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I love spell check. I have friends who dislike it because it atrophies our natural spelling muscles, but I say that a language as orthographically complex as English requires a bit of help. Help without shame.

The problem with spell check is that it has no way of knowing that you didn’t mean “causally”. No way to know that, in fact, you meant “casually.” Nor would it catch the mistake in the title of this post. This is why, when you have your friends read your specs and give you notes, you need to tell them that you also want to hear about typos.

Often, people don’t want to waste your time with typo corrections, and they will assume you’ll catch the errors yourself. So let them know you welcome the corrections. If you’re like me, you can read your own typo a remarkable number of times without seeing it, so don’t trust your own eyes. (My personal signature move is the omitted word. Or, as I like to call it, the omitted.)

And while we’re talking about it, really do double-check the spelling of your characters’ names — nothing looks more amateurish than a misspelled name.

And remember that, if you’re using Final Draft, spell check doesn’t work on any dialogue that is in “dual dialogue” configuration. (Jeers, Final Draft!)

Lunch: A Whopper Jr. from Burger King. Loads of mayo on that baby. Cheers, Burger King!

There’s a thing that happens that makes actors hate themselves. Sometimes, every now and then, in a big group scene, they’ll turn and look at the actor who is going to speak next. Or they’ll look at a prop the second before another actor moves to pick it up. Oh, gosh, they get so mad at themselves.

Just as actors try very hard not to let on that they actually know what’s going to happen next, we can make our characters feel similarly moment-to-moment. Look at this little made-up exchange:

MELANIE
Are you crazy? We’re gonna wait out here all night?

BARBARA
Hey, what kind of a stalker am I if I give up now?

There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s perfectly fine. But, if there’s room in your script, I’m a big fan of the following kind of exchange:

MELANIE
Are you crazy? We’re gonna wait out here all night?

BARBARA
It’s not that cold. You’ve got thin blood, dude.

MELANIE
I’m not talking about the cold! I’m saying, you’re a stalker!

BARBARA
And not a very good one if I give up now.

Barbara is missing the point of Melanie’s opening line. The writer knows what Melanie is getting at, but is letting Barbara misunderstand for a beat.

I love to have characters misunderstand each other, mishear each other, and jump to conclusions that have to be corrected or which they correct themselves at the last moment. I wrote a Buffy episode once in which Willow momentarily misunderstood some “Kiss Rocks!” graffiti as an exhortation to kiss rocks, until the real meaning clicked into place. I always thought it was neat human moment.

Characters who always grasp the situation instantly, who understand each other’s most obscure questions and who follow each other’s logical leaps aren’t behaving like the rest of us do. We can learn a little something here from our cousins the actors — make sure your character is in the moment, not looking at the coffee mug that the other actor is about to start reaching for.

Lunch: A small drink and large fries from McDonald’s. You know their fries are beef-flavored, right? Genius.

I was lucky enough recently to get to hear the writers and producers of The Colbert Report talking about what they do. Stone Phillips moderated, asking Stephen (I like to call him ‘Stephen’) and the others questions of his own and some submitted by those of us in the audience. It was absolutely fascinating. The very idea of putting together a new show four days a week is stunning to me. I know how long a half-hour can be.

But anyway, there was an answer to one of the questions that I thought you’d enjoy hearing about, Nation. Stone (I like to call him ‘Stone’) asked about what they look for in a guest. The answer was “someone with a strong opinion.” That, more than issues of subject matter or position on the political spectrum or degree of fame, is what guides their choice. It makes perfect sense. They want a guest who comes on with something to advocate, a position to argue.

It occurred to me that spec scripts are like that. A spec *pilot*, especially, is populated with people we’ve never met before. One of things that’s going to power that script is a good guest-screening policy. No one gets on that page until they’ve got a position to take.

This doesn’t have to apply to Waiter 1 in the restaurant scene, but your major characters are going to work together really well if they’ve got strong clashing opinions and a willingness to let you know about them. Battlestar Galactica is a great example of a show that seems to have an infinity of stories to tell, because every character on there has passionate beliefs, often about things as important as how best to ensure humanity’s survival. Big beliefs, big stakes.

If your spec pilot is feeling pale and wobbly, reconsider your booking policy.

Lunch: cold meat and cheese selection, white wine, fresh-baked cookie. High-class lunch.

