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I was just talking yesterday with friend-of-the-blog Alisa about Scott McCloud’s fine book Understanding Comics, and then today I come across this. (This is the Kevin Kelly site, which I reached through Boing Boing) The excerpts are from McCloud’s new book, Making Comics. Scroll down. The illustration that blows me away is the one where he illustrates how faces displaying simple emotions can be combined to create faces displaying complex emotions. Look at the math of it! It’s beautiful. And somehow shockingly true. Just knowing that a fear face and joy face create a desperation face… yes! Yes, of course they do! And anger + joy = cruelty. Yes! My only disagreement would be with joy + sadness, which creates an expression he calls “faint hope” but which I would call “brave front.” Maybe it’s a matter of the recipe: two parts joy to one part sadness or vice versa.

I’m not even sure what this has to do with writing for television. But it’s making my writing cords vibrate, so it must in some way. I’m certainly struck by the way the complex faces make me want to write dialogue. McCloud clearly has the same instinct — disgust + surprise = “you *ate* it?!” Sounds about right.

I think what I’m struck by is how some of the ingredients in complex emotions had escaped my conscious awareness. The ones with ‘joy’ in them seem to particularly capture the imagination. The joy that’s part of cruelty… and the one captioned “Eww” — disgust + joy… I feel like I’ve just learned something about human nature, you know?

I’m also left wondering about emotions that aren’t here — smugness, for example. Is it maybe joy + anger, just like cruelty, but with more joy and less anger? Hmm. Or is this all way too reductive? Human emotions can’t simply be reduced to formulae better suited for combining Jelly Belly flavors. But it sure serves as a nice springboard for thinking about feelings.

Even a static scene of two people talking about their life philosophies can be fascinating if you track the emotions of the characters. I don’t know, but I feel maybe like now I’m a little more attuned to what that means.

I think we should all run over to Amazon and buy this book. We’re all there buying Prisoner of Trebekistan anyway, right?

Lunch: scrambled eggs with salsa and tortillas

We were talking about action sequences, in answer to a question from Karen in Virginia. And I promised to tell you a little about writing action on some of my more recent non-Buffy shows. So here goes:

On Battlestar, I was confronted with something different than Buffy. Space-adventure type action, with CGI effects. Turns out, it didn’t really make any difference. Just like at Buffy, it was all about picturing it first, then writing it. And, as always, just as it is when writing spec scripts, the secret is to study the produced scripts. I studied how the ‘real’ Battlestar writers wrote the action stuff, and then made mine sound like theirs. Very lean and spare, just like they do it.

It’s probably worth noting that I still left the action stuff for last, but this is for different reasons than it used to be. I used to dread it, and leave it for last in the hope that the script elves (Tinker, Polish and Tweak) would take care of it for me. Now I leave it for last because the emotions in action sequences tend to be really straight-forward, so I can just skip over them while writing, without any fear that something subtle will happen in the scene that will affect the emotions in the next scene. These scenes get left for last because they’re the least important, not the most feared.

And that, really, leads up to the only trick-of-the-trade that really matters for writing action, now that I think about it: confidence, writing without fear. Action is just all about making a decision. This will happen, then that will happen. She’ll kick him first, or the Viper will be hit from the left. You can’t be vague with this stuff, so commit.

This became really clear when I got to write an action sequence for my latest project. On Andy Barker, PI, the Andy Richter half-comedy I’m working on now, my script required an unusually long action sequence in which Andy grapples with an attacker. Since I had more experience writing action than the other writers (who have spent their writing years becoming far far funnier than me), I tackled the sequence with more confidence than I usually do. And I love how it turned out — I used the props well, came up with cool little moves. I just generally wrote my little heart out. Confidence, I recommend it! And it should be easy to be confident about your action-writing skills since the greatest action-writing skill IS confidence. It’s a moebius strip of self-bolstering rationalization! Hop on!

Lunch: Chinese BBQ pork and noodle soup from Noodle Planet. Mmm.

