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Let’s talk character descriptions!

Here is what I would consider a good character introduction:

SHERRY, 40s, sharp-tongued, rich and proud, is the woman you sit next to when you want to hear snarky comments about everyone else. She’s all offense because her defense sucks — she’s shockingly thin-skinned. Chain-smoker, stylish, bright-eyed, attractive in a surgical way.

Here’s a less useful one:

SHERRY, 48, is tall, thin, and tastefully tan with a smoker’s baritone voice. She’s got bleached hair expensive enough to look natural and the work she’s had done has left her as tight as the skin of a drum. Ice-blue eyes miss nothing.

I know you see the difference. The second description is highly physical. In fact, it uses visual characteristics to try to convey things about the character. This is a very good way to quickly convey character in, say, a novel, but it’s not especially helpful in a script. Imagine being an actor reading those two descriptions — which one helps you more? Which one discourages you from even showing up because you’re a short green-eyed brunette? Or because you’re African-American, Asian or Latina? It’s good to have a clear mental image of a character as you create it, but if you describe that character too precisely, you frustrate everyone during production, and you tip off any reader of a spec to your inexperience.

(Sometimes, of course, physicality is absolutely necessary and should be described. If your spec is about a super-fat psychic, then by all means, lard it up in the description.)

Substantial, non-physical description isn’t only a practical consideration. The truth is that the things that make a character memorable tend not to be physical. Ted Baxter had striking fluffy white hair, but that’s not what made him Ted Baxter.

By the way, it’s not cheating to invoke other characters or well-known people. Describing someone as a “hilarious endearing loudmouth of the Kathy Griffin variety” is very clear. Or, “Professor Snape with less charisma and worse hygiene” — got it. Character description can involve throwing some pretty wild stuff together to create an evocative impression. Here’s an excerpt from a script by Michael Angeli, from our Battlestar staff. This isn’t a character introduction, but it’s closely related. You might call it a re-introduction:

… GAETA, on the floor, head hung, blood seeping through his bandaged leg. Disgusted, resentful, broken. Not the Gaeta who historically obeyed and struggled and obeyed again, tick-tick-tick, but a man whose moral metronome has been cranked to the breaking point.

That “tick-tick-tick” is genius. Moral metronome or time bomb, it creates a visceral impression.

By the way, here’s a trick. You can actually back into a memorable character. While you’re writing a character description, you might want to try throwing in something that even you didn’t know about the character, then write or rewrite the character to reflect it. For example, if I had written a fairly generic snarky rich woman for the roll of Sherry above, I might push myself to do better by adding that little bit about her being personally thin-skinned. It’s an interesting trait, and if I had to adjust the woman’s lines and actions to reflect it, I would probably end up with something much more complex and fun. Give it a try. Just throw in “easily amused” or “prone to panic” or “surprisingly soft-spoken” or “disdainful” or “fearful” or “wry,” and see what it does to someone. Fun!

Lunch: left over beef with the sauce that was intended for the left over salmon. Amazing.

Oh, such an adventure today, Gentle Readers! I got to go on a tour of the sets and entire operation of a daytime drama. You might think that the world of television writing is sort of homogeneous all the way through — like a potato. But it’s not. The worlds of comedy and drama have undergone some cross-pollinating in recent years, and if you work on a prime-time comedy, it’s possible you might even find yourself interacting with writers from the late-night world of Conan, Dave or Colbert, but soaps — they are unknown territory.

The effect is something like divergent evolution, as if soaps were put on an island in the early days of television, where they’ve continued to develop along their own lines, uninfluenced by the rest of the TV world. Their job titles and terminology and methods are similar to the rest of the business, but just different enough to cause delightful confusion.

The production aspects are insane– the show I visited doesn’t shoot, as you might assume, an hour’s world of material each and ev’ry blessed day. No. They do FIVE shows in FOUR days. So it’s more than one standard episode every working day. With no hiatus, of course. Year ’round, I’m sayin’. Holy cats. A single actor might be in seven, nine, eleven scenes in one day. I was told of one case in which and actor, trying to clear their schedule so they could take a week of… that one actor shot over twenty scenes in one day.

The sound stages look very much like sitcom stages, only without audience seating. The rooms have no fourth walls, and there are four cameras shooting into the sets, getting all the angles at once. Most scenes are shot in one take — taking as little as minutes to complete. The sets themselves are moved overnight as the ones needed for the next episode are moved in to replace the previous day’s configuration. This show uses four directors — one directs all the eps shot on Mondays, another all the eps shot on Tuesdays… I’m telling you, it’s wild.

Oh, and the director blocks all the scenes well in advance of shooting and all the sets are pre-lit to fit that blocking during the night before shooting. In other words, the actors don’t get any input on where they stand. What’s your motivation for crossing the room? Well, that’s where the light is, bub. Oh, and the director sits in a control booth, watching monitors there, not on the set.

Now let’s try to imagine the challenges for the writing staff! If everything goes smoothly, all you have to do is produce a full script every single day, year ’round. And they have only a few more writers than a standard prime time hour drama. So they cannot, obviously, run a standard story-break room. The system that evolved was for years, at least at this show, a sort of three-tiered system – a few top writers craft the overall story arcs. Mid-level writers work with them to turn those arcs into things that look a lot like traditional episode outlines, and an array of writers below that (who do not even have to be local to Los Angeles), take those outlines and quickly generate the dialogue while adhering slavishly to the outlines because any adjustment they might make would affect all the other moving parts of this speeding train.

