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I’m in terrible rush today, gentle readers. So I only have time for a brief post. I’ve decided to present you with a brief list of interesting parentheticals. Sometimes you can do things with these that you might not have thought of.

(for the thousandth time)
(in Swahili)
(mouth full)
(between coughs)
(distractedly)
(suddenly working class)
(feigning obliviousness)
(secretly fuming)
(bitter)
(bitter yet fighting it)
(lying)
(around a swollen tongue)

Neat and compact, these can to do the work of great globs of stage direction. And these don’t even include the ones that are little cheats like (while opening the envelope), in which genuine action is brought into a line.

Lunch: a “Sassy Garden Avocado Sandwich.” More cucumber than avocado, but still good.

Here’s a little riddle for you: How is Desperate Housewives like The Love Boat? Well, until Ted McGinley is added to the DH cast in season eight, the best answer I have is that they share an interesting writing peculiarity — the stories are divided among the writers by thread instead of by act.

Sometimes a writing staff splits up episodes and writes them as piecework. This is very common on comedies, but often happens on dramas as well. The name that appears on screen as the author of the episode may or may not indicate something meaningful about the contribution made by a particular writer. Now, obviously, one can imagine different strategies for splitting one script’s worth of writing among a milling and embittered clump of writers. One common way is to assign continuous chunks of the script. Usually this is done by acts, but sometimes it’s more like: “I’ll take act one up to but not including the least scene. He’ll take from that scene up to the middle of act two, then…” The other way, which I call the Love Boat way, is to give a writer responsibility for one of the story lines all the way through. (On the original Love Boat, the episodes were actually credited this way, with the different story lines each having titles and the writers of each identified in the opening credits.) This is how Desperate Housewives apportions the work.

The Love Boat method, of course, only works under very special circumstances. It requires that the stories be fairly separate. A few scenes in which the threads overlap and influence each other — that can be worked out, but if the story lines are very dependent on each other, things will quickly get difficult. The method also requires additional writing to smooth out the transitions in and out of scenes and figure out those scenes that are influenced by more than one thread and do whatever else is needed to unify the whole.

On Buffy, we used this method exactly once that I recall. For an episode named “Conversations with Dead People.” The episode had an atypically modular structure. The episode named “Life Serial” was also split up by thread, but since each act was a separate thread, it actually was also an example of the other method as well.

Usually, if we needed to split an episode, we did it by acts. This method allows the writers more control over their own transitions, but it also requires a very good outline. No one wants to sit down and write Act Four if they’re not entirely sure what led to this point. Even given an outline, it’s always amusing to read that first assembled draft in which the output of different writers is just slapped together. There will always be exposition that is covered two or three times, and sometimes, interestingly, the same joke will appear more than once. Again, more writing is required at this point, to sand down the joints where the splinters stick up, and to make it all read like a genuine whole.

By the way, I think there’s a lesson in the Love Boat method for those of you writing specs. Sometimes, instead of writing your script straight through, you might want to power through all the segments of your script that relate to one thread. There is something to be said for the mental focus you get when you tackle a single thread from beginning to end. Maybe you’ll find it exciting and new!

Lunch: the sirloin and cheese ciabatta sandwich and jalapeno poppers at Jack in the Box. Wonderful.

I was sitting here writing just now — working away on my pilot script — and I had a little epiphany. A very small one. Just a ‘phany really. Something I’d known and employed forever, but had never really thought consciously about. But it’s true and it’s important and it clarifies some stuff you’re probably already doing instinctively when writing dialogue. So I thought I’d sneak on over here and whisper it to you guys.

People get inarticulate when they have to tell the truth.

I don’t mean all truths. I mean here the kind of truth that either makes the speaker vulnerable, like a proclamation of love, or the kind that has the potential to hurt the listener, like a retraction of a proclamation of love.

This has two consequences. Number one, it should make you write hesitations, false starts and circumlocutions in moments like these . Number two, it means that a reader or a viewer, encountering a character engaging in hesitations, false starts and circumlocutions KNOWS that a truth is at hand. Even if she doesn’t yet know what it is. You can use this to create suspense.

CHARACTER 1
Why did you want to see me?

CHARACTER 2
Oh. Right. You… There was this thing you did earlier… And I just wanted… Um, do you want to sit down?…

And, of course, one natural reaction to suddenly finding oneself inarticulate is to push too hard to get through it. And then you get the blurt. Also effective, and also all wrapped up with the truth. You don’t blurt a lie. (Unless you’re a really good liar who is turning the above principal to your own advantage by feigning a spontaneous blurt.)

Truth implies tongue-tied. Tongue-tied implies truth. Only the liar is glib.

Lunch: Chinese chicken salad and edamame at Universal

First off, a big “thank you!” to everyone who has written to say they have read and loved Bob Harris’s “Prisoner of Trebekistan.” The general consensus seems to be that it’s a book that gets read in one sitting. Not because it’s that short, but because it’s that suspenseful. Click here, and you can stay up riveted all night, too!

Moving on, can you stand another spoiler from The Office? This is from the latest episode. Here’s the exchange (this is from memory, so it might not be exact.):

MICHAEL
I watched Oprah today. And… I’m going to be a father.

PAM
(long beat, then)
What was Oprah about?

This is one of those wonderful moments with two punchlines in a row. Sitcom writing is often characterized as being all “set-up, punch, set-up, punch.” But sometimes, it’s “punch, punch…” And that’s a beautiful thing.