Ever recommend something even though you know it’s probably a mistake? (Anchovies? You’ll love ’em! You don’t? Oh.) Anyway, I recently heard an interesting idea for novel way to approach writing a spec script. It’s challenging, fun, attention-getting and probably a really bad idea.

The idea is to do a crossover episode as your spec. You know what I mean — Dr. House is brought in to help the young doctors of Grey’s Anatomy with a tricky diagnosis! Or Ugly Betty’s magazine hires the lawyers from Boston Legal!

It’s a tempting notion because it cuts right through the confounding problem of spec scripts: they have to be both typical and extraordinary. How do you capture the *exact* feel of a produced episode of something, and still have the script stand out? Well, a crossover spec stands out by virtue of the concept, and gives you twice the opportunity to capture tone and voices, therefore showing off your ability to emulate. If it was done well, a script like this could be quite the showpiece.

But it would be SO HARD to do well that I just can’t recommend it. Both shows would need their own emotional arcs (probably one as A-story, the other as B-story). So both, say, Gregory House and Meredith Grey have to be emotionally affected by their contact with the opposing team of characters. And they have to be affected in ways that feel natural and even inevitable. And they have to do it in such a way so that the two arcs don’t fight each other, don’t radically affect the status quo of either show, and aren’t tonally discordant with their home show.

The idea is supposed to be that you can have guest stars who bring with them all of the beautiful baggage of established characters, but I fear that the effect will be the opposite: every single character you’re writing will feel like a guest star. And you’re likely to end up feeling like you’re directing traffic, trying to give a double-sized cast their individual moments in the spotlight. And all of those introductions? No one wants to make an audience sit through that. And how DOES one stay true to the tone of both shows, anyway?

So, I’m not recommending it. And yet… it’s worth thinking about if you’re really confident in your skills. Which shows would you combine? Is there anything themic that connects them in an interesting way? If you were *creating* a show, would you ever have put these characters together? If you think you’ve found a story worth telling, some value in crossing the series other than novelty-value, then give it a try. Because, if I understand genetics at all, one out of every ten times you manage to breed a horse and a narwhal… you get a unicorn.

Lunch: A chicken and swiss cheese sandwich, hot and melty.

I hope you guys enjoyed my Battlestar Galatica if you happened to check it out. Hope you weren’t too traumatized. There was some “Espenson brings the funny” anticipation for this that had me a bit concerned since the ep wasn’t so much, ya know, funny. But I did get to write the line “You’ve got goo in your hair” which I find hilarious in a Cylon context. Anyway, I’m just as proud as a proud thing to have been involved with that show, so… Thank You Ron! Whooo!

All right, back to our business at hand, the business of writing spec scripts. Here is more of what I learned at the round-table discussion at the Writers’ Guild. The question on the table is about the dramatic build of your script. It’s all right, isn’t it, to let the script start out slow, setting things up for a big finish where everything pays off in a big meticulously conceived action/comedy sequence. Right?

Turns out, you’ve got fifteen pages. If you haven’t gripped the agent, executive, or whomever in those fifteen pages, they’re not going to bother finishing the script. There is nothing requiring anyone to whom you send your script to read the *whole* script. So you’ve got to work hard to keep them turning pages. The 15-page cut-off is one person’s yardstick by the way, others will give you more or, often, less — maybe even just the Teaser. It’s not that they don’t want to like your script, they do want to. But if they don’t like it right away, the thing they want more than anything else is to pick up the next one on the stack, hoping that *this* one is the winner. And then there’s one on the stack beneath that…

Now, that isn’t to say you can let everything fall apart in the second half of your script. You still have to bring it on home. But pay special attention to the opening. If you’re writing a spec pilot, consider all the different ways to introduce your characters — if you just start with them waking up in the morning, well, it’s classic, but you might want to see if you can find some other situation, some image, that tells us who they are right off the bat. If you’re writing an existing show, think of all the episodes produced so far — which one had the best opening? Is yours as good as that? As gripping? As tantalizing? Is there any way to start in the middle of some action? Consider playing with the time line of your episode to bring action to the front. If your show has jokes, pay special attention to the early ones, they’re going to set your reader’s expectations for what you’re capable of.

Fifteen pages. Count ’em off and look at ’em. Make ’em sing.

Lunch: leftover cucumber salad and edamame from last night’s sushi dinner. Even better than when they were fresh.

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