JaneEspenson.com

Greetings from WorldCon! I’m in Anaheim, gentle readers, where I’m appearing on panels and mingling with other SciFi fans and – get this – presenting the Hugo Award for best Short-Form Dramatic Presentation. I will get to open the envelope on stage and everything. I’m nervous about it, but I think it’s one of those things, like rewriting, that after it’s over, you’re glad you did it.

I got to share a dais today with the great Melinda Snodgrass. She’s the writer with the best claim to fame that I ever heard of. She wrote a wonderful, classic episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “The Measure of a Man.” It was about a challenge to the sentience of Data, the android character and it was one of my all time favorites. And here’s the kicker. It was a spec script. This is the only case I have ever heard of in which a spec script was purchased and produced. Now that’s impressive. Kinda makes you want to polish that spec a little more, doesn’t it? You know, just in case it falls into the right hands?

I can think of one other case that was similar to this. Steve De Knight got hired onto the Buffy staff on the basis of a Buffy spec. Unheard of! You never even submit a spec of a show to that show, right? Well, in fact, he didn’t. It was submitted to Angel. But Joss loved the script so well that he grabbed De Knight for Buffy. I never got to read the script myself, but I understand that it was about Xander and Buffy and how they are affected when Buffy loses her Slayer powers and Xander gets them.

Melinda and Steve did the same thing with their specs. They both took strong, well-established characters that were central to the show, and they put them through a trauma that drove at heart of how that character is defined. What does it mean for an android — this android — to be sentient? What does it mean for Buffy to be the Slayer? These questions are big pointy hooks. Throw them into the ocean and drag them around on the bottom for a while and you’re going to dredge up some stuff.

If you can find an idea for a spec that cuts as close to the heart of a show as those two did, you’ll be on your way to winning the show-biz lottery like they did.

Lunch: seared ahi tuna salad

When I decided to try to get onto the staff of a drama — when I set my sights on Buffy — I needed a drama spec. So I wrote a spec NYPD Blue. In it, I had Andy Sipowicz believe in the innocence of a young suspect. “If that boy’s guilty,” he told the lieutenant, “then he’s the best actor since Charles Bronson.” Later on, when Andy was alone with his partner, the partner turned to him and said “Charles Bronson?”

When I got my Buffy meeting, Joss talked with me about this spec. He loved the fact that Bronson was Andy’s yardstick of acting ability. He went on: “I know why you did it,” he said, “but I wish you didn’t have the second reference.” He was right. If I were writing a similar line today, I wouldn’t have the partner call Andy on it. The line was only there to call attention to the joke like a little arrow pointing back at it. It didn’t further the joke.

Watch out for this tendency to want to put arrows like this into your specs. For example, if you have a character say something like: “Half of me is touched and half is sad and the other half wants to kick her ass,” then it’s very tempting to have another character point out the arithmatic mistake. But the joke is almost always better, subtler, funnier, if it goes uncommented-upon. If you think it won’t be clear enough, call attention to it in a stage direction, as in “Marjorie hesitates, but doesn’t point out the arithmatic error.”

A joke that the reader misses will slide past them painlessly, but one that is over-explained, over-talked-about, will drive them nuts.

Lunch: The “Cabbo-Cobbo” salad at Poquito Mas

I’m planning a whirlwind last-minute trip for the 4th of July – just a long weekend, really, but fun. As a result, I got to go buy travel books the other night! Whee! Hey, you know what books I love? Those “100 Places to See…” books. Usually travel guides assume that you already know you want to go to Maui or Peru or Greece or whatever. But those books open it all up, and you end up considering places you’ve never thought of. That how I ended up in Tobago a while back… one of those books said it was the place to go, and it was.

Those books remind me of a great brainstorming technique that my friend Michelle told me about once. It’s called “One Hundred Bad Ideas.” It’s just what it sounds like; you make a list of one hundred bad ideas for a sitcom or a drama or for a House spec or for a movie or a short story. The fact that you’re calling them “bad ideas” frees you up to put down absolutely anything that crosses your mind. After all, they’re *supposed* to be bad. But, truth be told, you don’t really have one hundred bad ideas. Once you’re thinking about your subject, and being free and accepting with all your ideas… some of them are going to be good. Possibly really good.

Do it pretty fast. A quarter hour, maybe, until you run dry. You probably won’t complete the list. You’ll run out of ideas, bad and good, before you reach one hundred. But the fact that you will try as hard as you can to finish it, also means that you’re not settling for the first idea you came up with. This is incredibly valuable. The reason I started my writing career with *two* spec Seinfelds is that I had a better idea when I was halfway through writing the first script. I’d jumped on my first idea too soon.