I got a lovely letter recently from Karen in Virgina, asking about writing action sequences. She asks me to compare writing action for Buffy versus for Battlestar Galatica and if I “…have any tricks-of-the-trade for mapping an action scene?”

Ooh, thanks, Karen. This is an interesting area. When I started at Buffy, I was totally stumped by the action sequences. My favorite fall-back phrase was “Buffy responds with a flurry of kicks and punches.” I had the right instinct, to use figurative language (“flurry”) when I needed to convey the general effect I wanted, but I didn’t have anything specific in mind to back it up.

I quickly realized that I needed to come up with more than that. I don’t think I ever brought the imagination to these sequences that some of the other writers did — Doug Petrie, in particular, lived for this stuff. But I did get better at, for example, thinking about the props that a given set might furnish that could be used in a fight. Remember in “A New Man”? Buffy fights Monster Giles in a hotel room, using the little folding luggage stand.

And I got to where, instead of freezing up and trying to bluff my way through an action sequence, I would instead lie down and close my eyes and seriously try to visualize it. And I’d go and look at the set if it existed. (A wonderful option that eludes spec writers unless you’re good at sneaking onto studio lots, which I cannot recommend.) But I still found it helpful to sometimes make the descriptions more evocative than literal. This is from my second draft for “Harsh Light of Day,” when Buffy is fighting Spike:

Buffy slams him, a powerhouse punch. He’s back up like one of those pop-up clowns…

Later on, as the scene continues, the action gets more precise. I’m eliding the dialogue here, for the sake of space:

Buffy deflects the pipe again, the impact jarring.
/Spike taunts/
She throws a kick, he rejects it with the pipe.
/Spike taunts/
The pipe swings down again, connecting with her arm.
/Spike taunts/
He’s bringing the pipe up for another blow.
/Spike taunts/
He just went a bridge too far. When he swings again, she ducks it and comes up under him, throwing him down on his back. The pipe goes flying, hitting [unconscious] Xander again, who moans. Buffy jumps and lands on Spike, pinning his arms down with her knees, pressing his head into the ground with one hand, twisting his neck. He bucks, but she’s pulling at the ring.
/dialogue/
Audibly breaking a finger in the process, she gets the ring. Spike ROARS in pain and bucks again, in panic, knocking her off. He scrambles up and away, starting to SMOKE and SIZZLE in the sunlight. He drops into an open manhole and is gone. Buffy sinks to the ground, exhausted. But she holds the ring.

You see I’m still relying a lot on the stunt team to come up with glitzier moves than my description really provides, but there are a few nice touches, like the pipe hitting Xander, and the audible finger break. I was getting better at it, anyway.

And I had picked up a few tricks of the trade beyond just searching for usable props: Get your hero in a very bad, almost defeated position right before they rally. And wrap up the action quickly after it’s clear who has won. (No need to kick Spike’s butt all the way home, for example. Just down the manhole and he’s gone.)

Next time: I’ll continue, with tales of action on Battlestar and… Andy Richter Engages in Fisticuffs!

Lunch: Something called “fig cake with chocolate” from that same import grocery where I got yesterday’s sandwich. Compressed fig with teensy little chocolate chips. Teensy chocolate chips should totally be a Newton option.

I have just finished reading the oddest little novel. “As She Climbed Across the Table” by Jonathan Lethem. It’s a nifty little scifi/philosophy/humor/physics love story. You know the kind.

I want to call your attention to the following character introduction: “Georges De Tooth was our resident deconstructionist, a tiny, horse-faced man who dressed in impeccable pinstriped suits, spoke in a feigned poly-European accent, and wore an overlarge, ill-fitting, white-blond wig.” Holy cow. Talk about painting a picture. What I love about this description is that other than the information about field of study, all these things are observable. And yet, they tell you so much about his nontangible qualities.

This man clearly cares deeply about appearances, about hiding his true self. But he also isn’t interested in appearing especially normal. He wants to wear a metaphorical mask, but an unconventional one. And, since the accent is apparently transparent, and the wig is ill-fitting, this man, who is all about the masking, clearly isn’t very good at it. Even before he speaks, I expect him to be pedantic, defensive and self-consciously outrageous in his opinions. But how cool is it that I never had to read any of those words? (I do wish, however, that I knew how the wig was styled. I keep imagining a page boy, but I don’t know. I feel like it would help me understand Georges even better. Don’t you think?)

