At last year’s festival, Savannah Morgan asked delegates who they should invite to the next festival. I, like many others, eagerly replied: Eric Kripke, showrunner of Supernatural. She responded, I’ll try but he’ll be filming Season 3 of The Boys, and also being one of the most successful genre writers, so it might be difficult.
Fast forward to this festival, and he is coming on, a couple of days before filming starts on Tuesday 16th Feb. How did she achieve this feat? She sent him a (The Boys-inspired) sonnet!!
In a festival that advocates becoming your own superhero writer, it’s inspiring to see what you can achieve when you put yourself out there and try. It was super brave of Savannah and it paid off.
Core compass of The Boys
Kripke also knows a thing or two about superheroes, showrunning the Amazon original series The Boys. He described the core compass of The Boys as answering the question: “What if superheroes were actually real in our world and had to suffer all the psychological truths and minor indignities that real people do?”
He had some valuable insights into how he structured the show – borrowing the structure of the Wizard of Oz to show the POV character Hughie meeting the rest of The Boys in turn, as he is blown out of his usual existence and “down this yellow brick road to hell.”
Issues with structure
For Supernatural, Eric had followed the more classic Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey – which he calls a ‘cheat code’ for great stories. The problem he had on Supernatural was that the two lead characters, Dean and Sam, were practically in every scene, leading to the need to introduce more supporting characters to cut away to. On The Boys, he has the opposite problem: too many people and stories. However, he also has more freedom, with no need for act breaks to accommodate commercials and no fixed episode lengths. He described the process for The Boys as more like “short story film making”.
Basic structure for an episode of The Boys
Usually the main character, Butcher (with Hughie or Homelander) drives an A story, while a B story and 3 or 4 other smaller stories happen concurrently in one episode. The writers manage this by keeping the threads as separate short stories until at the last stage of writing. One of the last things they do is what Eric calls ‘shuffling the deck’: putting all the stories together, and at this stage connections and conflicts between stories will begin to emerge.
What a great interview
This level of detail about how Kripke writes is usually hard to find. I was lucky enough to have my question asked, about how Supernatural manages to inspire people with mental health issues. He passed the glory onto his actors, which you cannot deny are brilliant. However his writing has techniques I have learnt from, such as reflecting a character’s state of mind through the state of his car. So to get to ask a question of my main writing influence was amazing and one of the many great experiences the festival has offered.
The openness of the LSF staff makes it feel like you know the moderators. Many in the forum were cheering Savannah on – who had openly admitted to being nervous – as much as asking questions of their own. It felt like a community win having him in the festival, as much as a boon for the amount of writing information.
Highlights
- Yes Herogasm (The giant superhero orgy featured in The Boys comics) is going to happen – but with COVID distancing rules currently in play filming a massive orgy might be challenging.
- His advice for how to get into his writers room – Don’t be an asshole!!
- His method of writing fantastical stories is to apply stringent rules to the craziest things.
- He took the scene where Starlight is accosted by The Deep into performing a sex act, very seriously, and with #metoo movement happening at the same time, it allowed Starlight the chance to speak out, as many people were doing right then.
- He is working on a scene for Season 3 of The Boys that he promises to be”the craziest thing anyone has ever done!”
Karen lives in London, UK. She has written short horror stories for publications, and published an anthology under the pen name Karen Heard (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Its-Dark-Inside-Karen-Heard/dp/1482681986). She has also written and directed fringe theatre at a number of London venues and is currently working on a TV pilot. She is always open to discuss collaboration ideas or writing projects. Email KarenDSheard@gmail.com