I actually, right now, have a file on my computer called “100 bad ideas for a sci-fi drama.” It has 52 entries – that’s when I fizzled out. I actually love about fifteen of the ideas on the list, and will probably invest some time in all of those fifteen, playing around to see if they can be turned into something. Most of the ideas are, however, legitimately bad, as they should be. I was going to excerpt the list here, except that I have realized that one’s bad ideas are a very personal thing. We all need to feel free to put down *very bad* ideas without fear that anyone else will ever see them.

Okay, if you insist, here’s one of the more detailed entries: “A person is split into two people, a man and a woman. They need to solve a task together to re-integrate. They hate each other, but must stay together always or lose any chance of becoming one again.”

A wee bit contrived, no? Other entries are much shorter, by the way. “The Monkey’s Paw, the series,” that kind of thing.

So go crazy! Especially if you’ve decided to tackle a spec pilot. Looking for a family sitcom idea? A single-camera half-hour idea? A cop drama with a twist? One of each? Start making lists. You’ll be amazed what you’ve got kicked into the corners of your brain.

Lunch: tofu pups and fresh tomato.

Addendum: Friend-of-the-blog Jeff Greenstein adds this story from art school: “On the first day, my painting teacher told the class, ‘You are about to paint 100 bad paintings. So just go ahead and get ’em out of the way so you can start painting the good ones.'” Nice!

He adds:

“I think of that often when I look at my early spec scripts.”

I did a little checking with my agenting team (yeah, they sometimes form teams), to find out the hottest, latest, up-to-datest info on what specs they’re seeing in the drama world. They agree with me that there is very little in the way of specable drama shows right now. House seems to be the most popular one-hour spec of the moment, they tell me. With some action also happening with Nip/Tuck and The Shield. Nip/Tuck? Still? Really? Huh. They’re a little skeptical about Grey’s, due to the serialized nature. It’s hard to keep it current. (Frankly, I worry about that less than they do.)

So what do they recommend after you’ve written your House? They suggest writing a play, a screenplay or a spec pilot to demonstrate your skills. Certainly not a terrible idea.

(An aside: Following up the spec pilot idea, I had a kind of a neat thought yesterday. Part of the problem with a spec pilot is that the reader doesn’t get to see how well you do at capturing someone else’s characters and tone. So what about a spec pilot that takes off on a well-known movie? You know, as if you’d been hired to write the tv-series version of X-Men or Platoon or whatever? Personally, I think this could be a very interesting project.)

Anyway, this blog — this humble blog — is going to continue primarily to be about writing spec episodes of existing shows. I still believe this is considered the currency of the town by so many people — and by the ABC Writing Fellowship — that it can’t be discounted.

But I’m also going to start throwing in a little advice on spec pilot writing as we go along. Not all the time, but here and there. I’m not qualified to speak to writing features or plays, but I’ve written a few pilot scripts now, and they present some unique challenges that are totally different than anything I’ve talked about. So hang on, because suddenly we get to talk about conceptualizing a whole show, creating major characters and setting a tone… And even naming the series! Fun!

New vistas!

Lunch: that cannellini bean salad I sometimes make. I’m starting to be a little bored by it. We need new vistas in all areas of life.

They’re tearing down a building near the one I live in and putting up a bigger, fancier one. I had some concern that my pretty view would be blocked, so I went to the public hearing at the … what was it … some kind of planning commission. I imagined that I was letting myself in for an evening that would manage to be both boring and contentious. It wasn’t as bad as I feared, but, yeah, there were aspects of both boredom and contention as the issue of parking garage clearances was debated. There are some TV jobs that feel like that. You have to sit and listen to people arguing passionately about adjective choice on an episode of “Mom’s in the Kitchen,” or whatever.

Which brings us back to bad television. Yesterday, I talked about the benefits of bad television. But bad TV is more than just a crappy wonderland of writing examples. It’s also potential employment. If you’re writing spec scripts, you’re doing so in hopes of being hired by a show. Sure, you might be hired by House or Battlestar or Veronica Mars. But you might not be. You might instead be hired by “Cat’s Got Your Tongue,” a new drama about a kleptomaniac demon passing as an ordinary housecat.

What do the writers on “Cat’s” do, then, to try to get a better job the next time they’re on the market? They write spec scripts. Even very experienced writers sometimes have to write fresh new specs. If you’re on a high-profile show, you can use the actual episodes that you have had produced as your samples, but if your show is more obscure or not respected, you’re going to have to write something better-known and classier. Some writers embrace this as a chance to prove to themselves that they can still write quality. And, in a way, isn’t that part of the glory of the spec process? It gives us all a chance to see how’d we do if we were handed an assignment by our Dream Show.

So keep Tivoing the good shows, and keep collecting produced examples and keep polishing your spec-writing instincts. You’ll probably be using them for a while.

Oh – and don’t worry that as a not-yet-hired writer your specs will be competing against the specs of people already in the business… they’re competing for higher-ranking jobs. You all are just competing against each other. And you KNOW you’re better than each other.

Lunch: quesadilla and a coke.

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