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There is more good news about the Warner Brothers Writing Workshop, Gentle Readers! A little bird who works for Warner Brothers (I think that makes him Tweety), tells me about two interesting developments, both of which I think are new. First of all, the program is going to attempt to recreate the feel of a working writers’ room, which is very ambitious and interesting. Second, and more importantly, Warner Brothers show runners are going to be given a powerful incentive to employ the workshop participants — the workshop will pay the salary of those writers for the first fourteen weeks if they’re taken on board a staff.

If this information is accurate — and I have no official confirmation — it’s huge. Suddenly ABC/Disney is joined by a genuine alternative, and there are two reasons to continue to write specs for shows that already exist. So set your tivos, scour the internet for produced scripts, fire up Final Draft, and let’s get to work on your submissions for next year! (Or get one in the mail fast for this year — the WB deadline is Aug. 15)

Lunch: a homemade avocado, Roquefort, heirloom tomato and prosciutto sandwich on a seed-encrusted mini-baguette. Best thing I ever ate.

Nuts! Nuts and bolts! That is, I’m hoping, primarily what you’re here for. Nuts-and-bolts advice about writing scripts. Stuff like this:

If you simply have to give a character a very long chunk of dialogue — if there’s simply no way to shorten it, try breaking it up with parentheticals and stage directions so that it doesn’t sit on the page as one big block.

I mention the nutsy and bolty nature of this advice because I’m looking at a lot of blogmail here that I simply don’t know how to answer. I’m afraid I can’t get you Battlestar scripts or suggest what you can do to get your Battlestar specs to the Battlestar show runners or take your ideas for episodes to my bosses or any of the similar things that I know would be very helpful, but are simply, as we used to say in grad school, “beyond the scope of this work.”

It’s probably time to review the basic premise of the exercise that is getting work as a television writer. Again, my expertise is in the writing, not the getting hired, but here is what I’ve observed. There are two primary ways in. One is by getting recognition through a contest or a fellowship, or by doing well in film school, that kind of thing. Leading with your script and letting your body be pulled after. The other is by moving to Los Angeles and getting work as a production assistant, then a writers’ assistant, and simply working your way into the writers’ room where you can make friends who will read you. This is leading with your body and pulling the scripts behind you. Both ways require that you, at some point, get someone — someone from the ABC/Disney Fellowship, a professor, a boss… someone to read your spec script.

That’s really where my part starts. Not by reading your script. But by making sure that when you hand that script over to that someone – whether at the start or the end of the process – it’s perfect. Clean, spare, elegant, confident, funny where it’s supposed to be, mature and reflective of your sensibility. Sound fun? I think so!

Lunch: roast chicken, broccoli, corn

On Friday night, Gentle Readers, I got a chance to sit down and chat with the current crop of ABC/Disney Fellows along with some of their execs and other Fellowship alums. Great people, great fun, and very interesting.

I can report that eight of the ten current television fellows have been placed onto writing staffs. That’s enormous, particularly given the current trend toward smaller writings staffs. I’m extremely impressed at the job the people running the fellowship are doing, not just in training the Fellows, but also in acting as effective liaisons between the Fellows and the shows.

I can also report that a surprisingly large number of Fellows are comedy writers and have been placed onto comedy shows. Hmm. Maybe that pendulum is finally swinging.

Finally, I have a suggestion for those of you who submitted scripts to the program, hoping to be part of the next batch of Fellows. Be ready with a second script, Gentle Readers, in case they call and ask you for one. This happened to me when I got into the program. I was borderline, and they asked for another script. Apparently, this is still part of the procedure. So dig out your second-string scripts, everybody, and start getting them in shape!

Lunch: A “Cuban sandwich” and what I expected to be a piece of rum-soaked custard filled cake but which turned out to be a whole entire cake. Plus, I don’t really like cake. It was ill-advised.

Whoa. This humble blog has been praised by the amazing John Hodgman. Holy crap! I’m absolutely beside myself. If you follow this link, you’ll be taken to his blog entry which then links back here. Theoretically, you might never get out of the loop, so bring an apple.

