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02/13/2007: Whoo followed by Hoo!


I just got the best letter, gentle readers. Seriously, this is one to frame. A regular reader, Amanda from Los Angeles, writes to let us know that she has landed an agent! At a big agency, too. This is a huge accomplishment! Cue the party music, but not too loud, because she's going to tell you what the key was:

...My Office spec took me a month to write and I'm so glad I took my time to make it right. I studied four produced scripts (as you recommended), and I spent a LONG time finding the averages: how many jokes per page, how many scenes per act, how many talking heads, how many pages in the cold open and the tag, etc. That way, when my spec was done, I could hold it up to the averages of the produced scripts. It helped a lot to approach the script that way."

YES! That's exactly right. That is *exactly* the way to do it. Study those produced scripts, people! They'll help you make a spec that feels so real that your readers will forget it's a spec. Make them believe it's a produced episode they happened to miss. The only way to do that is to be authentic. Even if your reader isn't terribly familiar with the show, there's something about getting it *right* that just shines off the page. (And I can pretty much promise you that with a show like The Office, your reader will be very familiar with it.)

I love that she didn't just count scenes and pages and jokes, as I have indeed recommended, but that she also categorized the *kinds* of scenes. As she mentions, The Office has those "talking head" scenes. And I bet Amanda didn't just count them. I bet she also checked on how many other scenes, on average, separate the talking head scenes -- are there ever two that are adjacent? I believe there are, actually, but I'm not certain. See why you need the produced scripts?

I had a friend when I was starting out, who prided herself on the speed with which she wrote specs. Problem is, no one can smell the speed on your script. Slow down and do the math -- or at least, the counting. Take a month, take two or three.

Amanda took her time, made a script that smelled not of speed but of Steve Carell, and look what it got her: a shiny agent all her own!

Lunch: tortilla soup and a Caesar salad from Mexicali