JaneEspenson.com

I went to the gym this morning. Finally got up off my expanding bottom and got myself to the gym. I got a phone call from my agent just as I was arriving, so I walked into the gym, still speaking on the phone. By the way, there was nothing of particular import in the phone call. The most interesting thing I was doing was changing locations while talking. Hmm, that reminds me of today’s question, sent in by faithful reader Christine in San Francisco. She asks:

“If characters start a scene in one spot, i.e. the interior of a diner, and the cameras follow the characters outside in the same scene, is there a need to start a new scene, or identify the new location? Or is there a way to indicate with stage direction… the fact that we’re moving from in to out? Or vice versa?”

Well, yes, there is. Actually, this is one of those areas where the art, as opposed to the science, of screenwriting comes into play, because you get a choice of methods here.

You can, of course, start a new scene, making the location-change super-obvious:

INT. DINER – DAY
[dialogue]
The characters exit, still talking, into…

EXT. STREET OUTSIDE DINER – CONTINUOUS
As they emerge and continue down the street…
[dialogue]

Or you can do this. Make it all one scene and head it this way:

INT. / EXT. DINER – DAY

Or, if you prefer:

INT. DINER / EXT. STREET – DAY

Now, you just use stage directions in the middle of the scene to indicate the transition. If you’re afraid the readers won’t catch it, you can supplement the stage directions with parentheticals like (exiting) or, more subtly, (fumbling for his sunglasses).

Not only does this kind of location description allow your scene to look as continuous on the page as it would play on the screen, it also saves space.

So why would you ever want to use the first option, to make it two scenes? I do that if the scene is unusually long, especially if the topic changes at some point. It’s just a judgment call – does it FEEL like two scenes or one?

I might also do it if the locations are simply too different from one another. For example, this would feel a little strange to me:

EXT. PLANET’S SURFACE / INT. TRANSPORTER ROOM

Sure, a conversation could conceivably bridge a beam-up. But the transition is more than just incidental to the characters going through it. I would make these two separate scenes.

There are, of course, going to be all kinds of variations on simple location-changes that you will encounter in your writing life. You will have characters in revolving doors and characters who exit vertically, and characters who hallucinate locations, exteriors that are revealed to be interiors and vice versa… The most important thing to keep in mind is that the techniques of screenwriting are flexible enough that you will be able to invent a way to describe whatever it is that you want to describe. There’s no need to adjust a moment to make it easier to write down. Remember, the words work for you, not the other way around.

Thanks for the question, Christine!

Lunch: a salad to which I added still-warm chicken. Soothing.

I had my kitchen remodeled last year. It was the first (and only) time I’ve ever taken on a project like that. Finding a designer, working with a contractor. Enduring the dust and delays. But it worked out great. The finished product is perfect.

Part of what was hard about getting started on the remodel was coming to terms with how much needed to be done. Sure, the oven door never closed completely, and it blocked the entrance to the room. But it cooked just fine, and I was convinced that moving gas lines around would be the death of us all. It just seemed like it would be easier to leave it where it was. Leaving it in place, of course, was going to put all kinds of limits on where everything else could go, so I finally had to give in. The oven moved and everything has been better ever since.

I had to be willing to let go of something that worked well – it cooked great – in order to make the whole kitchen better. This is an example of what is called “Killing your Darlings” or “Killing your Babies” in scriptwriting. You have to be willing to cut something that you KNOW works, in order to make the script as a whole better.

Cutting a good joke is really really hard. I know really experienced writers who still have to tell themselves “we’ll use it in another episode” before they can cut a good joke. Even though they know it’s a lie.

Here’s a little joke run from my first draft of an episode of Buffy called Gingerbread. This is Xander and Oz, whose relationship was strained at this point. I wanted to give them a bit of awkward/funny interaction in which Xander is trying to make nice:

XANDER
Hey, it’s Buffy’s birthday next week. Big eighteen. Good-bye not voting and feeling excluded, hello just plain not voting.

He holds for the laugh. There is none.

XANDER (cont’d)
So. You got gifting plans?

OZ
Pendant.

XANDER
Wow. Great idea.
(then)
Was that “pendant” or “pennant”?

At the time, I loved this bit. I still like the “voting” joke. Not sure I’m still in love with the “pendant” joke — the idea was supposed to be to highlight Xander’s willingness to praise Oz’s idea even thought he isn’t sure which word he heard. It’s not terribly strong. But at the time, I adored the whole run.

I did a huge rewrite on this episode. I hadn’t gotten the tone of the episode right at all. Too much joking. Not enough genuine horror. And, of course, there were always issues of script length. For one or both of those reasons, this interaction had to go. If I’d held onto it, it would’ve been at the expense of other material. The fridge would’ve stayed stuck in the corner and the cupboard space wouldn’t have worked out right.

Sometimes you’ve gotta yank stuff out. At least, it ALL has to be on the table. If you start a rewrite with some jokes that aren’t negotiable, you end up having to stretch everything else around them. And it often shows.

Lunch: Turkey scramble.

I’m back from Vegas. I had a wonderful time! I played many pretty slot machines. However, there was one that I had enjoyed on a previous visit, that I discovered to be gone. It was brand new when I found it, and it was quite different. It had no illusion of reels. Instead, it featured a honeycomb-shaped pattern of symbols that each popped in independently and it payed based on the size of the clumps of any one symbol. I guess maybe it was *too* different. Since the machine was nowhere to be found, I assume that I was the only one who liked it. Technology can sometimes be slow to find acceptance, even if it works perfectly.

