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Did you see the premiere of The Office the other night? I love that show! I love it even though it makes me want to tunnel backwards through the sofa sometimes. “Discomfort comedy.” I think that many times the only thing that makes it tolerable is the presence of Pam and/or Jim, who are typically enjoying the discomfort. As long as I have someone to identify with who is not angry or mortified, then I’m okay. Maybe there’s some sort of generally applicable principle for all sorts of writing — you know, make sure there’s an audience surrogate in every scene, or something like that, but I haven’t taken the time to figure out if that’s really true. Perhaps we’ll address that another time.

Because what I want to talk about is — SPOILER SPOILER — the kiss. If you can call it that. You know what I mean. The slowest most painful build-up to any kiss in screen history. Think about it. You’ve seen other man-man kisses played for comedy. As far as I can recall, EVERY SINGLE ONE I’M THINKING OF has been of the ambush variety. One guy grabs another and kisses him fast. And the fastness has always been essential to the comedy. Even the Will/Jack kiss on Will and Grace was a (very funny) ambush. The only other slow build-up kiss like this that I can think of, although it wasn’t played for laughs, was the Uhura/Kirk kiss on Star Trek, which must’ve had a similar “are they really going to…” feel at the time.

The problem is that the ambush kiss has now been played so often, and so identically, that although it still gets yelps from an audience, it isn’t as dewy fresh as it once was. The Office did something valuable by taking this new run at it. It’s a valuable lesson about changing bits to keep them fresh.

Oh! And, as another supporting example, I just thought of another non-ambush comedy kiss. In Dude, Where’s My Car, the two guys have just been shown up by a guy making out with his hot girlfriend, so they, totally unthinkingly, try to top him with an even more passionate kiss. They also went away from the expected ambush joke, and reaped fresh funny as a result.

Always patrol your script aggressively for jokes and bits of stage business that you’ve seen before. And question your friends who are reading your script, make sure there’s nothing there that they find too familiar either. And then look for that twist. You can use the audience’s expectations to help you out, even! They’ll be extra surprised if you take the bit in a new direction, and surprise is one of the main ingredients for funny.

Lunch: shabu-shabu. Beef and veggies and lovely clear noodles dipped in boiling water right on the table-top. Plus, if the steam blows right, it’s like a facial!

I dined with a dear friend last night, who is writing for one of the new fall shows. She happened to bring along an outline for one of their episodes. I noticed that it had a feature I’d never seen before on such a document. Usually there’s a “logline” at the top of an outline, a sort of “TV Guide” summary. But now, I was seeing TWO little headlines at the top of the first page. They read something like this (story details totally changed to avoid spoilers)…

What it’s about: Our main character’s boss quits, and she has to hide his absense from her co-workers for a whole day.

What it’s REALLY about: Her love for her boss fades, as she realizes the considerate man she loved doesn’t really exist. No other virtue can make up for a lack of kindness.

Call it the “logline plus” system. I love it. The writers of this show find it useful because the outline is sent to studio and network executives who need to be able to make a quick evaluation of the document. But of course it’s also invaluable for the writer.

It’s a great idea to have both of these written out at the top of every document you produce as you write your spec. The “really” line, of course, is what I was talking about in the last post. This is the reason to write the episode. The other line, the more traditional logline, lays out the literal events. Having both of them under your eyes as you work is going to help keep you on track. Maybe print them up and tape them to the computer? Or maybe that’s a bit much. Just keep them around somewhere.

On another topic, I got a sweetly determined letter recently from Stephanie in Platteville, who declares her intention to move to LA and make a writing career happen! She’s got more courage than I had, I’ll tell you that. Best of luck to you, Steph! I’m rooting for you!

Lunch: BBQ pork and noodle soup from a Thai restaurant. Yummy.

