JaneEspenson.com

First off, I am told that some of you out there are finding yourself in the gratifying but agonizing position of being finalists in the ABC Writing Fellowships, and being forced to wait over the holiday to find out if you’ve actually made it in or not. Well, congratulations-slash-courage! I’m rooting for all of you! You’re one step closer to making it in!

Which — sort of — leads us to a question from Reader Kris, who asks about something I rarely talk about, which is the Next Step. Kris asks, “Say you’ve got the perfect spec, you’ve got a great agent/manager, now comes the interview with the show runner/EP…what do you say or do to get the writing gig on their staff?”

This hypothetical young writer has got a great agent/manager?! Wow. That’s actually the much harder step right now. But let’s go with it.

The first thing is not to overstress. If your material made the show runner want to bring you in, then he or she is already impressed. Often these meetings are simply to make sure you show up wearing pants. A show runner doesn’t want a disruptive personality in the room, a person with a crazy vibe or a non-stop talker, someone with a confrontational attitude — that kind of stuff. So just show up on time and be sane. That’s most of it.

You’ll also be asked how you got into TV writing, so you might want to practice your story. You’ll have to tell it your whole career, so it pays to have it nice and shiny anyway. If you have an interesting background, this could be your chance to bring it up.

You can also help by knowing the show and knowing the show runner’s work history. Mention what you like about the show. Don’t mention what you don’t like. If it’s a terrible show and you’re asked what you like about it, it’s not a trick question. Find something to like. Something about the writing, not the acting, casting or costume design. (By the way, only ONCE in my career at one of these meetings, have I been asked to name something I *didn’t* like about a pilot. It was this last season, and my mind went totally blank.)

Reread your own spec before you go into the meeting, too, because it’ll probably be discussed, and you might be asked about choices you made. If you’re given advice about changes to make to it, thank them and say you’ll change it, even if you disagree and aren’t going to do any such thing.

If it’s a comedy meeting, it can help to be funny but it isn’t necessary. It’s better to be not funny while NOT attempting a joke than to be not funny while attempting one. They’ve seen your joke-writing in your spec, so it’s not like you’re coming in cold.

Don’t sell yourself too hard. The job you’re going for is “staff writer,” so the show runner doesn’t need to hear about what your vision for his show is, although you can certainly weigh in with opinions *if asked*. But in general, just be alert, friendly, and, remember, pants-wearing.

And if you don’t get the job? That’s often a matter of budget-failure, not you-failure. Shows staff from the top down — hiring the top-level producers, then lower and lower… it’s very common these days for a show simply not to staff at the lowest levels because they’ve spent all their money. So don’t assume you did anything wrong. In fact, you probably just impressed someone who will remember you next time ’round.

Also, THANK YOU, gentle readers, for your holiday greetings! Thanks to Claire for the hieroglyph card, which I’m still translating, to Lilia for the book, to Ingrid for the candy… to everyone for your cards! Gosh, guys, you’re the best!!

Have a happy and safe New Year’s Eve!

Lunch: Very bad fried chicken strips at DuPars (a genuinely retro, not self-consciously retro, diner). They were followed by gooseberry pie, so all was well.

I once saw a well-dressed man, faced with a sudden downpour, press the button on his expensive high-tech umbrella… which instantly detached from the handle entirely and shot an impressive ten feet down the sidewalk in front of him like a crazed bat making its escape. It really was delightful.

Loss of dignity is hilarious.

The most obvious way to use this fact is to add comedy to a scene. There’s a great scene in a Will and Grace episode in which two people have a pretty serious conversation about emotional infidelity while dancing The Chicken Dance. If you’ve got a scene that you want to leaven with comedy without having the characters crack jokes, this is a really good way to go about it. Give them something undignified to do, or an undignified place to be. Let them have that heart-to-heart on a carnival ride, or while sitting in very small chairs in an elementary school, or while dangling from a cliff-face in groin-pinching harnesses, pathetically awaiting rescue.

Removing dignity is comedic. But the fact that something dignified is made laughable… well, we all know that that can be tragic, too. The kind of humor I’ve been talking about is just a few degrees skewed from poignancy, a point well understood by anyone who’s ever had the misfortune to get very angry while wearing a chipmunk costume. It’s funny if you’re not the chipmunk, it’s terrible if you are.

A sad girl is all the sadder if she’s also playing Twister — a fact that can be played for comedy *or* drama. In other words, drama writers, don’t assume that having your couple break up on the wind-swept beach is going to be more powerful than the famous Buffy-Angel break-up which was all the more horrific for taking place in the sewer.