And this example also illustrates that the resulting effect doesn’t have to be “jokey” or unreal. In fact, you could make the case that the best, most natural way to get funny line following funny line WITHOUT any set-up, is when the comedy comes out of character, as it does here. Michael’s self-importance and Pam’s sensible mind and appalled tact fuel these lines, so they’re totally natural, and not at all forced or jokey. To say it another way, writing lines that come uniquely out of character eliminates the need for a lot of set-up, allowing funny to follow immediately upon funny.

Note that the example also illustrates a perfect use of a “beat” – I have no way of knowing what was indicated in the script, but I called it a “long beat” in my transcription. Not only is the beat necessary for the funny, but, within reason, the longer the beat, the funnier, since it’s that elapsed time that allows us to imagine the mental work that Pam is doing, trying to figure out what Michael could possibly mean. Writing teachers may caution against “directing” in your script writing, but in a case like this, it’s crucial. The “beat” tells us everything about the nature of the interaction.

Lunch: “Rajma Masala” — that MRE-style Indian food I like, over spaghetti

The mission statement for this blog is to talk about the writing of spec scripts. But, fairly frequently, I meet people who don’t write at all, but who read because they’re simply interested in the process of writing for television. Hi, non-writers! Welcome! And, I suppose, you writers might also sometimes be interested in knowing something about the process beyond the spec script part.

Which leads us to a cluster of questions sent in by gentle reader Jason in Tennessee. He’s a Buffy/Angel fan, intrigued by the shows’ complex mythology. Take it, Jason!

“I’m curious about the way a mythology is developed — is it planned out at the beginning of a series by one person, or is it built slowly by several writers? Where does a seasonal arc come from, how is it broken up from episode to episode, and what sort of flexibility do writers have for including pieces of overall seasonal development into their own individual, stand-along episode?”

He goes on to ask “how the demands posed by outside forces (network politics, sponsorship, special effects, budgets, guest directors, etc.) impact the writers, and also the integrity of the show’s seasonal story arc.”

Holy cow, Jason. That’s a lot of questions. The answers, unfortunately, tend to vary wildly from show to show, so it’s going to be hard to be coherent here. Let me try.

The mythology of a show sets out the rules of the world and how the main characters fit into it. The basics of the mythology are actually part of the initial pitch when a writer is trying to sell a series to a network. So, yes, that is generally the work of one writer — the show’s creator. Of course, that creator will have had help and input from all sorts of places, including his or her friends, fellow writers and certainly from studio or network execs.

And, as you might expect, the mythology as initially devised doesn’t cover enough to take a show though many seasons without being augmented, altered and affected, as you point out, by outside forces. So the writers have to be a bit flexible. And sometimes of course, they have to ask for an audience’s indulgence. Androids don’t age, so please ignore our actor’s subtle wrinkling. Or, we know we had Frasier say his father was dead, but now he’s not, so… um… I guess he lied before?

Seasonal arcs, the continuing story lines that shape a season of a show are sometimes developed seasons in advance, but usually are planned during the first meetings of a show’s staff at the beginning of the writing year. They might be developed committee-style, or they might be decreed by the show runner. Sometimes arcs are sketched out separately for a number of main characters (Desperate Housewives, clearly, has this). And some shows, undoubtedly, don’t even have the arc planned, but rather let it develop. So I’m afraid there’s just no one answer to this one either.

But let’s imagine we have a seasonal arc in place. It doesn’t, obviously, come broken into 22 different segments. So, as the staff works together to “break” (i.e. devise a rough outline), for each episode, they have to figure out how, how much, and if, they are going to advance the arc in any particular episode. Since a writer is never sent out to write an episode until they have an outline, no individual staff writer really ever has to decide during the writing of an episode if they’re going to advance the arc or not. That’s already been determined during the break. But, again, there is variation here between shows — some allow writers more or less autonomy in making changes during the writing process. One show I know allows writers so much autonomy that an individual with a brainstorm could end up changing the whole season arc — you know, if the show runner liked what they did and didn’t send them back to change it. Other shows are very rigid.

Finally, we reach the question about outside forces. Again, it just serves to underline the need for flexibility in questions of this kind. Many a staff has laid out a season arc and started writing scripts only to discover that an actor is pregnant, quitting or untalented enough that they need to simplify some emotions. Or perhaps the network vetoes a choice. Or issues of cost might curtail the big season-ending parachuting sequence. Or maybe someone just comes up with a better idea.

However, two of the factors that were listed in the question aren’t really forces to worry about too much: sponsorship and guest directors. I’ve never been on a show where a sponsor affected our story-telling. And I’d be pretty pissed if it happened. And in TV, most directors are “guest directors” and they also have limited powers to affect how we write the show. They might have notes, and often they have suggestions for cool ways to shoot something that the writer might not have thought of. But it would be, I think, fairly unusual for a director to do anything that would affect a seasonal arc, or even the main point of any one episode. They simply usually weigh in too late in the process, after the script has been written, rewritten and approved by everyone involved.

So, there you go. The short answer: Every Show Is Different. This is one reason that I think it’s valuable to work on a variety of different staffs before you run your own show — you get exposed to many different ways to handle these issues. Television isn’t written by only one procedure. Even the Very Best Television is created in many different ways. Clearly, there’s more than one way to skin a cathode ray tube.

Lunch: I reheated a left-over Croque Monsieur from Campanile. Grilled cheese that tastes like fondue. Wonderful.

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