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A far-reaching question comes to us today, Gentle Readers, from acquaintance-of-the-blog Michael. He actually asks a whole network of questions, about getting feedback and constructive criticism from others, and about how to respond to the note, “make it more ‘special,'” and about what it means when a script you like is rejected in some way.

Okay. Well, first the basics. Get notes. Absolutely. Seek out readers whom you trust and take their advice seriously. Ask them open-ended questions about what worked for them and what didn’t work. If you get a strange note like “make it more ‘special,'” ask what they mean. Don’t argue with them or defend what you’ve done. Just take in their suggestions and reactions, and then sort through them to find the ones that help and discard the rest.

Usually, writers have a hard time making recommended changes that they really need to make, but Michael’s questions bring up the other side of that page. It is possible to put too much stock in notes. One person’s opinion isn’t necessarily right, and not winning a competition is even more meaningless — how do you know you didn’t lose by a coin flip to the equally-amazing script that won? So don’t feel that you have to make a bunch of changes that you don’t agree with, in order to aim at some mysterious target in the mist. The target is not mysterious at all. The target is a tight intelligent script that you like. You will be able to recognize it when you’ve written it. That’s the key: Notes are there to help you write something you like more than what you wrote unassisted.

If you’ve lost sight of whether you like your own script and whether or not the suggestions you’re getting will make you like it more or less, then set the whole mess aside for two weeks while you write something else. When you pick it up again, you’ll probably be able to look at it more objectively and you’ll be able to make those decisions.

Thanks for the question, Michael — hope this helps!

Lunch: Mulholland Grill. Chilled gazpacho and a beet salad. Excellent, although there should’ve been more beets.

So, you’ve got your ABC/Disney and Warner Brother’s applications all submitted, maybe something for Slamdance, too, and now you feel like you’re in limbo. What should you do now?

Write! You don’t have another deadline breathing down your neck right now for which you have to spec an existing show. So this is the perfect time to write original material. Write a couple spec pilots — a comedy and a drama, perhaps. Write some one-act plays and submit them to play-writing contests. Write a short film script. Write a feature. Write short stories and send them to magazines and journals. Write a comic book. Write a novel if you’ve got the patience/time/confidence.

Read books about writing and apply what you learn. Read film and television scripts and notice how they work. Outline your favorite episodes of television as you’re watching them. Fill notebooks with creative ideas that you can go back to years from now when you’ve got a looming pitch meeting and you need something fast!

Make friends with writers. Take writing classes, join writing networks, chat with other writers on the net. Heck, start a writing discussion group if you can’t find one in your area.

You might feel as though you should be doing something more active — landing that writers’ assistant job, for example — but if there isn’t progress in that direction at the moment, take it as an opportunity to write write write. Because when someone finally says, “hey, send me something so I can see your stuff,” you really, really want to be ready. You want to say: “I have an original pilot, a humorous short film script and a feature script for an action movie; which would you like to see?” You don’t want to say, “Sure, I have something I just need to polish and then I’ll send it along,” because that tells the person you only have one script and it’s not even done! Think about it. If someone said that to you today, what answer would you give?

Lunch: cold stuffed tortellini from the salad bar

Gentle Reader and friend-of-friend-of-the-blog Chris in Los Angeles writes in with a wonderful technical question. She (or he) says:

How would you format a montage of still photos with voiceover? Should I write in the location of each picture on the Scene Heading Line? Or can I put some kind of overall “Montage” note and then describe what’s in each picture, one by one? If that’s the case, what should I put on the scene heading line?

First off, let me just say that this is the kind of stuff that drives newer writers nuts, because they’re worried about doing it wrong, about breaking a rule. The fact is, however, that when you’re faced with an unusual situation, the best way to do it is just to be as clear as possible for the reader and not worry too much about rules. This means, of course, that different writers would tackle this situation in different ways, and none of them would be correct or incorrect.

Now, I assume you’re not talking about panning across a mantelpiece and showing us the photos there, because then I don’t think you’d be asking about the scene heading and using the word ‘montage’. But anyway, just for completeness, if it was the mantelpiece thing, it would probably go like this (please forgive any indentation oddness):

INT. LIVING ROOM

But you’re not asking about that. You’re asking about a genuine montage, right, Chris? A location-less series of still shots, like in a Ken Burns documentary? That’s more unusual, and I can imagine it being done in a couple different ways. Here is one way that I might use:

A STILL PHOTO

And on from there. But it’s totally flexible. That one action line where I list a lot of photos in a row? You could break those each out into its own shot line if you wanted to. It’s all about whatever you think best conveys what you’re picturing. Play around with it.