And sometimes, it doesn’t so much work perfectly. I assume that many of you out there are using Final Draft to write your specs. Well, here’s a handy tip for all of you. It has to do with dual dialogue (parallel columns of dialogue that indicate two characters speaking at the same time). If you need to use any dual dialogue, do not put it in its final form until right before you turn in your script. Keep the dialogue in one column for as long as possible.

This is because of the way Final Draft deals with the problem. When it creates the two columns, it actually creates a little block of your script that is opaque to search-and-replace. If you want to substitute a word throughout your script, or, even more crucially, change the name of one of the characters uttering your simultaneous dialogue, search-and-replace will simply fail to work inside the dual dialogue. And there will be no notification that you need to go check it by hand. This can allow errors into your otherwise perfectly executed spec. Boo!

Also, it seems to me that having dual dialogue greatly increases the time it takes to do a simple “save” on your script. It looks to me like it “unpacks” the dual dialogue, saves the script, and then duals it up again. Pffft.

I can only assume that there are good programming reasons why this is the best way for Final Draft to handle two columns. The best way for you to handle two columns is to keep it as one for as long as you can. Also, you get that lovely surprise at the very end – when you finally engage the dual dialogue, the script will be mercifully shorter!

Lunch: Del Taco’s chicken soft tacos with Del Scorcho sauce

I have a lot of books about Egyptian hieroglyphs. There’s a lot to learn. I’ve got some of the basics down… I can puzzle out a lot of the cartouched names of your more established Pharaohs. I can spot familiar nouns and recognize a bunch of formal language that shows up simply everywhere: beloved of the gods, that sort of thing. Knowing some of this makes trips to the Luxor casino in Vegas extra interesting. I love trying to figure out all the inscriptions they’ve got all over everything… inside the elevators, on the bedspreads, on all the reproduction art and the columns on the main floor. Great stuff.

There’s one exterior wall of one of the towers, alongside where the secondary taxi stand is, that is covered with big panels – probably five feet by ten feet, all beautifully carved with hieroglyphs. I stood there, during my last visit and took a minute to really look at them. And I recognized them. Not just the words, but I recognized some of the ornate patterns that were used to decorate the images. These were copied directly, I realized, from the pages of one of the books I had at home. One of my favorites, it’s a very basic book of vocabulary items. One per page. Like flashcards. Very prettily done, with fanciful ornate patterns that I haven’t seen anywhere else. This wall of the Luxor is covered with random pages from the vocabulary book. Just the prettiest words, carved very large and scattered around, repeated sometimes, regardless of their meaning. “Cat!” declares the wall. “Baboon!” “Hear! Hear! Cat! Milk! Baboon! Ramses!” The north wall of the Luxor is like an over-stimulated Egyptian toddler.

I’m going to the Luxor. Back on Monday!

Lunch: Coca-Cola. Marzipan Bar. Pirate’s Booty.

More mail! Carole from Attleboro writes with kind words and a couple of interesting questions. Thanks, Carole! She asks why I don’t often use examples from Arrested Development in my joke discussions. Well, let’s take care of that right now. I was just thinking of one of their particularly genius jokes yesterday, and it made me laugh out loud. Just sitting in my living room, laughing out loud like a crazy person.

Remember this one? Tobias was speaking proudly, early in an episode, about how he was both a licensed analyst and a therapist. He combined the two words in what sounded like an-AHL-rap-ist. It was a funny character moment, not really a joke. Then, as I recall, much later in that episode, we saw his business card and realized that his new title was spelled “analrapist.” Holy cow. This joke works like one of those hidden picture things. It’s there right in front of you the whole time, but you don’t see it until… you see it. Fantastic! What you end up laughing at is partly your own blindness in not having worked out the spelling immediately. And you can laugh as Tobias’s own blindness for not seeing what he’d done. AND you can laugh at the reaction of the person reading the card (Buster, so it was hilarious). It has layers of funny as far down as you can dig.

This is a great illustration of joke deployment strategy. Whoever came up with this must have noticed that this word could be logically formed from common job descriptions. This writer might have even noticed this years earlier when looking though the yellow pages for professional help, I don’t know. But then came the challenging part, working out how to use this comic observation for maximal funny. Because, you know, there is more than one way this joke could’ve been told. The card could’ve been the first thing we saw, for example, and then had the title explained, which would have been funny, too. Or, the first person to hear him say the title could’ve noticed the problem and asked him to spell it, getting the funny out right away, but without the visual component. Or Tobias could’ve delivered the whole joke himself “I was going to call myself an analrapist, but then I noticed…”. None of these are as funny as the actual deployment on the show. Letting the audience sit with that information and then revealing the card…

If you have a joke that’s not quite working, or even if it is, consider how you’re laying it out. There are always other ways to deliver the humor. Would it work better reversed, or as a call-back, or as a visual reveal? Should the funny be split over two people or should one character deliver the set-up and the punchline? Once something is funny, it’s very tempting to stamp it “done.” But, just as with weaponry in a war, deployment can affect how efficiently you slay ’em.

Clarification: I remember Buster reading the card. It’s possible this was in a later episode… I’m not sure who the first reader of the card was. But it worked. It worked great.

Lunch: tofu pups and health-food sauerkraut. Get regular sauerkraut. This “healthy” kind has the texture of applesauce. Bleah.

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