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I recently read one of those collections of short stories. You know the kind, the “Best Short Stories of Two Thousand and Whatever it is Now” kind of thing. In the introduction, the editor talked about how she would have thought that short stories would be increasing in popularity now, as we all lead fast lives with small amounts of leisure time. A short story for the subway ride, a short story before turning out the light to refresh for another hectic day… it seems to make sense. She was puzzled as to why this doesn’t seem to be happening, that novels still seem to be the preferred unit of prose-based fiction.

Well, I can tell her why. Start-up costs. You have to invest a lot of attention in the start of a short story. Who are these people? Are they firemen? What year is this? Hey, are we in China or something? Picking up a short story requires an investment in attention and care far beyond what reading the next chapter of a novel requires. There, we already know what we’re in for and we only have to worry about what our guy is going through next.

What I’m getting to here is, of course, a discussion of the cold openings on House.

Typically, the House cold open (also known as a teaser), is a little game of who’s-gonna-rupture. You meet a few people in an easily understood situation. Three of them cough and then one collapses in a sea of their own innards. Cut to credits. It’s a neat little device, but it is a short story. If you’re writing a House and you’re doing one of these cold opens, you’re going to want to spend a lot of time making it very clever, very suspenseful and intriguing. Make us care about the person who is about to collapse. Make us invest in the show even though we’re not seeing the man we’re all here to see… we’re not yet seeing House. Or even Wilson or Cuddy.

Unless we are. See, every now and then, we do see a regular character in the teaser of the show. It’s a minority of the time, but it happens frequently enough that I think you should consider it for your spec. In one episode, we see House because the game of who’s-got-the-pathogen is happening in the Emergency Room where House is avoiding seeing patients. In another, the famous and best-episode-of-television-ever “Three Stories” episode, we don’t start with a case at all, but with House being sent to teach a class. In another, we see Cuddy witness the injury of a man who was working for her at her house. In yet another, House is already working a case when someone bursts in and shoots him.

Okay, now that’s more like it. Now we’re talking about a chapter in a novel in which something interesting is happening to someone I know. I’m not being asked to invest in the health of someone I just met without any connection to my continuing characters. I’m being forced to care, dragged into the story by my pre-existing investment.

The actual show doesn’t do these kinds of openings all the time, I’m sure, because they don’t want to end up with Murder-She-Wrote syndrome in which coincidence drags our characters into the mystery every week. But you don’t have to worry about the every-week-of-it. You’re just writing the one episode.

Now, don’t get so excited by the gymnastics of including a major character in the teaser that you flip yourself right out of the arena. You have to demonstrate that you understand the conventions of the show. You have to conform to the prototype in some ways if you’re going to fool the reader into thinking this just might be a produced episode. But in this one specific instance, I think it’s worth considering including at least one regular character (doesn’t have to be House) in the teaser.

Other people might give you the opposite advice. They could say that doing this breaks the mold of the typical episode too much, or that involving a regular character that early on buys cheap empathy that you haven’t really earned. There’s no way to know what the reader of your particular spec will prefer, but in a world in which you have no idea how far into your spec a jaded reader will venture, I say hook ’em early.

I think if I were writing a House spec, I would start with Wilson (House’s best friend, an oncologist) puzzling over a patient of his who has been brought in with some acute and alarming symptoms. While the patient struggles to breathe, Wilson picks up the phone and urgently demands that House come to his exam room right away. House enters (complaining) and looks confused to find the patient, still breathless and apparently alone. House is about to pivot on his cane-point and exit, when the patient points, panting, down out of frame. The camera TILTS down to find Wilson, lying unconscious at House’s feet.

The reader might throw the script to the floor at this point, declaring that the writer is attempting to use shock value instead of good writing. Or they might keep reading, because they care about House and they care about Wilson and I’ve tapped into their little novel-lovin’ heart.

Lunch: chicken salad sandwich and a hand-made version of a Ding-Dong from Big Sugar Bakeshop — small chocolate cupcake filled with whipped cream. Yummy.

ADDENDUM: If you’re already written your House, or have plotted it out, or simply have a great idea for a more standard cold open in your head, don’t feel that you should change it. As I say, this is simply a suggestion to consider the option, not necessarily to exercise it.

Okay, so we just tackled the problem of how to make sure your House or Office spec isn’t too different from the show. Now let’s think about how to make sure it isn’t too much the same. Since everyone is writing these particular specs, you have to make sure yours is better than theirs. The key is emotion. You want to find a story that affects the main character emotionally in a way that makes sense but that the show itself hasn’t already beaten to death. An emotional realization is especially nice.

If I were sitting down to write a House spec, I think I’d start by listing emotional moments I want to see that character go through. Regret? Genuine undistanced anger? A need for a human connection? What would cause that emotion? What would that emotion cause? I’d start working backwards from there. Notice that I am not starting with a disease.

If I were doing the same thing with a spec The Office, it’s a trickier task because Michael, Jim and Pam share the emotional heart of that show. I want to see at least one, and ideally all three of them being affected emotionally in the episode. For example, if Jim and Michael connected over a shared emotional reaction to something Pam said in anger… hmm… that’s a very interesting dynamic. So what made Pam angry? What do Jim and Michael do about it? And so on… Notice I’m not starting with “someone forgot to label their lunch in the breakroom.”

