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Speaking of “Band Candy”… we were, right? Speaking of “Band Candy,” there’s a line in that script that illustrates a tricky little mistake that you can avoid if you’re careful. I was writing a line about how the strange occurrences around town had the “Hellmouth’s fingerprints all over them,” when I realized that the line was nonsensical in an interesting way… the fingerprints of a mouth? Wouldn’t those be “mouthprints”? So I threw in some line with the word “mouthprint” in it — not as a real joke, but just as a bit of whimsical wording.

The problem with the line is, of course, that in an episode filled with characters wrapping their lips around delicious melty chocolate bars, the word “mouthprint” SOUNDS LIKE it’s related to that. Which it isn’t. The result is confusion, muddiness.

Believe it or not, this situation comes up all the time. You have someone, quite incidentally, order a hamburger right next to a joke about how a man is devouring a girl with his eyes as if she were steak. A character makes a drug reference in a drug store. A character named “Mr. Fox” orders chicken, and you meant nothing by it. A joke about a “Southern Belle” occurs right before someone rings a bell.

The effect is similar to having one character call another one a “big baby” while an actual large baby is visible in the background of the scene. The audience is gonna try to connect the two things. They’re going to get confused and distracted. Throw out the baby and the bathwater it rode in on.

So be really clear with yourself about which connections you want, and which you don’t, and then be ruthless in making sure that you don’t have any strange overlaps like this. Change the joke, change a name, move a scene to a different location. Clarity is your friend.

Lunch: More Vietnamese food! Pho and fizzy lemonade.

Such a delightful letter just arrived from Alex in Texas! He tells me he watched my “Band Candy” episode of Buffy when he was eleven. Surely a typo. Eleven?! Is that even possible? I’ll just be shuffling off to my hip replacement surgery now.

Anyway, Alex (who writes his letter in script format, hilariously), asks a number of good questions. I’m going to address one of them here. He has clearly followed my advice and procured himself a number of actual produced scripts, which has him wondering if his spec script should include the Cast List and Set List pages that you find in produced scripts. Nope. It should not. Just a title page and then into the script, please. If you’re writing a spec pilot you will occasionally find someone who includes a page with an evocative quote to introduce the series, as you might include at the beginning of a novel, but I would tend to discourage this too. It smells pretentious to me.

The only thing non-standard that I might actually encourage is to include your last name as part of the header that runs across the top of every page. So it would look something like this:

Fabulous Girls – “Pilot” – Espenson [page #]

I suggest this just because you’re writing specs to get your name out there, so why not give everyone the maximal chance to see your name?

Thanks for the letter, Alex! It made me laugh! Great work! I wish I had advice about agents, contests, etc, but all I can do is suggest persistence and research and wish you good luck! There must be someone out there with a lovely and complete list of spec script contests, but I’m afraid it isn’t me. And the agent sitch — well, I can only say I hope it opens up again soon, because getting agents to read new writers right now is difficult. And yet… every year I go to a new job, and there is usually a writer there who is reporting to their very first job. So it happens. It can happen for you.

Lunch: Vietnamese food — rice noodles with pork and shrimp and that devastating sweet sauce. Fizzy lemonade.

Oh my. I have been busy. I’ve been on set, my friends, watching the shooting of Andy Barker, PI. Fun! Hanging out with Andy Richter? I’ll say it again — fun. This is going to be a great show, people.

And I picked up a neat tip. When it’s very late and very cold, and they bring the hot foil-wrapped burritos around… get an extra one just to tuck against your belly under your coat. It’s like a hot water bottle only with beans. Delightful!

By the way, those of you who live in Southern California, or who happen to find yourselves in an area where a show or movie is being shot, might enjoy doing a little work as an extra.

****CORRECTION: This is not an invite to be an extra on Andy Barker — this is just a mention of the idea of extra-hood in general. Yikes — I should, like, read these things before I post them, huh? *******

Before I got started writing, I signed up with an agency in San Francisco that supplied extras for movies shooting locally. You can completely not see me in “The Doors” for example. I’m also entirely not visible in a television movie about Patty Hearst. It’s fun to get a bit of exposure to the filming process, if you haven’t had a chance to see it in person before. And it might give you a bit of the sense of what it’s like for the writer/producers, watching a scene as it’s shot and trying to figure out, on the fly, how to make it work better.

Which brings me to this. You know that little moment in your script that sort of *bumps* you every time you read it, because there’s something a little off about it, but the moment before it’s so good and the moment after it’s so good, and you can’t really figure out another way to get from one to the other? Well, imagine watching it being filmed, watching that bumpy moment over and over again, watching actors trying to make it work, discussing it with the director… bleahh. Fix it now! Even though you’re writing spec scripts, I think it’s still helpful to imagine *every moment* of your script getting loving attention from a whole lot of professionals. At the very least, doing this can raise your subconscious concerns about your script to the conscious level, where you can fret about them!

Lunch: chicken meatballs, salad and steamed veggies, wheeled out onto the golf course where we were shooting. Fun!

Having friends who are willing and able to give you notes on your scripts is a hugely valuable thing. Especially if they’re good at it. But there is a certain note that you should be very careful of. The “more like this” note. Sometimes someone will say “I love it every time Character A insults Character B. Put in more of that.” Or “All your action stuff is so great. I wish there was more.”

It’s really tempting, of course, to go chasing that praise and to add more of the thing they like. And sometimes it’s a good idea. But lots of times, the reason they love the insults, or the action, or whatever, so much is because there’s exactly the right amount of it.

It’s like cheesecake. You don’t know you’ve had enough until you’ve had too much.

This is one reason to keep some fresh eyes in your stable of friends-who-can-give-notes. If you’ve plumped up some part of the script in response to requests, the people who requested more aren’t going to be likely to read the rewrite and say, “Oh. You were right. Now there’s too much.” They’ve got a bit of ego invested in the note now. So a fresh reader is going to be really helpful. “Gahh!” they may say, “Too much cheesecake!”

Lunch: a tuna sandwich from the gas station. It sounds bad, I know, but it’s a really good gas station.

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