It’s easy to get lost in the dialogue of a scene, to think of the scene as being simply the words that are said. But think about the location and the business of the scene as well. A little incongruity might be just what the scene needs.

Lunch: Vietnamese food — pork and shrimp and noodles with that amazing sweet sauce

Ever get into a sentence and then realize that you’ve gone down a road that makes it grammatically ungettable… out.. of? This happens all the time when we’re talking. Sometimes we start over, but sometimes we do what I did there, and just keep going. It happens when we’re writing too, but then the tendency is to go back and adjust the sentence structure to avoid the problem.

When you’re writing dialogue, it’s almost always better to do what you’d do when speaking, not what you’d normally do when writing. If I get in a grammatical tangle, I usually leave it there. Recently I wrote a line — an urgent, frantic line, that started: “He’s pissed now, and if we do the wrong thing he’s gonna get even…”. I didn’t even consider “more pissed.” The only way to end that line was “pisseder”. And I resisted the temptation to have another character comment on it. It’s an urgent moment; people would let it go. I really like how it turned out — it ups the funny quotient and the urgency quotient at the same time.

Writing dialogue should feel a bit like taking dictation from the same part of your brain that comes up with what you actually say all day long. If it gets tangled up, let it. If it hesitates, put in an “um”. If it stumbles to a halt and trails off, well that’s what ….s are for. You can massage it all later, take out all the stuff that makes normal speech so totally unlistenable… to. But the work of making dialogue sound natural gets easier if you let it come out of your brain that way.

Lunch: bagel and cream cheese with a black cherry soda at Factor’s deli. I wanted a baked apple, but they didn’t have any today.

So… I was watching a Monkees episode on DVD just now. Because I can, that’s why.

The first line of the episode was:

DAVY
This is ridiculous, to come down here just because we read in the paper they may hold an embassy ball.

No, what’s ridiculous is to try to put that much information in the first line of a scene. You’re asking little Davy Jones to do an awful lot of heavy lifting with a line like that. Exposition is often called “pipe,” and this particular line could plumb an apartment building.

Watch out for stuff like this. There’s a temptation to try to set the scene quickly, and it’s amazing how easy it is to put everything right up at the front of an episode, or the front of a scene. If you find yourself writing lines that start with, “I can’t believe we’re…” or, even worse, “Tell me again why we’re…” then you’re in dangerous territory.

Lunch: Spicy tuna roll from Famima, one of those cute little import shops.

Sometimes there’s something in your script that doesn’t *quite* stand up to logical questioning. Why didn’t the villain shoot the hero on the spot? Why didn’t the crew beam the alien directly into a holding cell? Why didn’t they rig that door, hide the treasure, have the pivotal conversation in the cab on the way home? In general, of course, you want to avoid stuff like this.

But…

The first priority is telling the emotional story. If there’s a little “buy” that the audience has to make in the logic of the piece, it’s often fine to simply allow it. Show runners, when they notice one of these little logic bumps, tend to turn to their staffs and ask: “Is the audience asking the question?” Sometimes the staff will decide they are. But often, it’s pretty clear, they are not. If they’re hooked into the bigger stakes, they’re along for the ride and they’re not asking why the hero’s wife seems to know where he is when we never actually saw her get that information — or whatever the issue is.

If there’s no cost to patching the logic, of course, do it. A spec script is your chance to present something that’s as close to perfect as it can be, and sloppy logic isn’t ideal. If it can be fixed without long labored dialogue or damage to the emotional arc, do it.

And if you can’t fix it, sometimes you can get good results by simply acknowledging the problem. This is called “hanging a lantern” on the problem. By this I mean something like having a character say, “Damn, we should’ve beamed him right into a holding cell!” This will at least let the audience feel that the issue has been addressed. I love this solution myself because it often adds a humorous – and human – moment right when you need one.

And then there’s the fudge. You know how that goes. It’s a sort of half-fix that seems to address the problem unless you look at it too closely. Have a henchman working in a way that seems to run counter to his boss’s plan? Well… the henchman misunderstood the plan. Sure. Good enough.

You’ll have to decide, of course, on a case-by-case basis, whether a logic problem needs to be eliminated, acknowledged, fudged or ignored, but it’s worth noting that those are all valid options. You don’t have to be on a water-tight ship to get where you’re going if you don’t mind getting a little bit damp.

Lunch: warm fresh-baked cornbread with butter and honey, and grapefruit picked fresh off the tree.

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