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Friend of the blog, the amazing Rob Kutner, one of the writers on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, has written a book called “Apocalypse How.” You can order it here, or, once Book Soup has it on their site, you can also order it there! And you can read about it way over here!

I don’t have my copy in hand yet, but this is sure to be terrific. From the web site: APOCALYPSE HOW is a comprehensive cataclysmic guide that walks you through the Nine Most Likely World-Ending Scenarios, and provides useful and inspiring advice on every aspect of surviving (and thriving!) in the new world to come. Fantastic.

Up here in Vancouver, I’m continuing to enjoy watching my words get spun into gold by this amazing crew and cast. Nothing will convince you you’re brilliant faster then having brilliant actors read your material. Of course, the opposite is true too, which is why I caution you to be very careful about staging amateur table reads. Terrible line-readings will make you think your writing is terrible. And it just isn’t. I think you’re better off listening to imaginary brilliance than real-world awfulness. So turn up those voices in your head and turn down your roommate’s boyfriend’s offer to read the lead in your spec pilot. Unless he’s good, he might just convince you to throw out something that actually works. Remember that there is no line so inspired that it can’t be read painfully badly.

Lunch: cheeseburger, pickles, other wonderful items from the catering truck

I’m still up here in Vancouver, watching production of my next episode. It’s exhausting but fun. One of the things I’ve been doing is making last-minute cuts to shorten too-long scenes. It’s been making me think a lot about how to keep a scene short and focused and strong.

If you’re tackling this in your own script, I suggest trying what I’ve been doing: recreating a beatsheet like the one you wrote at your pre-outline stage, only even shorter. Just make a list of the one crucial thing that happens in each scene. Sometimes two crucial things happen in a scene, especially if an A-story and a B-story are both involved, but usually no more than that. So I mean, literally a couple words for each scene: “Joe tells Carrie his secret.” “Leslie starts the house fire.” “Jeremy blames his father for his failings.” “The soldier starts to regret his actions.” Then look at the scene and find the part where that happens — sometimes it’s all in one line or one action. Decide on the absolute minimum you’d have to keep to fulfill the promise of your little beatsheet. Declare all the rest expendable.

Now, this isn’t really true, of course. The heartbeat of a script is in all the stuff that might not be strictly necessary for this scene, but that gives a world its texture, and fleshes out a character so that their actions reflect a full and believable person. If you cut everything but story, you’d have a synopsis, not an episode. But keeping your eye on the function of the scene within the story is crucial and sometimes surprisingly difficult. If you know exactly what the scene needs to do, you can bring a slightly more objective eye to the cutting process. I’ve been amazed sometimes when I’ve realized that some four-page scene I’ve written actually plays better — is sharper and more emotional — as a one-page scene. You don’t always lose when you cut. The bones of your story show up better when you take some of the fat off.

Even if you don’t need to lose length off your script, I recommend that at some point you make one of these little reconstructed beatsheets, just to keep your focus on the most basic shape of your story, the real function of every scene. It will keep you from wandering off into the maze.

Lunch: steak, which I shared with a beagle who lives in the Set Dec Department. I love food from the set.

Did you see my episode of Battlestar Galactica that aired last night? I myself did not, as I was on a soundstage, watching even fresher Battlestar being made. So instead, to celebrate, I reread the script this morning and I thought I might show you all a little excerpt to illustrate how simple it can be to do something that might look tricky on the screen.

SPOILERS… if you haven’t seen the episode yet, you might want to wait. Anyway, there’s a moment in the episode where something plays out and then you realize it didn’t really happen, that it was just one character’s fantasy/fear/hallucination/projection/SOMETHING…. Here’s how I scripted it (I’m just showing you a scene fragment here):

…Awkward pause. Adama signals the bartender, then says:

See what I did? Almost nothin’. I just said what happened using emphasis so the eyes of careless reader wouldn’t miss it, and then with a “We realize…” sentence. I love “We realize,” because what you’re really doing is conveying to the reader the intended experience of the viewer. You’re not forcing them to guess about what you want the viewer to understand at that moment, and you’re not using dialogue to over-explain something that a character wouldn’t say out loud. I find it incredibly useful as long as it’s not being used to try to convince a reader that something would be clear to a viewer when in fact it would not. It’s a powerful weapon, use it well.

Lunch: shrimp dumplings, rice rolls, sticky rice and chicken in lotus leaves from Dim Sum place near the hotel. Best Dim Sum I’ve had in a long time. Vancouver is food heaven!

Hello again, Gentle Readers. Were you worried about me? So sorry to disappear for so long. I’m up here in Vancouver where they’re shooting my latest Battlestar episode. It’s crazy and hectic and wonderful. I’ll be back to talk to you all again when I’m out from under!

A blog letter just arrived in one of those little packets you get from the post office when their equipment mangles a letter. This envelope inside is missing about a third of itself, resulting in a letter that’s missing its corners, although not in that cool Battlestar Galactica way. Luckily for Gentle Reader Maryanne in [town name torn away], Australia, very little of the actual content of the letter was obscured.

Maryanne writes to ask:

Obviously, costumes are chosen by costume designers, rather than writers. But if the costume is actually mentioned in the script (like, for example, Riley’s “clown pants” in The Yoko Factor.), how much specific description would the writer give in [word torn away, assume “the”] script?

Well, I don’t have a copy of Doug’s script for The Yoko Factor. I’ve found one on line, but I can’t tell if it’s the actual script or a transcript. At any rate, the line of stage description that I found reads: “Riley pulls a pair of hideous multi-colored weight lifter pants from the knapsack,” which sounds about right. That’s the degree of detail you’d generally give.

Wardrobe description, by the way, was something I found very confusing as I set out to write my very first scripts. I knew that clothing was part of what defined characters, but once I started describing the characters clothes, I felt like I needed to do it for every scene in order to be consistent. So I went overboard. I recently read a script by a new writer who had clearly fallen into the same line of thought, telling the reader what everyone was wearing in every scene. That’s not only unnecessary, but it’s distracting, since it makes the reader think that these details are going to be important, raising expectations that don’t pay off.

Mention clothes when you first introduce someone, if it’s important to the character (“She’s the sort of young woman who insists on dressing like a teen-aged boy, right now in tennis shoes, jeans and a hoodie.”), and when something significant is happening with the clothes (“His suit is rumpled and a pair of women’s underwear dangles from his pocket.”), and when they help define a supporting character (“Men in white coats enter through both doors simultaneously.”)

Beyond that, if you assume your characters are dressed appropriately, given their characters and their surroundings, your readers will assume the same and it’ll be fine to leave everything unspecified.

And if, like Riley’s pants, you need to describe some oddity, do it clearly and succinctly, and don’t feel like you can’t convey an attitude about it, as “hideous” does in the example.

Hope that helps, Maryanne from mystery town!

Lunch: cup o’ noodles, fig newtons

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