Please linger on his side of the looking glass while you’re over there. Hodgman has a sense of humor that manages to be both dry and twisty (like uncooked ramen). I highly recommend his book “The Areas of My Expertise” and I consistently giggle with glee when he appears on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

In fact, there was a joke he made during his most recent Daily Show appearance that I’ve been wanting to discuss with all of you, Gentle Readers, and this is the perfect time. He was displaying a chart that purported to show an increase in the number of leprosy cases in the U.S. The joke went like this:

“As you can see, over the last seven years the average number of fingers per American hand has dropped off, while the number of fingers that have dropped off has risen dramatically.”

Wow. That joke is so well constructed that I want to live in it during the rainy season.

Here’s why it works. The phrase “dropped off” is one we use automatically when discussing charts. As a joke writer, you should immediately look for humor in the literal interpretation of any metaphorical language. In this case, the beautiful collision of the subject matter and the way we naturally talk about charts produced the joke. It’s identical in this way to this joke from my Buffy episode, “Harsh Light of Day,” in which Anya is trying to talk Xander into sleeping with her.

ANYA
I think it’s the secret to getting you out of my mind. Putting you behind me. Behind me figuratively. I’m thinking face-to-face for the event itself.

Often, you find this kind of joke as you’re typing. You write the words “dropped off” or “behind me,” and it suddenly hits you that those words, taken literally, are colliding with your subject matter in an interesting way. Your first impulse might be to change the wording to avoid muddying what you’re talking about. But before you do, play around with it for a while and see if the ironic clash of language can be turned into a joke.

A close relative of this kind of joke, by the way, is this classic one from the Simpsons in which Bart finds himself in the audience for a performance he doesn’t enjoy:

BART
I didn’t think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows.

The starting place, again, is taking figurative language and considering its literal meaning. My buddy John Hodgman and I recommend it. Hee!

Lunch: cup o’ noodles, pie

Gentle Reader Dan in Philadelphia writes in with an excellent question (two of them, actually, but we’ll just tackle one of them today). Dan asks:

“How do you write dialogue for a stuttering mumbling character, such as Matt Saracen from Friday Night Lights? Do you write all the pauses and repeats or do you indicate it in parenthesis?

Does it change if you are writing for a character who always stumbles as opposed to a character who’s just doing it once?”

Ooh. I love this kind of nuts-and-bolts question. Thank you, Dan!

This is, in fact, a rare instance in which I would suggest that a spec script should look somewhat different than a script that’s been written by the show’s actual writing staff. I bet you anything that Matt’s lines in produced scripts are written without any repeats or stumbles. But your task isn’t to supply words to an actor. Your task, as the writer of a spec, is to demonstrate that you can capture a character’s voice. That voice, in this case, involves false starts and backtracks.

So I’d put ’em in, but lightly. If you put in as many of these as the actor does, I think it would get cumbersome and tiring to read. (And I probably wouldn’t write in literal stutters of this t-t-t-type.) But lay some verbal effects in lightly, here and there, especially when the character is stressed. If you want to call attention to it in a specific spot in the story, I wouldn’t do it with a parenthetical, but with a stage direction that calls attention to what you’re already doing with the dialogue. For example:

Matt’s nerves make his normal stumbling speech even more obvious, as he finally raises his eyes and looks at Julie:

MATT
I… I don’t– I don’t want you to go.

And as to whether it makes a difference whether a stutter is habitual with a character or a one-time thing, absolutely! If a character is normally a smooth-talker, and you’ve got them stumbling, you’ve got even more free reign to write in the curlicues when they happen:

HOUSE
But– I mean– Wasn’t– Isn’t the patient… with… you?

Using false starts and hesitations like this is a great way to convey emotion. Nervousness, agitation, gradually dawning awareness… you can get them across very elegantly this way. You’re really letting the reader use their imaginary ears to “hear” your script, which is the point of the exercise. If you relegate the hesitations to a parenthetical, you don’t get this effect at all.

Writing realistic speech of this kind is one of my favorite things. Give it a try and notice how your script starts to have a sound.

Lunch: veggie sandwich. How can avocados be vegetables? They’re so good.

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