Hey, Gentle Readers, get ’em while they’re hot! Copies of Bob Harris’s new book Prisoner of Trebekistan are sailing off the virtual shelves! And along the way, I’m learning so much about this whole other side of the business of writing. It’s fascinating. Turns out that authors don’t get Nielsen ratings. How do they stand it? Anyway, exact sales are hard to judge. But the anecdotal evidence is piling up that people are reading / people are loving. There was a rave review in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, for example, that burned up the pages with the warmth of its praise. Run on over to Amazon and grab yourself a pile o’ copies!

And as long as we’re in the neighborhood, the book also serves as a great example of the “what is it about” school of writing. This was the phrase that Joss Whedon drilled into our heads over at Buffy. It’s an important approach to writing that will, guaranteed, make your spec scripts sparkle and stand out from all the others.

Plot is hard. So when you find a series of events that actually string together to make a story — a beginning, middle, end — it’s tempting to consider the job done. In fact, it’s tempting to throw your arms in the air and caper in circles singing “We Are As Gods.” But unless the story is *about* something, all you’ve done is come up with a pile of stuff that happens. And that can leave readers and viewers with a sense of arbitrary action, a sense that a different pile of stuff could’ve happened without it making a lot of difference.

When writing a spec (or even an episode of a show for which you’re being paid), the mistake is in starting with the story. Instead, think first about what you want the episode to be about — is it about the triumph of love? The destructive quality of envy? About how expecting the worst in others brings out the worst in oneself? About how emotional resiliancy is better than virtue? About kindness trumping truth? About how love isn’t blind, but wishes it were? About how emotional infidelity is worse than physical? About how an anticipation of betrayal can cause that betrayal? About how denial can sometimes be a choice? About how living a happy life is also a choice and not an event?

Find something like that — something you believe in. Now, you’re ready to find a story.

Non-fiction, of course, makes this whole process harder, because you *can’t* change the events to reflect what you want the story to be about! You have to find a marriage of events and meaning that doesn’t distort either. That’s hard. That’s why, when a nonfiction book manages to do it, it’s so darn satisfying. Remember that book “Into Thin Air”? It accomplished this. And “Prisoner of Trebekistan” does too. In it, we see how an attempt at becoming a Jeopardy champ leads to a tentative embrace of learning, which then catches fire and turns into a transformative quest. It’s about how knowledge changes your life in touching, unpredictable and hilarious ways. Now that’s something to be about.

If you’ve already got a spec story that you love, you might have already done some of this subconsciously. See if you can articulate what the script is about. Then go back through the script and find places to make the “about” powerful and clear. You’ll end up with a script that will justify all that capering and god singing.

Lunch: Left over garlic-cheese bread from the Smokehouse restaurant and canned beans from Australia.

I’m more invested, this year, in the new television season than I have been in recent years. I’m hopeful about a number of shows, and I feel like I’m in the market for a new favorite scripted drama. I hope I reflect America in this way.

I’ll be really interested to see which shows click instantly with audiences. Some shows really do seem to just lock in right away. They don’t always stay locked in, but a strong start guarantees that they at least are given a chance to get going, to find their voice.

Now, let’s imagine that, say, Shark or Heroes or whatever, is a hit. Should you start writing a spec for it? Kira from Santa Monica wrote me a letter with, essentially, this question in it. She has been told not to write a spec for any show in its first season, and yet she points out that some shows, like Lost and Desperate Housewives, are so quickly hits that there doesn’t seem to be any reason to wait.

Hmm. A good and timely question. I’d say it wouldn’t hurt to sit up and pay attention when an instant hit is annointed. Start looking around for produced scripts to study, and read recaps and do all that good research. But if it was me, I’d probably wait until that first season was at the very least half over — probably even entirely over — before I started actually writing. This isn’t so much because the show might disappear, as it is that most shows are still in flux during season one. It’s still finding its tone, and figuring out which kinds of episodes serve it best. Heck, it could still be firing and hiring actors and changing all its locations around and all kinds of things — “Ellen” even changed its title after season one! (Remember, it was “These Friends of Mine”?) Anyway, it’s best to let a show settle down, find a rhythm, before you jump in. You don’t want to have to shoot at a moving target.

