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I once saw a well-dressed man, faced with a sudden downpour, press the button on his expensive high-tech umbrella… which instantly detached from the handle entirely and shot an impressive ten feet down the sidewalk in front of him like a crazed bat making its escape. It really was delightful.

Loss of dignity is hilarious.

The most obvious way to use this fact is to add comedy to a scene. There’s a great scene in a Will and Grace episode in which two people have a pretty serious conversation about emotional infidelity while dancing The Chicken Dance. If you’ve got a scene that you want to leaven with comedy without having the characters crack jokes, this is a really good way to go about it. Give them something undignified to do, or an undignified place to be. Let them have that heart-to-heart on a carnival ride, or while sitting in very small chairs in an elementary school, or while dangling from a cliff-face in groin-pinching harnesses, pathetically awaiting rescue.

Removing dignity is comedic. But the fact that something dignified is made laughable… well, we all know that that can be tragic, too. The kind of humor I’ve been talking about is just a few degrees skewed from poignancy, a point well understood by anyone who’s ever had the misfortune to get very angry while wearing a chipmunk costume. It’s funny if you’re not the chipmunk, it’s terrible if you are.

A sad girl is all the sadder if she’s also playing Twister — a fact that can be played for comedy *or* drama. In other words, drama writers, don’t assume that having your couple break up on the wind-swept beach is going to be more powerful than the famous Buffy-Angel break-up which was all the more horrific for taking place in the sewer.

It’s easy to get lost in the dialogue of a scene, to think of the scene as being simply the words that are said. But think about the location and the business of the scene as well. A little incongruity might be just what the scene needs.

Lunch: Vietnamese food — pork and shrimp and noodles with that amazing sweet sauce

A simple post in praise of the holiday season. Because of the Peace and Love? Sure, fine. AND because this can be a wonderful time to get some writing done. The spec that started everything for me was the second of the three Star Trek: The Next Generation specs that I wrote. I wrote it over a Christmas break during grad school.

I know that a lot of you are in college. Those of you who have just finished a round of exams and find yourself with a bit of time and some mental ease, might consider doing some writing. Not stressy, gotta-get-it-done writing, but fun writing. I remember working on that Trek spec, pen-on-paper, smiling to myself. I was just playing around with scenes, having fun moving the characters around like hand puppets. Stranded in an airport? Bored in Grandma’s guest room? Looking for an excuse to stay home from caroling in the bitter cold? I recommend writing a spec Heroes — could anything be more festive?

Lunch: Cup o’ Noodles has these great varieties now — I assume these are new? All picante chicken and spicy lime shrimp or whatever. I had one of those. It still benefited from adding lemon juice, but it was an excellent start.

More and more writers seem to be doing what I do, namely, moving back and forth between writing for hour dramas and writing for half-hour comedies. Maybe this will ultimately result in more similarities between the way the two kinds of shows are written. But for now, there are still some stark differences.

Unlike drama writers, comedy writers spend a lot of time looking at dialogue *together*. This is because comedy staffs do the group-rewrite thing, going through every line of the script over and over as a group, usually while looking at it projected on a monitor in the writers’ room. Lots of time is spent changing jokes, looking for a funnier take on a situation. But I would estimate that just as much time is spent on minor wording tweaks. Usually, this involves removing words, looking for the fastest, tightest version of any line, whether it’s a joke or not.

Tightening lines like that is especially important for comedy, where timing is an integral part of the whole point of the exercise. As a spec writer, you don’t have the — advantage? distraction? — of a whole room full of people chiming in on the best way to tighten a line, so you have to do it on your own. It’s worth making a whole separate pass through your script, just looking for words to cut.

Do you have someone saying: “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!”? Does it maybe work better as, “I’ve been sayin’!”? In comedy, faster is almost always better (there are exceptions, but in general, fast = good). Make the cut.

Drama doesn’t rely as crucially on speed, but timing is still important, and lengthy chunks of speech tend to be boring, and intimidating to the eye of the reader. It’s not as important, I would say, in drama, to shorten an eight-word sentence to three words, but it’s really important to shorten a five-sentence speech down to two sentences.

Remember, it’s a sculpture and you’re Michelangelo. Chisel away enough stone and there might be a naked guy inside.

Lunch: poached eggs on a bed of spicy Indian beans

I hope you guys enjoyed my Battlestar Galatica if you happened to check it out. Hope you weren’t too traumatized. There was some “Espenson brings the funny” anticipation for this that had me a bit concerned since the ep wasn’t so much, ya know, funny. But I did get to write the line “You’ve got goo in your hair” which I find hilarious in a Cylon context. Anyway, I’m just as proud as a proud thing to have been involved with that show, so… Thank You Ron! Whooo!