So I’ve started to think about how details in a character description can be better than piling on the abstract adjectives. A breathless woman in high-top sneakers, a twitchy boy with his shirt buttoned all the way up, an old man with a bandaged ear, a girl who giggles and tugs her sleeves over her hands, a college boy with hair over his eyes, a man with a thin smile and James Bonds’ wardrobe… all these details make us start inferring things about the characters, without ever having to write words like “nervous,” “dangerous” or “shy.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, because I’m writing a pilot. Those of you writing spec pilots are probably thinking about it, too. How much should we describe these new characters were creating?

Out of curiosity, I looked at the Twin Peaks pilot script. Some amazing characters were born there after all, I was curious about how they were introduced. I found that some were barely described at all. The series lead is merely:

FBI field agent DALE COOPER, mid-thirties, handsome in an unremarkable way.

Or course, he immediately begins talking into his tape recorder, making his character unique instantly through dialogue. Other characters are given more of a picture:

JAMES HURLEY, a handsome, clean-cut young man with intelligent eyes, in a black leather jacket, seated in the back corner, his motorcycle boots up on the back of the chair in front of him.

GIOVANNA PACKARD, wearing a coat over a brocade bathrobe, her beautiful hair and make-up in stark contrast to the harsh surroundings…

and

AUDREY HORNE, a delicate, Botticelli-like beauty, with a halo of wavy black hair and dark, haunted eyes.

Look at the last one. When you look at the literal meaning of this apparently physical description, all he’s really saying is that he hopes to cast a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl. But the poetry of the description tells the reader a lot more than that. Does she sound peppy or languid? Vapid or deep?

Scripts are a unique form of literature. Even a spec script has to behave as if the roles in it will be inhabited by actors. So you can’t create every mole on their shin, as a novelist can. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find clever, poetic, visual ways to start building their personalities in the readers’ minds. I’m going to try it in my pilot. You can give it a try in yours, too.

Lunch: A veggie sandwich on a crusty Italian roll from Bay Cities Imports in Santa Monica. Wonderful!

One of the ways in which linguists gather data about language is to ask speakers of a language whether or not they would ever produce a given utterance. Would you ever, for example, say a sentence with this form: “Beans, I like.” Or “Him, I’d vote for.” Sometimes people will say that, no, they would never do that, put the object of the sentence at the front like that.

And then you listen to them and hear them produce sentences exactly like that. It happens all the time. This phenomenon, I totally love. It turns out that the part of our brain that produces sentences is completely different than the part that evaluates them. Seems like a bad set-up, but what are you gonna do?

I think something similar happens with scripts. I’ve seen the most critical of viewers produce scripts that would never meet their own viewing standards in some very basic ways.

Here’s the most common way in which I’ve seen this happen. Suppose you were watching a show in which someone overhears some vague planning going on. They’re certain that what they’re hearing is a plan for a surprise birthday party for themselves, although they didn’t hear their own name. Do you, as a viewer — or as a reader — believe that this person has made the correct inference? I don’t think you do.

The reader will be way ahead of the writer of such a script. Just as the writer would be if HE were the reader, instead of the writer. But somehow, it’s very easy to write things like this — to somehow assume that the script is going to be read in 1955, when tv plot twists were new. I’ve seen seasoned staffs do the same thing. It’s bizarre.

It has to be the brain thing. I think sometimes we read our own material with the part of the brain that wrote it, when we should turn on the evaluation part. Don’t collaborate with your creative mind’s desire that the reader approach the script all blank, trusting and without any interest in anticipating where the story is going. Read with your crafty, suspicious, “televisionwithoutpity.com” critical viewer brain instead. If you fool IT, then you’ve got something. This I vow.

Lunch: The chicken and cheese omelet with a waffle, from Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles.

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