Also, being a hit isn’t enough to make a show specable. It has to be watched and respected not just by America, but by agents and show runners — the people you want to have read your script. And, besides that, you don’t know if it’s going to *remain* a hit. Some shows quickly fade. Remember Commander-in-Chief? Huge pilot tune-in numbers. But gosh, not a good spec to have now.

More and more, I find myself seeing the wisdom in writing a spec pilot. So many hit shows are serialized, which makes them tough (though not impossible) to spec. And others are such niche fare (Nip/Tuck, The Shield), that it’s hard to know if enough of your readers will really know the show. You’ll want at least one spec of a real, existing show, I think, but beyond that… I really have to say, write a pilot.

I’m writing one myself, right now. Come on. We’ll do it together.

Lunch: Nibbled on a burrito at the Farmer’s Market.

Did you know that in the FBI, agents are either referred to by their names or by the title “Special Agent”? None of this simple “Agent Scully,” “Agent Mulder” stuff. Never done. Ever. I know that because we had a technical advisor on one of the shows I worked on recently who was a real live active FBI agent. Of course we ignored him on this point. “Special Agent Jones” sounds stilted, unlikely and long. Sometimes the truth is stranger than than fiction, and sometimes it’s just wordier.

Two of the shows I’ve worked on recently have employed technical advisors. This is incredibly helpful to the writers on a staff. On The Inside, the advisor kept an office right there among the writers. Very helpful. He’d tell us all about what we got wrong, until he gradually gave up on the “Special Agent” thing. Battlestar Galactica has an expert too, for astronomy and, as far as I can tell, all other things scientific. I got fascinating notes on my script from him. Did you know that radiation is different than radioactivity? You did? Oh, so that was just me, then.

Anyway, this is all in service of a question from Nic in Germany. She’s asking about how much research she needs to do on the diseases and medical terminology in her Grey’s Anatomy spec. Of course her question also applies to everyone writing a House spec. And there’s all that law stuff for the Boston Legal spec-ers. And police procedure for The Shield. And what about inside late-night-TV stuff that’ll be useful if Studio 60 becomes the next hot spec? If you’re a writer employed on those shows, you have resources. Some shows even allow their writers to simply indicate where the techno-talk goes, and then let the advisors suggest lines. Star Trek: The Next Generation writers were known to simply write “tech tech” as a temporary line until the advisors weighed in. But for a spec, you don’t have this option.

I can only say, hail the internet. Remember how the parents in Lorenzo’s Oil became experts on their son’s disease? Well, that’s you, and the spec script is your son. You simply have to do the work. You can make up stuff where you simply have to, but try to be as accurate as you can.

A great source can be those nonfiction cable shows like “Diagnosis Unknown,” and “The New Detectives.” And those “true crime” books, like the excellent ones by Ann Rule, can also be good sources for crime stories. Newspaper items are also useful. Take a real story and change it to conform to the needs of a television story, and you’re starting out with data that you *know* is good.

For example, all this current spinich stuff is ripe for picking! If I were writing a House spec right now, I’d be studying all the articles and thinking about how a food contamination outbreak could complicate the diagnosis of some completely unrelated disorder. (Maybe a disease caused an iron shortage, so the person ate a lot of spinach to try to replace the iron, but the spinich was contaminated, and reacted with the original disease, masking it or exacerbating it… )

And, as always, study those produced scripts. If your characters use specialized terminology in their jobs, you can usually master those terms just from looking at how they’ve used them in other scripts. I don’t know what a “chem seven” is exactly, but I sure heard those doctors on ER order it often enough.

Want another Battlestar anecdote? In my episode I had a character refer to a planet’s “atmo,” meaning, obviously, “atmosphere.” It sounded perfectly natural because I knew I’d heard characters in produced episodes use the term. I was right. I had. But they were produced episodes of Firefly. Battlestar character don’t say “atmo.” Oops. Make sure you study the *right* scripts.

Lunch: A Whopper Jr. from Burger King. It really did taste char-broiled, but not in a good way. Kind of a lighter-fluid flavor. Bleah.

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