And that’s really all you need to make your script stand out. You don’t need terrorists in the hospital or a fire in the paper warehouse. You don’t need an episode to make a reader say, “Hoo! Nice explosion!” You need an episode that makes your reader say, “Oh, wow, I never realized House/Michael felt that way, but, yeah, that makes sense. Sigh.” Yep, go for the sigh. Even in a dark show like House. Even in a funny show like The Office. Emotion rules.

Lunch: Salad bar and raisinettes

Okay, let’s imagine you’ve decided to hunt with the pack and write one of the more popular specs for your ABC/Disney Fellowship application. So you’re looking at writing a House or an Office. One of the first things you’re probably looking at is how to make your episode stand out.

This can be a real minefield because you don’t want to overshoot the mark. The main point of the whole exercise is to “capture” the show. If you make your episode different in an effort to shine, you might just make it so different it no longer feels like the show.

Here are some guidelines that might help keep your spec bolted to the world of the existing show:

1. Use the show’s established sets. Sure, House had an episode with the A-story taking place on an airplane, and The Office has gone outside for events like the “Diwali” episode and the “Booze Cruise” episode. But I probably wouldn’t recommend these stories for a spec. One of the easiest ways to help your reader imagine your episode as a produced episode, is to allow them to picture sets they already know.

2. As always, beware the guest character. They have a tendency to take over the show. You reader doesn’t know or care about them, and you can’t show off by effortlessly capturing an established voice. In other words, your spec should not be about either Michael Scott’s nor Gregory House’s mother visiting the office/hospital and taking over.

3. Use all the major regular characters. If Wilson isn’t in your House, it’s going to feel less like a “real” episode. That relationship is important to the show, so you should make an effort to service it. This rule is less clear for The Office — I don’t need to see Creed in absolutely every episode. But I’m certainly going to expect to see Michael, Jim, Pam and Dwight.

Now, these are guidelines, not rules. If you do something totally brilliant that somehow manages to work despite violating these, then go for it. The jetliner episode of House, called “Airborne,” that I reference in guideline one, for example — well, I have to admit, it’s possible that might actually have worked if it was a spec. After all, we all know what the inside of a plane looks like, and it made for a memorable variation on the show’s normal patterns. So follow your own instincts, but keep in mind that you’re writing a chapter in someone else’s novel. Part of the job is to make the reader unaware of the shift in authorship.

Lunch: back to California Chicken cafe for that chicken Caesar salad. Zesty.

I have a notion, gentle readers. Let me run this past you. I am being told with ever-increasing (almost table-pounding) vehemence that specs of existing shows are no longer what you need to get staffed on shows. You need original material. Spec pilots, short film scripts, feature-length film scripts, plays, even short stories.

But, as we have discussed at length, to get into the ABC/Disney writing fellowship, one of the rare glittering unlocked doors in this town, one needs to submit a spec script for a show that’s currently in production.

Now, traditionally, there have always been only a handful of “specable” shows every year. But it seems to me that since this spec no longer needs to be something universally-acceptable that you can submit *everywhere*, since it will, it appears, probably be used only as part of this one application, perhaps we should consider throwing the doors open a little wider as we contemplate what to send to Disney.

If you’d rather write a Battlestar or a Friday Night Lights than a House, a How I Met Your Mother or a 30 Rock than a The Office, maybe it’s okay to pick something a little more off-the-beaten-track, or a little newer, like that. You’re taking the chance that the person who reads your script knows the show, so keep that in mind, but you are going to do your very best writing if it’s a show you’re passionate about. Remember that it has to be primetime, so don’t throw yourself into an “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” spec, but it might be worth taking a searching look at the primetime network and cable schedules and picking something that you think you can really cut loose and excel at even it’s not the same thing everyone else is doing.

And remember, you can only be as good as the show, so don’t aim low in the belief that you’ll impress readers by elevating a mediocre show. Impress them instead by capturing an excellent show.

Lunch: spicy hot wings with many many napkins

There are some shows that have two distinct types of episodes. Usually the distinction is between “arc” episodes and “stand-alones.” I imagine you already know the difference — one concentrates on developing the ongoing storyline of the season or series, and the other presents a complete story through to a conclusion that doesn’t progress the overall arc. “The X-Files” was a show that had a very clear division between the two types of episodes.

Some episodes have elements of both types: maybe a stand-alone B-story paired with an arc-driven A-story, or maybe an episode that appears to stand alone but that turns out to have a surprising impact on the season arc in its last scene.

Your spec script, even if it is for a show that is predominately arc-driven, will need to have at least some stand-alone elements. In fact, it should probably have as many stand-alone elements as you can get away with. So when you’re looking at produced scripts, using them to try to put together a template for the structure of your spec, try to use stand-alone episodes as your examples as much as possible. If you’re purchasing your scripts and can only afford a few, make them the most highly regarded episodes plus the stand-alone episodes.

Don’t think that stand-alone episodes are somehow less satisfying than arc-driven ones. There can be a temptation to dismiss stand-alones as “skipable” or as easily-resolved-crises-of-the-week, but it doesn’t have to be that way. A stand-alone might not push the storyline, but it can totally push character development. And character development TOTALLY trumps storyline.

Lunch: egg foo yung at the Universal Cafeteria. Very omelet-like.

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