember most I called "Suburban Mafia." Through summaries, this show had 5 seasons, with a wrapped up ending. It was based on an Italian family. The set up was like my own, but the characters were exaggerated versions, obviously. I gave my brother bipolar disorder who was eventually killed off by an ex running him over. She was abused by her dad and ended up committing suicide. Made my cousin a stripper to pay for nursing school, my older sister was a drug addict whose future husband would be murdered by our deviant uncle because he was black ... and was actually her father! My Mom and my brother's best friend had an affair after my brother died and my Dad ran out on us. My character was raped and blamed my aforementioned sister. He also came out of the closet (duh!), and had a love interest, but broke it off after my uncle kidnapped my rapist and tried to persuade me to kill him. Said uncle thusly died in an explosion. I deported my grandparents. My little sister started out as the typical superficial popular teenage bitch who wasn't afraid to use sex to get what she wanted from boys, with an ex-friend as her rival. My paternal aunt (married to the uncle and my cousin being her daughter) was an alcoholic and at the time I thought I was so clever casting/imagining Kristian Alfonso as my Mom and Crystal Chappell as my Aunt. She had yet to return to DAYS when I wrote it. 

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I mean, obviously I've been working on a DAYS fanfic here for years. I've got so many years of story mapped out still, and honestly, considering I've been working on this for 6 years now, finishing up a lot of my initial stories are starting to pain me because I've changed and grown so much in that time, that I spend more time filling in plot holes and gritting my teeth through a lot of what I'm posting, while dreaming of the stuff that's to come that I never seem to get to. At least it motivates me to continue, I guess!

As for my own soap, absolutely. When I was 12 (so around 1998-99), I worked as a paperboy for the local newspaper in my hometown, and to make the miserable cold Canadian winter mornings bearable, I'd plot out a soap in my mind. Well, I never forgot about it, and over time, have developed it further and further, while never quite getting it down on paper (on disk? Online???). I think I began to blog it here for a minute as A World Away, and it basically revolved around a small Northern city in some undetermined US state with a automotive company as its central industry. The two quarrelling families being the founding family of the Atlantic Motor Co., and their rival family, who head up the local factory union. I forget the family names but they're written down somewhere there.

 

A third family would act as a sort of bridge between the two, and by the time I was writing it in adulthood, it was essentially as rooted in messy psychosexual drama as I could make it without weirding myself out. One of the stories that I especially enjoyed plotting out was the twins falling for the same man. The rich family would be highly conservative, they would have fraternal twins, Jennifer and Robert, who both fall for the same handsome doctor at the local hospital, Michael, who ends up being bisexual and in love with both of them, but knowing how rigid their family is (as well as his own), he keeps a lid on his orientation. This is in part to protect Robert, who, when the family DOES eventually find out, is excommunicated from the family, and forced to resign from his job. Robert and Michael then concoct a plan to have Robert "die" very publicly, and then secretly work together to take over the company from under the family's nose, while the family blame Michael for Robert's supposed death. The same family that rejected him now fight Michael over Robert's will, and even try to sue Michael for medical malpractice.

There's a scene I've kept in my mind all these years, of Robert's bigoted family heading to the board meeting where they'll meet the CEO of the company that's taken theirs over, hoping desperately that they'll be able to keep some control of the company they helped build. When the chair at the head of the table spins around, and Robert's looking back at them, the look of sheer horror on their faces as Robert fires each and every one of them is so delicious to me.

Of course, Robert will be as otherwise viciously conservative as the others in the family, but in this one particular instance, he's in direct opposition to his family's views. This would eventually complicate his future relationship with Michael, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

UGH, I need to actually write this show out properly. One day.

Edited by beebs
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Great topic! When I was middle school age (as well as watching DOOL and PASSIONS religiously and before I learned a few things about myself), I imagined a show, Seaview Heights, that I would not only headwrite, but star on.

 

I'd play Alan Stevens, the troubled son of making a new life for herself Jan Barton, who gave me up to her sister, Sydney and husband, Victor, because she was married to an evil man named Martin (as an adult, I'm now thinking, "Martin Barton"?). Jan's best friend was Lionel, a Ned Flanders type (in decency, not being especially religious) who she relearned love from. Anyway, Alan and his sister, Sabrina, had a best friend, Bobby Green, who Sabrina liked. But he also caught the attention of scheming Janet Randall, whose sweet sister, Cassidy, became Alan's girlfriend.

 

There was also Martin's trophy wife, Shelley (who was anorexic); Sydney's older son, Charlie, and his wife, Annie (I sure seemed fond of names which ended with vowels); and Bobby's mother, Florida, a talk show host. And these were just some of the characters. I thought an hour long show needed 32 characters, so we had a family in the fashion business (Welch Worldwide), the Randall girls had an older, slightly feminist sister (who entered into an opposites attract relationship with Martin), there were a handful of doctors, etc. Hey, I was in middle school.

 

And it was slightly better than my idea in college, which was the reverse of Glee (student actors).

 

Now that I'm an adult, I'd love to go back to basics, write something simpler. More organic, too -- think of the stories about COVID-19, people understanding the effects of systemic racism, new attitudes sexuality (a few years back, a community not too far from me had a hazing scandal that may or may not have been fueled by gay panic), political divide (I'd love to have a leading lady who's a newly appointed state senator), etc. that aren't being told, at least not beyond the surface. I think I'd set it in a town striving to be more than a bedroom community to a nearby city.

Edited by Franko
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May seem strange but I did once outline my own fictional soap opera almost twenty years ago that I’ll always call “Love at Large” set in San Francisco Bay Area about two families, the old money Weaver’s who own “Hyde & Weaver” Department Stores (Think Lord & Taylor, Nordstrom) and the nouveau-riche Colton family who own Colton’s Discount Stores (something along the lines of K-Mart or Target of course) with various characters peppered in. A lot of my inspiration at the came from a mix of Y&R, B&B and yes Sunset Beach at the time but I was hoping for a more conventional soap. 
 