Recently it seems that the middle of that particular snack cake may be disappearing — the higher-ups are creating things with a more outline-y flavor and the lower-downs are being given more autonomy to do a bit of structuring on their own. By this I mean that they’re told in which act a given scene goes, but not in which order. Of course, if it’s ultimately decided they got the order wrong, the scenes just be reordered in editing. Again, I must say that I’m fascinated. When the finished scripts come back to the top writers, they do rewrites in a process that they were calling “editing,” which sounds very odd to my ears, as much of this did. It was like finding a foreign country within our own shores.

Now, soap writing has often been disparaged, but once you view the necessities of the process, it’s frakking amazing what they’re able to accomplish. By the way, one of the results of the process is that there is even more of a premium on chameleonship in this writing than there is in prime time writing. If a script reflects the individual voice of a particular writer it can be somewhat distracting (or wonderful, depending on the show and your point of view on these things) in a prime time show, but in a show that airs every day and that has beloved characters with decades of history behind their voices, a reliable consistent authorial sense is absolutely required. That great new spin you put on that scene is going to be the spin that tears the machine apart.

Okay, now imagine what happens when the process doesn’t run smoothly — what if an actor has an emergency and can’t show up, for example? Or what if an episode turns out too long and a B-story has to be cut — how does that affect the next day’s script? What if an actor doesn’t like a story line and requests a change? Imagine that one-script a day train coming at you!

So what should you do if this work appeals to you? After all, it is one of the few Hollywood jobs that doesn’t require you to live in Hollywood. And it does seem to provide an unusual example of job security — almost everyone I met seemed to have been there a decade or more, some much more. Well, unfortunately, daytime drama does not appear to be a growth industry. And the downside of all that job security is that there are never any openings. So it’s hard to recommend that anyone pursue this as their do-or-die gonna-make-it-in-shobiz option. But I have to say that there is something very appealing in this high-pressure high-output write it now-now-now world. I can imagine myself wanting to try it just to test my mettle — but can you write… faster?

ADDENDUM: If you follow the link on this page (over on the right–>) to the ABC/Disney writing fellowship, you will see that one of the programs that is offered there is actually specifically for daytime (soap) writing. So if this is for you, that would be the place to start!

Lunch: chicken breast and mozzarella sandwich from the studio cafeteria! TV hospital food is much better than actual hospital food.

With the help of Friend-of-the-Blog Jeff, I located and purchased the most wonderful book today, Gentle Readers. “Best Television Humor of the Year,” edited by Irving Settel. It was published in 1956 and contains long script excerpts from “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” “The Goldbergs,” “The Life of Riley,” “The Martha Raye Show” and others. All of the shows were in production at the time of publication, and there’s something wonderful about hearing, say, Milton Berle discussed in the present tense.

I’ve only started reading the scripts, and I must say they are heavy on situation and reaction and low low low on jokes. So far, the only real laugh I’ve had was at a clever stage direction. In an episode of “The Bob Cummings Show,” written by Paul Henning and Phil Shuken, there’s a bit of physical business indicated for a bit player — a model hoping to land a job. The stage direction reads:

A very beautiful and shapely model is seated near the office door waiting to be interviewed by Bob. As she hears the door open she quickly crosses her legs, pulls her dress up to jury-influencing height, and assumes a provocative pose…”

“Jury-influencing height.” I love it. Sharp, quick, knowing, subtle, and since it’s in the stage direction, clearly intended for the reader, and not the viewer of the piece. It feels very contemporary amid the rest of the script. I’ve always advocated stage-direction humor, and I think this is one of the starkest examples I’ve seen of how it can pop — not just as an opportunity for humor, but as a way to create a connection between the writer and the reader, even across decades.

Lunch: Barbeque chicken and more of those Spicy Fries from Ribs USA. Wonderful!

Okay, so my new pattern for the blog is to disappear for a long time and then come back with a post that gets something wrong while being critically snooty about people getting things wrong. And I accomplished it on my very first try!

Friend-of-the-Blog Craig Miller has directed my attention to the actual standard use of the phrase “butter wouldn’t melt in his/her mouth.” And I was totally wrong about it, although I’ve certainly heard other people be wrong as well, in different and contrasting ways. The actual use is to refer “dismissively to somebody who appears gentle or innocent while typically being the opposite.” Erm. Okay, yeah, that actually seems right, although the connection to the relative behavior of mouths and butter is obscure.

I will point out that this totally proves my point. Sometimes we’re so sure we know how language works (what with being writers and all), that we don’t double-check this stuff and then we get in trouble when our scripts meet a reader who does know what they’re doing. In fact, this makes my point so perfectly, that I suspect maybe I played it exactly this way on purpose.

So check those idioms!

Lunch: Korean bbq chicken, brown rice, kim chee and pickled radish from the food court at the Century City Mall.

You know what’s been bugging me lately? Words and phrases being used almost but not quite correctly. Sir, you mean “unkempt,” not “unkept”. “Whirlwind,” not “worldwind.” You might mean “incidents,” or you might mean “instances,” but you certainly do not mean “incidences.” And, Miss, you must mean “hot on the heels of,” not “hot OFF the heels of.” Good lord!

Oh, and if you say that someone looked as though “butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth,” you mean that they had a very cold expression, not that they looked sweet and harmless — what’s your reasoning there? That they look so benign they wouldn’t even harm butter?

The only thing wrong with feeling superior about knowing how to use these words is that each of us has a matching supply of words we’re using wrong without even knowing it.

This is yet another reason to make your friends read your scripts and give you honest and thorough feedback on issues like these. By the way, for stuff like this, you don’t even need to rely on your screenwriting friends. Try giving a copy of a script to your most literate “I only read the classics” friends. They may not have anything useful to say about space battles, but they are very likely to be the ones to tell you about the difference between “invoke” and “evoke,” “lie” and “lay,” and about that weird second “i” in liaison.

Lunch: Penne Arrabiata

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