JaneEspenson.com

Hi everyone! I’m back from my long holiday weekend. Spent much of the time face-down in the water. Fun! I was snorkeling with the tropical fishes. I got a new mask and a crazy looking swim top that keeps your body heat in. Fantastic, except I was literally swimming in a pink mock turtleneck. It was a very odd feeling at first. Like skiiing in a prom dress or gambling in a bride dress — no wait, I’ve seen that one a lot.

Anyway, I noticed something while snorkeling. If I was in a dense swarm of fish, I didn’t savor each individual as much as if I was in a more sparsely populated area where I could focus on each fish in turn and really study its coloring and actions. Less is more — could it actually be true? Perhaps!

As you’re coming up with stories for your brand new specs, this is the very most important time to look at the examples you’ve collected of produced episodes of the show. You don’t need more story than these episodes have, *even though it might feel like it makes it easier.* Cramming an episode with EVENT makes it feel significant, fast-moving and easy to write, because there’s a lot of do, but it’s going to make the show feel rushed, superficial and too crowded to allow those wonderful single-fish character moments.

Read (or view) the produced episodes you have access to, and try to recreate the outlines that they began as. Pull out the beats of pure A-story. These are the beats that look like this:

1. discover crime victim
2. develop first theory: wife did it
3. wife found dead
4. develop second theory: mother-in-law did it.
5. move in on mother-in-law
6. mother-in-law threatened by real killer
7. real killer fooled as mother-in-law revealed to be hero in disguise

Count them. Don’t count moments of discussing-the-case that turn into personal beats. These are character beats disguised as A-story. Count only the moments that really develop that main spine of a story. The story you’re coming up with for your spec should have NO MORE beats than you’re finding in the produced examples.

(And don’t be overly shy about using a very similar structure for your A story as one that they’ve already used. It’s just structure. Unless you’re specing a show that is about nothing except clever structure, what will make your spec shine is the character stuff and the general elegance of the writing. Structure is just the shape of the glass into which you pour all that stuff.)

If you’re writing a spec pilot, again, too much story is your enemy. Even more so than on a regular spec, because you need room to introduce all those characters! Look at some produced pilots — they can have VERY thin stories indeed. Frasier learns his dad’s going to live with him. Mary Richards gets a job. A brainy new waitress is hired at the bar. A doctor starts work at a new hospital. A cop gets a new partner and misses his old one. Even if you do a pilot that plays as more of a normal-day-in-the-life, the characters are still new to the viewers and will require a bit of time for introductions.

Give yourself character time, is what I’m saying. In other words, slow down and smell the fishes.

Lunch: snack box on the airplane. Cookies, granola bar, cheese, peanut-butter crackers and raisins. Too much sweet, not enough savory.

Hey everyone, I’m heading off on my long weekend very early tomorrow morning, so there won’t be a new entry until Wednesday. So enjoy the 4th, everyone. Don’t get mutilated by illegal fireworks. Or legal ones, for that matter.

Do they still sell sparklers? I remember playing with those as a very small child. The metal stick would literally be white hot. I could’ve been maimed! Looking back, it seems like a very bad idea.

Sometimes there’s an inexhaustible supply of bad ideas. Or none at all. Which is to say that sometimes the “One Hundred Bad Ideas” brainstorming tool just doesn’t work. Or maybe it just feels weird to you. Trust your instincts on that — if it’s not for you, there are other ways to come up with that shiny new idea. Like a more traditional brainstorming session.