Notice that whether you use the “scene heading” or “shot” or even “action” designation for the bits of prose is entirely up to you. The reader won’t be able to tell which they are, anyway.

All the standard rules of script formatting assume you’re going to be doing the standard script thing, having action and dialogue set within a series of locations. When you deviate from that formula, you can deviate from the formatting rules — you can start a scene without either an “Int” or an “Ext”. You can blur the distinction between scenes and shots and description. The categories are supposed to help you. When they stop helping you, find another way. As always, the key is to make your choices clear and confident.

Lunch: that heirloom tomato salad again. Lovely.

Some shows use a different kind of outline than you might’ve seen before. It’s actually a sort of pre-outline, and it reads more like a traditional prose short story than you might be used to. It doesn’t indicate act breaks, it just tells the story of the episode from beginning to end. And, get this, it tells the A-story separate from any secondary stories.

Can you picture the kind of document I’m talking about? It starts with a brief one-paragraph summary of the episode as a whole — a little recap that sums up the reasons for telling the episode — what does it mean? Then the next section is all A-story, all the time, a prose walk-through of those events, generally told scene-by-scene but without explicitly giving scene headings. Then the B-story is laid out, beginning to end, and then, if there’s a substantial enough C-story to merit it, it can have its own section, too.

Here’s a mini-example, using a fake ep of a fake show I’m making up as I go for the sake of exemplarity.

“Clarity”

AMY’S STORY
AMY gets an early-morning phone call from her son’s teacher. She’s been unable to reach Amy at any other time. Amy slips out of bed without disturbing Jeremy, feeling guilty that her work is removing her from family life so much that she wasn’t available for the call. The teacher asks Amy if she can come in to the school to meet with her about something “sort of urgent.” Puzzled, Amy agrees. [MORE– TO THE END OF THE B-STORY]

See how that goes? I haven’t written very many of these in my career. It always seemed to me like an odd stutter-step to tease the stories apart so you can tell them with narrative flow, when they’re not going to appear that way in the finished script at all. And yet, whenever I do employ this step, I’m shocked at how useful it is. Especially when it comes to checking secondary stories for internal coherence.

It’s easy to think of a B-story as a series of scenes that are useful for commenting on and transitioning in and out of the main story scenes. Being forced to tell a B-story in a compelling way that stands alone can help you make sure it’s doing more than that.

Also, I think any step that forces you to think hard about all your stories before you write dialogue is a good thing. I picture it this way… there are hidden gems in every story, little moments that end up being the reason a reader drops your script so that he can pick up the phone and call your agent. But you have to find those gems before you can put them into the script. An outline slices up your story horizontally, so you can look into the cuts for those gems. The kind of story document I’m talking about here slices up your story vertically, so if you do both, you’re creating a much better search grid.

Lunch: crab dip with pita bread

Ever have a fan of a particular movie watch you watch it for the first time? They’re rarely able to resist helping you watch it. “Ooh, there’s a good bit coming up.” “Watch the girl in the background.” “Oh, this guy shows up again later.” Or, even worse, “He’s going to turn out to be a jerk,” or “Later on, you’re gonna find out she’s his daughter.” It can be very tempting to fill in information that a first-time viewer doesn’t have, thinking that it will sort of jump them ahead to the connoisseur-type enjoyment of a repeat viewer.

It can also be tempting to do this when you’re writing — wanting to let your reader in on information that the imaginary “viewer” of the piece doesn’t yet have. For example, let’s say you have a character, call her Barbara, and you have her look at a photograph of a young girl. You don’t want the viewer to know yet that this is a photo of Barbara herself as a child. But you write a stage direction like, “Barbara’s eyes widen as she recognizes her younger self.” Your reasoning is that you’re doing the reader a favor by letting them in on this fact before the “viewer” knows it.

The only problem with this is that it makes your reader have a split personality. From this point on, they have to remember what they know as a reader versus what they know as a viewer. They’re also going to wonder if it was an oversight on your part, if you meant for this fact to be suggested in dialogue but forgot to put it in. Overall, you’re going to have a distracted reader.

If you want to do this kind of thing, at least mark it clearly, so the reader knows exactly what the status is of this piece of information is. I remember once writing a piece of stage direction that went something like this:

Outside the gate, a VAMPIRE lurks, although we don’t yet recognize him as such.

I’m letting the reader in on something, but I’m making it clear that the future viewer won’t know it. The reader still has two separate trails of information to keep track of, but at least she knows I want it that way.

Lunch: Chinese noodle soup with pork

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