All right, back to our business at hand, the business of writing spec scripts. Here is more of what I learned at the round-table discussion at the Writers’ Guild. The question on the table is about the dramatic build of your script. It’s all right, isn’t it, to let the script start out slow, setting things up for a big finish where everything pays off in a big meticulously conceived action/comedy sequence. Right?

Turns out, you’ve got fifteen pages. If you haven’t gripped the agent, executive, or whomever in those fifteen pages, they’re not going to bother finishing the script. There is nothing requiring anyone to whom you send your script to read the *whole* script. So you’ve got to work hard to keep them turning pages. The 15-page cut-off is one person’s yardstick by the way, others will give you more or, often, less — maybe even just the Teaser. It’s not that they don’t want to like your script, they do want to. But if they don’t like it right away, the thing they want more than anything else is to pick up the next one on the stack, hoping that *this* one is the winner. And then there’s one on the stack beneath that…

Now, that isn’t to say you can let everything fall apart in the second half of your script. You still have to bring it on home. But pay special attention to the opening. If you’re writing a spec pilot, consider all the different ways to introduce your characters — if you just start with them waking up in the morning, well, it’s classic, but you might want to see if you can find some other situation, some image, that tells us who they are right off the bat. If you’re writing an existing show, think of all the episodes produced so far — which one had the best opening? Is yours as good as that? As gripping? As tantalizing? Is there any way to start in the middle of some action? Consider playing with the time line of your episode to bring action to the front. If your show has jokes, pay special attention to the early ones, they’re going to set your reader’s expectations for what you’re capable of.

Fifteen pages. Count ’em off and look at ’em. Make ’em sing.

Lunch: leftover cucumber salad and edamame from last night’s sushi dinner. Even better than when they were fresh.

The amazing Ken Levine weighs in today! Ken has written for shows including M*A*S*H, Cheers and Frasier, and is as impressive a writer as you’re ever gonna find anywhere. You can, and should, check out his blog
here.

Ken has a comment about my last post. He says:

“You make wonderful points about comedy scripts needing to be real and grounded even at the expense of additional laughs. That was a cardinal rule on shows like CHEERS and FRASIER. But I think today’s show runner and network executive would look at that as ‘too traditional,’ and ‘not edgy enough’. The standards have been so lowered on the current crop of sitcoms that what passes for good wouldn’t be passable ten years ago… I think the advice you gave was dead on, but as I was reading it I was wondering whether most of your readers even had a clue as to what that meant. And you can’t blame them…”

Ooh. Feisty and interesting. If I’m reading Ken right, he’s suggesting that writing a *good* spec might be somewhat different than writing a *spec that gets you hired*.

He makes an excellent point. If you look at shows that are older than the ones he mentions, like, say, The Odd Couple or Barney Miller, they often genuinely had the feeling of a filmed stage play, with all the quiet moments left in. A spec that felt like either of these shows now would probably feel slow and under-joked. I’m not certain that a Cheers or Frasier spec would have the same feeling, but I’ll bow to Ken’s experience on that.

However, I still think that a spec that manages to land a genuine emotional moment is going to stand out above one that offers nothing but empty calories. I’m going to have to trust that today’s show runners and network executives know that hiring a writer who can write something real is going to pay off in the long run. You’ll have used the rest of the spec to prove you can churn out jokes. Most writers who are writing comedy specs are pretty good at churning out jokes, in fact. But not every writer can strike one o’ those emotional chords that suddenly makes an audience care about a character or a relationship.

And, although many of you are probably quite young, you watch shows in syndication, and you’re seeking out the best of what’s out there. You’ve probably seen some of those wonderful moments they did so well on, for example, Friends. The Ross/Rachel moments, for example. And you’ve seen the Jim/Pam stuff on The Office. Even a show as kinetic as Arrested Development had some touching father-son interactions. I would advocate reaching for moments like these.

Now, I could well be wrong here. Ken is a very smart guy, and he’s making a more complex point than I think I’m giving him credit for. Writing for the purpose of being hired is a very tricky business indeed, and you’ll each have to decide for yourselves how you’re going to strike the balance between what you want to write and what you think someone is going to want to read. Just don’t let the winds of television fashion blow you so far over that you’re no longer doing what inspires you.

Lunch: pizza somewhere in West Hollywood.

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