The title I remember I came up with I remember thinking as “At Large” being original  in the political sense as being “as a whole, general” but then I later found out a trashy 1990 movie with Annette O’Toole and Kate Capshaw used the same title in the criminal sense. Sheesh! 

 

Haha if anyone wants exact details I’ll share, I was pretty bored at the time.

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Biloxi, Mississippi, is a pretty famous city actually.  Neil Simon wrote a trilogy of plays -- "Brighton Beach Memoirs", "Biloxi Blues", and "Broadway Bound".  

"Biloxi Blues" was made into a successful movie staring Matthew Broderick back during the late 1980s.  

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In the late 90s/early 00s, I created my own soap opera called “South Beach” which was a mixture of “Sunset Beach” and “Melrose Place”. It was conceived as a primetime soap, with each season spanning 22 episodes and a regular cast of 11 to 15 characters. The show was supposed to run for 8 seasons, but was cancelled at the beginning of season 8

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However, I do know how the show would have ended. I even created some fictional backstage drama… like actors not getting along, cast members demanding more storylines, and the show running on a tight budget during the final seasons

 

Here’s an outline of all the seasons. Season 1 is a bit more detailed to get to know the characters and their back-stories. And yes, some stories are quite cliché and repetitive.

 

Edited by Huntress
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During much of my adolescence I wrote (pen and paper) a soap titled "Charles Harbor".  Set in a New England city named Charlestowne, it centered around twin sisters; one considered a bad sister, and the other good. This aspect was largely influenced by watching Another World and the stories involving Marley/Vicky. The cast also included a wealthy business mogul and his socialite wife; similar to Victor and Nikki Newman. The wealthy business mogul also had a dark past being a former spy; shades of some of the international intrigue DAYs also offered at the time.

 

Eventually my soap writing began to mature and so did my taste. Charles Harbor morphed into a more grounded soap with influences from ATWT/GL. I would start to pen stories centering around the close knit family named the Hastings; modeled after the Bauer and Hughes families. Similar to the Bauer/Hughes, the Hastings were anchored by a doctor and a lawyer; and in addition you had the patriarch and matriarch of the family similar to Chris and Nancy Hughes. It was also around this time that my writing began to focus more on social issues just like Agnes Nixon's AMC and OLTL.

At the tail end of my teens, I began to admire the structure and history of past soaps; The Doctors, Love of Life, and Search for Tomorrow. Learning how writers like Doug Marland and Agnes Nixon soap hopped, each bringing a piece of their unique style to those soaps and yet staying true to its history, I began to merge some of my earlier writing into a fanfic of The Doctors. The fan fiction was basically a return to Madison 18 years later (this was around 2001). It still focused on the Powers, Davis, and Aldrich families, but there were also some new characters and families included.

So having started off writing Sci-Fi/Adventure, then changing over to more grounded writing thanks to ATWT/GL/AMC, I settled on penning a medical soap(The Doctors), or in this case reviving one. During the age of blogging and websoaps, decided to take on a big challenge and write what would have transpired between 1983-2001 as a interesting way to fill in the blanks and explain how things came to be after I had picked up writing it. The bible is still under work, understandably (

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) with loads of ground to cover, but I have much of the 80s complete and an idea of how I would like the tone of TD to shift from the glamour of the 80s, to the tackling of social issues (HIV/AIDs, abortion, homophobia, Cancer diagnosis, etc) during the 90s.

While writing The Doctors fan fiction, also wrote a continuation of Millee Taggart and her stories on GL, where it picks up from 2003 focusing on the Reva stalker story, Spaulding battle, and other stories/characters on the canvas around that time. Lastly also took a try at DAYS wanting to write a continuation of some of the stories from the Hogan Sheffer era (before it went off the rails); bringing it back down to earth with a focus on social issues, focusing on what Cwikly/Brash left unfinished, and bringing back past characters such as Bill and Laura.
 




 

 

Edited by MichaelGL
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I lost everything but I had a storyline Bible I started in the 1980s when I was dealing with a lot in my life and I dreamed of a world where I lived with people who were like me and it was a way of escape.  It took place in Greenwich Village in New York and most of the characters were Gay and Lesbian.  I called it "The Story of Us".  It dealt with what was obvious at the time - equal rights, the friendships and love stories among the characters, HIV/AIDS, and some of the characters were models, actors, writers for the NY Times, coffee shops and diners, bars

etc.

I remember one of my male characters was a school teacher who lost his job because the school administration found out after he was outed and a student accused him of sexual abuse, and it was a lie in an attempt to blackmail him to get him to change his grades.  In the early 90's a lot of stories and scenes centered around a techno and disco dance bar, with drugs like Ex, drug addition, alcoholism, etc.  And I had a group of characters who would take in homeless young gay men and lesbian girls who were excommunicated by their families and would search them out in homeless shelters.

 

My big event of the year was the annual Valentines Day party where all of the characters from the different buildings would get together and the show would end with them all singing "What the World Needs Now".    

 

I wish I had saved it.  And I was so disappointed because in the late 90's a movie came out called "The Story of Us" and it made me mad because I thought - that's MY TITLE!

Edited by Fevuh
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@Lust4Life76 I've heard of "Days of the Week" but I've never seen it.

I've read some of your fanfic. It's really good! And your original work sounds good as well. 

Lmao that's ok. Not too long ago I realized that I named my little town "Lakeview", yet there was no lake to view lol I'll have to remember to include a lake in the story if I decide to reboot it.

Edited by AbcNbc247
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