JaneEspenson.com

I just got the best letter, gentle readers. Seriously, this is one to frame. A regular reader, Amanda from Los Angeles, writes to let us know that she has landed an agent! At a big agency, too. This is a huge accomplishment! Cue the party music, but not too loud, because she’s going to tell you what the key was:

…My Office spec took me a month to write and I’m so glad I took my time to make it right. I studied four produced scripts (as you recommended), and I spent a LONG time finding the averages: how many jokes per page, how many scenes per act, how many talking heads, how many pages in the cold open and the tag, etc. That way, when my spec was done, I could hold it up to the averages of the produced scripts. It helped a lot to approach the script that way.”

YES! That’s exactly right. That is *exactly* the way to do it. Study those produced scripts, people! They’ll help you make a spec that feels so real that your readers will forget it’s a spec. Make them believe it’s a produced episode they happened to miss. The only way to do that is to be authentic. Even if your reader isn’t terribly familiar with the show, there’s something about getting it *right* that just shines off the page. (And I can pretty much promise you that with a show like The Office, your reader will be very familiar with it.)

I love that she didn’t just count scenes and pages and jokes, as I have indeed recommended, but that she also categorized the *kinds* of scenes. As she mentions, The Office has those “talking head” scenes. And I bet Amanda didn’t just count them. I bet she also checked on how many other scenes, on average, separate the talking head scenes — are there ever two that are adjacent? I believe there are, actually, but I’m not certain. See why you need the produced scripts?

I had a friend when I was starting out, who prided herself on the speed with which she wrote specs. Problem is, no one can smell the speed on your script. Slow down and do the math — or at least, the counting. Take a month, take two or three.

Amanda took her time, made a script that smelled not of speed but of Steve Carell, and look what it got her: a shiny agent all her own!

Lunch: tortilla soup and a Caesar salad from Mexicali

I know from your letters, gentle readers, that many of you have ethnic and cultural backgrounds that aren’t currently overwhelmingly represented on the writing staffs of television shows. Does this help you or hurt you? Well, probably a little of both. “Diverse” writers are under-represented precisely because they haven’t been hired. On the other hand, there are some efforts being made to fix the sitch.

The ABC/Disney program, for example, has as one of its stated goals, “to employ culturally and ethnically diverse talent.” Also, show runners can get a financial break for employing diverse writers. If this is you, I recommend that you mention your background on any application for a writing program, and I also recommend that you mention it in any cover letter to a prospective agent.

Does this mean that you straight white males should despair? Not at all. And to answer a question in a recent letter, there’s no need to fake a disability or a sexual preference. I think that could be a very dangerous, although quite possibly hilarious, route. And it wouldn’t help anyway. I am told that there is no financial break for show runners employing writers in those groups.

There may be a few new doors now open to some writers, but that doesn’t mean that any of the old doors have closed. ABC/Disney encourages diverse applicants, but also has admitted many white writers, including straight white male writers, in the past.

This is a very hard business to get into. The hurdles are high, the open doors are few, and the metaphors are mixed. Anyone who gets hired can be assumed to have talent. So I encourage *all* of you to look for any open door you can find. And once you’re in… stretch a hand back through and help others follow you.

Lunch: a chicken-cheese omelet and a waffle

Hmm… what I thought was going to be one post about rewriting based on notes has turned into a trilogy. Here’s part three:

Put it all on the table. You might think you’re already doing this, but you probably aren’t. There is almost always some moment, some exchange, some theme or whatever, that you are determined to preserve. Often, it’s whatever inspired you to write the script in question. It’s the moment that you woke up thinking about, that seemed to come into your head fully-formed and complete with music. Cut anything, you tell yourself, change anything… just not that. Let’s call it a protected moment.

But sometimes that moment, no matter how inspirational, is a bay leaf. You needed it to get started, to get the flavor right, and now it’s done its job. And until and unless you acknowledge that you’ve given the moment in question a special status, you can’t even SEE that it has become superfluous. I’m sure there’s a parallel to be made with people who carry on with unsatisfying jobs, bad habits, or problematic spouses long after they should have dumped them.

This is one of the hardest things to do, of course — to cut or change a protected moment. Sometimes, if I’m considering a big change like this, I’ll copy the script into a file called something like “experiment” and make the change there, while leaving the original file untouched. That way I can fool myself into thinking I’m not really changing it. Then I can read it without having that “what have I doooone?” feeling. And if I don’t like it, I can go back to the original file knowing that at least I was open to every option.

By the way, I became aware of my own protected moments early in my career while watching show runners make changes that I, a less-experienced writer, was expecting them to balk at. Sometimes you don’t realize you’ve put up walls until someone else starts inviting people to climb over them.

Lunch: “Buffet City” — prawns and bao and pot stickers and tiny custard cream puffs

Several times during my career, I’ve heard experienced writers tell variations of the same funny true story. They’ve turned in a script to the network for approval, and the network executives have grimly told them that there are big problems with the script. They require that some character be fundamentally changed, or that a theme be entirely reworked, or that some other sweeping change needs to be made. In part two of this funny true story, the writer makes a one-word or one-sentence change to the script, like adding the word “proactive” to the character’s initial description or adding something like “He stands victorious, his mission complete,” to the final stage description. In part three of the funny true story the writer hands the script back to the network, expecting to be slapped for their impudence, but is instead praised for having made such a substantial change in such a short time. No one is sure exactly what was changed, but they know it felt better this time.

The moral of this story is NOT that network executives don’t know when something feels wrong with a script. In fact, they do. Instead, the moral is that sometimes the person giving you notes on your spec script — your friend or family member — might not have a sense of which script problems require big solutions and which require small adjustments. All they can do is let you in on it when something that they read doesn’t feel right. They’re about pointing at the problem. As the writer, you’re in charge of finding the solution. So listen and don’t panic. The change you need to make might not be as big as you fear. It’s like that old saying: sometimes the biggest fractures need the smallest bandages.

Lunch: knockwurst with sauerkraut

When you’ve finished a draft of your spec script, you give it to friends to read, right? And then you wait for their reaction, as if you’re being tested. Well, you are, kind of. But here’s something interesting — you’re also testing your friends.

You’re going to need input over your spec-writing career and beyond. Writers often — almost always — have friends read drafts before they submit them, even once they’ve got well-established careers. And they know *which* friends to hand them to because they’ve paid attention to which ones read carefully, which ones give constructive advice, which ones share their sensibility…

So start paying attention now. If one of your readers likes everything you do, well, that’s perfect if what you most need is an ego-boost (which is possible), but it’s not great if you really need advice. If another one has confident and specific recommendations but can’t answer simple questions about the plot, then maybe they didn’t read as carefully as they think they did. Someone else might be good at detecting problems, but might also leave you so demoralized that you lose confidence in your ability to fix them!

If you test your readers a little bit and keep track of them, you not only figure out whose notes work for you, you might even end up with a sort of tool kit of readers: someone who can help you sharpen your jokes, someone else who senses structural problems, and someone else to fluff the ego (it really is important).

Lunch: soup and the “thai crunch salad” from CPK

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