JaneEspenson.com

I get asked some questions, Gentle Readers, that, sadly, I don’t have answers for. Right now I’m looking at letters from “Maggie” in Westlake Village, from Jane in Los Angeles, David in Puyallup, Washington, Ellen in Vancouver, Matthew in Pennsylvania, and others. They’re asking excellent questions about where to find produced Battlestar scripts and how to get started in writing if you’re not a US citizen and therefore can’t enter some of the competitions. Or they want to know about how to get writers’ assistant jobs. Or how to get their scripts into the hands of showrunners. Oof. Um… In general, I dunno.

I write about writing. I can also give a sort of generalized advice about getting into the business that boils down to: write specs, enter contests, take classes, join writers’ groups, meet people, consider moving to LA, look for jobs that put you near to the writers’ room, and write more specs. The only part of this that I feel confident enough to tell you how to do is the “write specs” part. I have no idea how writers’ assistants get their jobs or what opportunities there may be for writers in Canada. And, as much as I want to help, I’m not sure I want to become the clearing house for this sort of information. If someone does want to take on this job, I will happily post a link to their site.

I don’t fault anyone for writing in with these questions — they’re great questions and you’re smart to ask them — they’re just beyond the scope of what I do.

And while I’m going through the mail bag…

Many thanks to Sara in Richmond, CA, for an article about computer usage’s influence on standard language — really fascinating. Another hearty “thank you” to Teri J. who sent me a copy of her book. And a “you’re welcome” to Friend-of-the-Blog Eric Loya here in Los Angeles — my favorite book store clerk. And to Jennette in Indianapolis who also has a book coming out — how wonderful is it that so many of you who write me have either written a book, or just won a contest or made a short film or otherwise have accomplished so much! I’m constantly impressed by you, Gentle Readers!

Keep writing — I read all the letters even though I can’t always find an answer worthy of blogging. It’s not you, it’s me.

Lunch: salad and a cup of alphabet soup — I scooped it myself so it was almost all alphabet and very little soup.

Remember Gentle Reader Lauren in Michigan? She asked a bunch of questions in a recent letter about the day-to-day life of a professional writer. Well, I realize that I left one of her questions unanswered. In addition to wanting to hear what a writer does on a show, she also wanted to know what the writer’s life is like between shows.

Ah, that’s an interesting question. March-ish to May-ish are traditionally when a lot of shows are on hiatus, and writers find themselves without an office to go to until June. If you’re staffed on a show that’s returning for another season, and you know your contract is being renewed and you have no particular pressing ambitions beyond that, you can legitimately behave like a college student over the summer vacation. Take a trip, spend some money, employ your days gathering all that real-life experience that makes your writing better when you return to the room all refreshed. I have done this, and it is, of course, wonderful.

But usually that’s not what happens. Odds are that the last show you were on is not coming back. Or maybe it is, but you’ve been told you’re not being renewed — this is not unusual and is not a career-killer although it feels like it at the time. In those cases, you’re going to want to write new television specs. Maybe you want to expand your career into features, so you need a spec feature, too. Or maybe you want to set your goals higher than the show you’re currently working on, so you need a spec that showcases your skills better than all the produced scripts you’re accumulating. For these reasons or others, you’re likely to spend your break writing new spec scripts.

You need them fairly quickly, too, since these are the calling cards that you will use toward the end of the hiatus to get interviews with any show runners who like what you wrote. And, by the way, since lower level writers are the last ones hired, you will sometimes be interviewed on a Friday for a job that starts on Monday. So you have to be mentally ready to jump back in.

In summary, your vacation will be spent working hard, and just when you find out if you’ve done your work well, it’s over and you’re back in the room.

Unless you aren’t.

It’s not unusual to spend a year here or there, early in your career, “unstaffed.” Guess what you do on your year off? You write spec scripts. You can also do all those other things that help, of course: join writers’ groups, make connections with other aspiring writers, produce short films and put ’em on the internet, get some short stories published, look for writers’ assistant work, take classes from working writers, etc.

Every time you get hired after a hiatus, either a normal or an extended one, it’s like you’re a computer rebooting. You want to make sure you’re also installing updates.

