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There was a child in the hair salon this morning. So instead of the normal ennui-athon of Paris fashion show footage, the DVD player had been loaded with episodes of an animated superhero show, for said child’s entertainment. The show was not the one I’ve written for, but I liked it. It was witty, even. I was quite happy, being placidly shorn while I listened.

And then we got to the very last line of the show. It was one of those shows that has to sum everything up at the end with a contemplative voice-over line that begins, “That’s the thing about life…” (By the way, it’s worth googling “that’s the thing about life”. Apparently, there are 932 of them.)

This one went, as near as I can recall:

SUPERHERO
That’s the thing about life. It just keeps going along, and no matter what you do about it, there’s always something that you didn’t know was going to happen.

Actually, I think it had less content than that. It was certainly that what-inducing. And it occurs to me that a lot of scripts, for all different sorts of shows, often for spec pilots, have such a summing-up moment at the end, and that you all should be warned to be very, very careful with it. First off, be very wary of using a narrator voice-over to begin with, but sometimes even a script without one will still have a moment like this in which the theme of the script is explicitly stated. Watch out. It’s a minefield.

If you decide to do this, you really have to earn it. You can’t just look at your story and come up with the vaguest possible aphorism that covers both the A and B stories. Even a great story will fall on its face if it turns out that the whole thing existed as an illustration of “Life is surprising,” or “I wish things were fairer!” And, by the way, it’s totally cheating to make the moral, “Sometimes we can’t explain why things happen,” in the hopes that it will excuse unmotivated events in your script. Nice try. (No really. It actually IS a nice try.)

If you’re going to try to give your readers a moral gift bag, it has to be something worth taking away, something a little surprising, something that connects with what the readers have just seen in a slightly unexpected way. For example, I might be intrigued by a story that ended with two main characters walking away from a big climactic scene while saying:

HERO ONE
I did everything I could to try to help him. I don’t get why he was still angry.

HERO TWO
Maybe ’cause you wouldn’t stop trying to help him.

It’s still a bit heavy-handed. Summing up is a heavy-handed business. But the observation that treating someone, even a victim, AS a victim, doesn’t always breed gratitude — that’s at least not a sentiment you hear every day. It’s a little unusual, a little thoughtful. It’s also not being expressed in a voice-over, which helps it not feel as weighty.

See, that’s the thing about life, sometimes you need more than a vague platitude.

Lunch: A Vietnamese dish — rice noodles and pork and shrimp. Mmm.

Eric in West Hollywood wrote in a very long time ago, with a question that I’m finally getting around to answering. He asks about the act structure for a one-hour drama. Eric:

In your opinion are five acts a blip or a trend? If I’m writing a [spec] pilot, should I write it in four acts? And which act break is the most important?

Ooh, those are great questions. Most hour shows seem to have gone to the five-act structure now, although the show I’m currently working on (Battlestar), is still holding to the older four-act structure. It’s hard to tell, of course, if something is a blip until it blips out, but I think this has the feel of a something more permanent. Networks like commercial breaks and they like a longer opening sequence to hook viewers, and those impulses have created the additional act. (I hear that some shows are even toying with a six-act structure, although I wonder if, in that case, maybe that first act feels a bit like a teaser and that last act like a tag.)

The nice thing for you spec pilot writers is that the transition is still transitioning. You can choose with complete freedom whether to tell your show with four or five acts. I’d suggest that you let your story determine that. Look at how many times it turns, and number your acts accordingly.

As to the most important act break, that’s a very interesting question. I’m going to rephrase it a bit, and ask how the four-act act breaks line up with the five-act act breaks. Traditionally, the end of act one is the moment that defines the main problem of the script — the obstacle the characters face. This should still be the end of act one, certainly not any later. The end of act three in a traditional four-act show is often the “all is lost” act break. I’d suggest that the end of act four plays this role in a five-act show, certainly you don’t want it earlier. So it’s not that you’re tacking on an extra act of set-up at the beginning, nor an extra act of resolve at the end. The new act is made out of the cloth in the middle.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to get more specific than that, because shows differ so much in what they require out of an “act break moment,” so you’ll have to do some exploration of this on your own, by playing with your own story. And remember, it’s all right if the length of your acts varies. Acts early in a script are often longer than later ones. I’ve seen first acts that are over twenty pages long and final acts as short as five or six pages. If the reverse is happening with your script, that’s a bit strange. You might want to have that looked at.

