Anymotion. Animation.

It was around four months back that I signed up to take up a job as a copywriter. I was all prepared to come gallivanting into the world of advertising and get my hands dirty. Really dirty. And writing for three year olds was definitely not on the agenda. Or so I’d led myself to believe.  

But then, one of the most important things I’ve learnt over my really long career as a copywriter is this – the thing about writing is that you never quite know where one form ends and the other begins.  Copywriting, scripting, po-tay-to, po-tah-to… same difference. If you can write one thing, you just as well can write anything else.

This is not to say that writing scripts is just like writing copy for ads or writing this blog post. Hell no! Writing for kids is really a whole new ball game altogether. And this is a fact I’ve been familiar with since my days of creative writing in college. If there ever was a genre I struggled to find my way around, it was writing for children. Adults are relatively easy. We’re so used to watching a whole lot of nothing that one more preposterous show on television really won’t disturb our comfortable level of intellectualism. Kids, on the other hand, are a completely different story. For starters, most of them actually seem to care about what you tell them.

So there I was. With no escape in sight, I sat face-to-face with my biggest fear as a writer – an animation director who rubs his hands in glee and asks you if you would write scripts for an animated show for pre-schoolers first and then gets to the not-so-important things (like asking you your name, for instance). See, this is what you get for saying “I like challenges” during your interviews.

Having said that, there’s no denying the fact that after treading warily through the first couple of scripts, you actually begin to enjoy the process. And it definitely gets easier once you’ve resumed breathing normally. More than anything else, writing about a chocolate girl, her friend who is actually a little tooth and a whole lot of other out-of-the-world characters just gets you to stop taking yourself so seriously. And everyone knows how important that is. Because that’s undoubtedly the only thing that keeps you from crying your eyes out when the plot of an episode is changed after the script has been written and rewritten and rewritten yet again. Ah, sense of humor… it’s funny to think it’s that ridiculous sound we make while laughing that keeps the world going. And it’s not just the world of animation either.

Shikha Gupta

Shikha is a writer at Thinxworks and ReZonant. Shikha brings scripts to completion, handling both story writing and screenplay.