Lunch: beef shabu shabu

What do you get when you get when you breed clams? Strangely, sometimes you get a genuinely fresh new joke. Gentle Reader Sarah in Washington state writes in with a great example of this phenomenon, which I had not consciously noticed before. She doesn’t know on which show this occurred, but she brings us the line, “After all, it’s not rocket surgery.” Hee! I love that! Two clams getting together to create new life.

It occurs to me that I even know of a three-way menage a clam. The not-very-smart character Mark on Roseanne once said something like, “He’s not the brightest tool in the deck.”

To be fair, I suppose these aren’t really clams that are being combined, they’re simply cliches, and the idea of malapropisms as comedy dates back as far as humans had sayings to screw up. But let’s not pop my parade here; I think there’s something to be learned from these. Lots of you will be writing specs in which you have to convey something of a character’s essential nature very quickly. Malapropisms like these can be very useful for establishing a certain type of character. Give ’em a try!

In other news, I’m pleased to find a letter today from Mark, also in Washington, who writes representing the Northwest Screenwriters Guild. This is a mysteriously apostropheless group that helps professional screenwriters get started at making a living. He wanted to let me know that a link to this very blog has been added to the site’s Resources page. Thank you, Mark! I’m always happy (as a clam) to be listed as a writing resource.

Lunch: bean and rice burrito

Clams! Yes, there’s always room for clams. I’m talking of course about old and overused jokes and joke forms, known as clams, which need to be expunged from your spec scripts. It’s shockingly easy to write a clam since you’ve heard it work before and it just lays itself out on the page so easily.

Here’s one that’s currently bothering me. Three people stand together. Two of them (Persons One and Two) want to get away from the other one.

Now, right away, I want to point out that this is not the same joke as the line from “Broadcast News” in which a character off-handedly says: “I’ll meet you at the place near the thing where we went that time.” That’s a joke about two people who know each other so well they share both their reference points and their internal labels for those reference points. The clam joke is about the opposite, two people trying to coordinate through their closeness and not doing it very well.

Both concepts are amusing, but this particular expression of it has simply become overly familiar. It also requires that reality-challenging conceit of the on-looker who doesn’t notice the very obvious strange behavior of his companions. So what should you write if you want to exploit the humor of the three-person situation? Well, instead of a halting bad lie, how about a fast glib one? It’s also been done, of course, but it has the advantage of being constantly made new because of the exact nature of the lie:

Or whatever. That’s really just to give you the idea of a shape of it.

To clamtinue, a recent letter from Gentle Reader Amanda (Hi again, Amanda!) in Eureka, comments on another clam I discussed a while back, the facetious use of “I said good day, sir!” She mentioned that there is an interesting discussion of exactly this clam on line. I poked around and found it here. As you can see, the joke dates back even earlier than I had realized, although it looks at though “Tootsie” might be the first use of it in its current form. Fascinating. Someone needs to do a comprehensive study of the modern American clam. Until then, use your own instincts to smell them out and cut them from your script. This was a great joke in Tootsie, but as you can see from the long list of uses, it’s become distinctly smelly since then.

Lunch: meal #10 at Del Taco (featuring two kinds of soft chicken taco)

Yesterday, I attended the Emmy Awards for my first time ever. I recommend it. The show itself moves along pretty painlessly and the Governor’s Ball afterwards is full of famous people, tasty food, and surprises like looking up and realizing that Tony Bennett is actually just over there on the bandstand, singing, and you can just walk right up. My goodness.

You saw the same broadcast bits that I saw, so you already know which parts of the show itself were fun, but I liked all the stuff you got from really being there. I enjoyed the vintage Emmy clips they showed in the theater during the commercial breaks, and the incongruously cultured voice that would request “applause in the house, please,” before the end of every break, and even the very end of the night was fun because there was this crush of people all waiting for their hired limos to come pick them up and everyone was in the same situation even though they might be, say, Vanessa Williams. Bizarrely egalitarian, the limo-waiting process.

Television writing is the best job in the world. It’s got so many rewards built in already: you work with smart and funny people, create something, have your work seen by millions… and then, on top of that, there are awards. Really?! Neat.

Polish those scripts, Gentle Readers. They’re the ticket to the show.

Lunch: turkey with spices for a sort of pseudo-Indian effect

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