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Let’s talk about act breaks again! Whee! I love this kind of analysis, don’t you? It’s amazing, all the little things that go into giving a show its own “feel.”

I’ve talked before about how you want to break the act at the moment of maximum tension and danger. I love breaking an act in the middle of a scene. Someone has a gun (or a romantic ultimatum) to our hero’s head and before she can do anything about it — BAM — there’s a car commercial! The audience dives for their remote to skip the commercial, and rejoins the action where it left off, all shaky with concern.

However, some shows don’t do this. There is an argument that breaking a scene in the middle gives the show a “soap opera” feel. Or that the audience feels manipulated. Or perhaps there’s just a tradition that has evolved over the years of a show — Gilmore Girls, for example, doesn’t like to break an act this way, although I never heard a reason given. It simply didn’t feel like the show. (Now that I really think about it, though, there may be a very good reason for not doing this on Gilmore Girls. The show is very much about the way things play out… the attenuation of awkward moments, the gradual realization, instead of the sudden chilling slam. To artificially punctuate those long scenes with an act break really might work against the mood of the show.)

If you’re writing a spec of an existing show, this is another reason to study your produced example scripts and do whatever they do. If you’re writing a spec pilot, you get to decide for yourself about the kinds of act breaks you want to write. Just make sure that you don’t end an act on a moment of satisfied resolution. The scene can be over, but make sure the tension is still up in the air — after all, someone can issue that romantic ultimatum and then exit, leaving our hero alone to contemplate it as we…

FADE OUT.
END OF ACT WHATEVER

Lunch: fondue and broccoli at The Grove (big L.A. shopping destination — I bought jackets.)

Remember that scene in that episode of Seinfeld where Jerry and George sat down to write their pilot? They started with the first scene and tried to figure out the first line… it was a disaster. This is not only because they had no idea and no outline and were fictional characters. It’s also possible they were starting at the wrong end.

Often, there is a scene in a script that is the reason for the whole script to exist. And it’s often toward the end. If you’re having a hard time plotting out your spec, you might find it helpful to work on the story by stepping through it backwards from that crucial scene. What would have had to have happened right before it? And right before that?

It’s harder to get off course when you’re headed back to your home than when you’re headed away from it. (By the way, I recommend getting one of those little GPS deals to have in your car. I got one for my birthday and I adore it. But that’s really unrelated to script writing.)

Lunch: soy and flax chips and strawberry lemonade all from Trader Joe’s. Theoretically healthy and very tasty!

Hey, Gentle Readers, our little blog-shaped project here got a nice shout-out from Jacob, the amazing recapper at TelevisionWithoutPity who does the masterly job with Battlestar Galactica. Thanks for the mention, Jacob! I’m a fan!

In the same recap, Jacob uses the phrase: “Everything you want, in the worst possible way.” This is an extremely important element of good storytelling, and I find myself surprised I haven’t talked about it before. Giving the audience everything they want, while stabbing them in the eyes at the same time, isn’t just a Battlestar trick, it was one of our storytelling staples at Buffy too, and it should be in your bag of tricks as well.

The classic Buffy example, of course, was giving Buffy and Angel their lovely moment of happiness. Everything the audience wanted! And then revealing that that very moment of happiness had condemned Angel to lose his precious soul. The worst possible way!

If you can find a way so that your spec culminates in a moment like this… it will be delicious. It works for (your more poignant flavors of) comedy, it works for drama… it adds a lovely angsty touch to any meal.

I’m trying to think of other effective examples I’ve seen: Sela Ward saves House’s life (Wanted!) and loses his love and trust (Worst!). Pam doesn’t marry Roy (Wanted!), but Jim’s already gone (Worst!). Orpheus gets Eurydice (Wanted!), but he turns around too soon. (Worst!) Arrgh! It hurts so good!

To do this, set up a goal. Make sure it’s clear that this goal trumps everything. Then figure out a way to fulfill that goal but at the cost of something else. Something vital. Something the gambler didn’t even know they were putting out on the table.

It’s the classic deal with the Devil, and you, the writer, get to be the Devil.

Have fun!

Lunch: turkey burger

Remember how I told you all once about how sometimes you will have the exact same idea for a script as someone else does, and that doesn’t mean that someone stole it. Even if you totally told your writing class about it or whatever?

The title of last week’s Ugly Betty: “The Lyin’, the Watch and the Wardrobe.” The title for one of our Jake in Progress episodes last season: “The Lying, The Watch and Jake’s Wardrobe.” Hee! So close and yet so clearly independently-arrived-at. If you’ve got both a watch and some clothing in an episode, it just kinda makes sense. And there’s always lying, so that’s just built in. Some ideas are just in the air.

And if you really think that someone took your idea for your spec script? Even then, you don’t have to sweat, because you’re gonna beat ’em on execution. No spec script wins a contest or an agent or a job based on the idea alone. Much more attention is given to whether or not you got the voices, the tone, all that other good stuff.

Lunch: chicken soft tacos from Del Taco. With Mr. Pibb. I have mistakenly identified this as Dr. Pepper in past posts, but Del Taco is actually only down with the Pibb.

Some terms that writers use aren’t used with great consistency. “Schmuck bait” is one of these terms. Most rooms use it, but they sometimes use it to refer to different things. The general sense, as the etymology would suggest, is to refer to something that the writer is doing to try to trick the audience… or to trick the more gullible segment of the audience anyway. To “bait” the “schmuck,” if you will.

Sometimes, tricking the audience is a good and effective trick, and in some rooms the term is used to refer to this. If you create a creepy and menacing atmosphere and you want your audience to expect a vampire attack, when instead you’ve got the vampires attacking somewhere else entirely, that might be called schmuck bait without any sense that the writer has done something inelegant… in fact, they’ve done something very effective.

Most writers, and most writers’ rooms, however, use the term to refer to an attempt to fool the audience into thinking something is going to happen which any intelligent viewer KNOWS won’t happen. If Alan Shore were on the verge of death in an episode, and you hadn’t read anything in Entertainment Weekly about Mr. Spader getting fired, then you probably shouldn’t be too worried about his survival. This kind of schmuck-baiting, you don’t want to do. (By they way, I have many friends at Boston Legal, and I assure you, they wouldn’t do such a thing. Unless they thought it was funny.)

As you write your specs, be careful about that second kind. It can be tempting to want to do a big story for a spec, but don’t try to build a lot of suspense around whether or not Dunder-Mifflin will suddenly close the Scranton office, or expect a reader to get worked up over whether or not House will take an offer from a hospital in San Francisco. ‘Taint gonna happen. (And don’t try to fix the problem by writing a spec in which… surprise… it really does happen! Now we’re back to the previously described problem of writing an atypical episode.)

Lunch: one of those Japanese rice snacks in the shape of a triangle. They’re cleverly packaged so the seaweed wrapper is kept separate until you want to use it.

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