Try, as much as you can, to let the natural shape of your story determine how it fits onto the pages. Let the demands of page-count and the number/placement of acts keep you from formlessness, but don’t let them dictate your story.

P.S. thanks to Loyal Reader Lilia for the fine gift!

Lunch: a “Boston Cream Pie Cupcake” from Big Sugar Bakeshop. I love self-contradictory treats.

Good writing teachers have some very good advice about adverbs. “Eliminate adverbs!” “They just prop up weak verbs!” “Cut ’em out!”

Yes, that’s what the good teachers say. But not me! I’m here to give you down-and-dirty practical advice. And I say use some adverbs. Writing a script is unlike any other writing enterprise. All you get to do in a script is say what people do and what people say. You don’t get to engage in long word-beautiful examinations of motivations. All that stuff has to be clear from the actions and the spoken words. So being able to convey HOW the actions are taken and HOW the words are spoken is vitally important.

Sure, it’s better to say he “shoves the ticket at her” than that he “hands the ticket to her forcefully.” That’s true. Great verbs are invaluable. But if my leading man is gazing at my leading woman, I’d sure like to hear whether he’s doing it “helplessly,” or “absently” and I can’t think of a way to enverb that difference. And if my hero picks up a sword, I love that I can convey something different if she picks it up “defiantly,” versus “with an air of tragic obligation.” All sort of adverbial options are interesting, and they all paint different pictures, some with charmingly subtle differences. The boundary between something said “smoothly” and the same thing said “insinuatingly” is a nice oily line, isn’t it?

There are great adverbs out there, and wonderful adverbial phrases. Just think of the things that can be done jauntily, morosely or with loads and loads of smarm. Scripts aren’t like other works of prose. We already labor under so many restrictions that to cut ourselves off from a whole part of speech is to go too far! To the barricades! Swiftly!

Lunch: heirloom tomato sweet onion salad from the nice commissary

If you’re writing a spec pilot or another piece with original characters, remember that your readers don’t necessarily know who the star of the show is. Help them out. Let your main character have the last line in a lot of the scenes. Give her the big jokes, too. Tell the readers more about her expressions and reactions throughout a scene than the other characters. All this stuff will make her seem to sparkle. And you won’t run the risk of having the readers focus mistakenly on some character you kill off in act two.

This might seem obvious, but it’s often the case that a secondary character, because he can be more broadly drawn, has the funnier point of view. It’s easy for that kind of character to get the last word all the time, and to highjack the script. Let them be funny, but make sure the spotlight stays on your star.

Lunch: Something called a “sombrero salad,” but it contained no actual hat.

I talk a lot about how important it is to learn from the examples provided by produced scripts. In fact, I think studying their structure is a much better way to learn structure than learning a bunch of rules is. It’s like learning a language for the first time. No one ever shows a baby a list of rules and then asks them to produce grammatical sentences based on them. Instead, babies are given lots of example sentences and, when they make their own, they do so based on what they’ve heard. The rules don’t predate the language, they’re extracted from the language later.

However, there are a few things that are included in produced scripts that you won’t want to put in your spec: cast lists and set lists, primarily. And, every now and then, you will come across a produced script with an appendix. This is almost always done in a very specific situation. Sometimes you will need, say, a news broadcast to run in the background under a scene, or a speech that rambles on behind your main characters as they talk. All of this dialogue needs to be written for the purposes of production, of course, even though it is not the main auditory focus of the scene. Often, it gets written out and attached to the back of the script as an appendix, or on pages labeled “additional dialogue.” (By the way, writing stuff like this is a kind of secret joy for me, since it’s a chance to be a writing chameleon, emulating newscaster-speak or politician-speak for paragraphs on end.)

You don’t need to do this for a spec. Ever. You can simply indicate that the broadcast plays on, or the speaker drones on, without giving the content until perhaps a specific line catches a main character’s attention. If the speech is important, of course, you can use dual dialogue to get it into the main body of the script, although this should be used sparingly.

Just like a real appendix, a script appendix just isn’t that necessary, and should be cut out.

Lunch: chilled cucumber salad, Vietnamese summer rolls

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