Here’s what my brainstorming list tends to look like when I’m looking for a new idea. I really do sit down and write one of these pretty regularly. It comes out different each time. But it might look something like this:

Jane Austen / Darcy from Pride and Prejudice
Moonlighting — Moonlighting with sci fi twist?
Time travel — teens? A family? As someone’s job?
Alien Nation — integration
Redemption
Con men / witness relocation (with aliens?)
Egypt / Hieroglyphs
The Egyptologist — unreliable narrator
Starman / Splash — seeing our own world through someone else’s eyes
Alternate Universes
Alien POV
Fiction comes to life? (Darcy again.)
Blade Runner / Battlestar – characters unaware of own nature
etc

I’m sure you can see what I’m doing. I’m thinking of things that inspire me. Usually, for me, it’s books, movies or tv shows with themes or a tone or a kind of character that I like. Sometimes it’s other things entirely. I list them as they occur to me, more or less randomly. And as I go, I’m thinking about what it is that speaks to me about each one — what is it about the show or movie or book or issue or place or person that makes me like it?

The trick to making it work is realizing that it’s not a list about other works of fiction. It’s a list about *you*. About what gets an emotional response out of you. Maybe your list won’t even have works of fiction on it — it might all be about your life experiences and paintings and songs. The exercise is really a bit of self-analysis to help you figure out what you already want to write about, but might never have articulated.

This list is mine. Yours will look totally different. It’ll have your trip to Spain and The Godfather and Batman comic books and zombies on it, or whatever else makes it yours. Just like with the “100 Bad” list, you should go for volume, not quality – don’t shut yourself down.

Anyway, I find this kind of list so much more helpful than starting from a title or events, or looking at what is lacking in the currect TV schedule. And this way, whatever I come up with isn’t just something I think I can write, but also something I know I will love writing.

Lunch: Vietnamese food. A noodle dish and spring rolls.

I’m planning a whirlwind last-minute trip for the 4th of July – just a long weekend, really, but fun. As a result, I got to go buy travel books the other night! Whee! Hey, you know what books I love? Those “100 Places to See…” books. Usually travel guides assume that you already know you want to go to Maui or Peru or Greece or whatever. But those books open it all up, and you end up considering places you’ve never thought of. That how I ended up in Tobago a while back… one of those books said it was the place to go, and it was.

Those books remind me of a great brainstorming technique that my friend Michelle told me about once. It’s called “One Hundred Bad Ideas.” It’s just what it sounds like; you make a list of one hundred bad ideas for a sitcom or a drama or for a House spec or for a movie or a short story. The fact that you’re calling them “bad ideas” frees you up to put down absolutely anything that crosses your mind. After all, they’re *supposed* to be bad. But, truth be told, you don’t really have one hundred bad ideas. Once you’re thinking about your subject, and being free and accepting with all your ideas… some of them are going to be good. Possibly really good.

Do it pretty fast. A quarter hour, maybe, until you run dry. You probably won’t complete the list. You’ll run out of ideas, bad and good, before you reach one hundred. But the fact that you will try as hard as you can to finish it, also means that you’re not settling for the first idea you came up with. This is incredibly valuable. The reason I started my writing career with *two* spec Seinfelds is that I had a better idea when I was halfway through writing the first script. I’d jumped on my first idea too soon.

I actually, right now, have a file on my computer called “100 bad ideas for a sci-fi drama.” It has 52 entries – that’s when I fizzled out. I actually love about fifteen of the ideas on the list, and will probably invest some time in all of those fifteen, playing around to see if they can be turned into something. Most of the ideas are, however, legitimately bad, as they should be. I was going to excerpt the list here, except that I have realized that one’s bad ideas are a very personal thing. We all need to feel free to put down *very bad* ideas without fear that anyone else will ever see them.

Okay, if you insist, here’s one of the more detailed entries: “A person is split into two people, a man and a woman. They need to solve a task together to re-integrate. They hate each other, but must stay together always or lose any chance of becoming one again.”

A wee bit contrived, no? Other entries are much shorter, by the way. “The Monkey’s Paw, the series,” that kind of thing.

So go crazy! Especially if you’ve decided to tackle a spec pilot. Looking for a family sitcom idea? A single-camera half-hour idea? A cop drama with a twist? One of each? Start making lists. You’ll be amazed what you’ve got kicked into the corners of your brain.

Lunch: tofu pups and fresh tomato.

Addendum: Friend-of-the-blog Jeff Greenstein adds this story from art school: “On the first day, my painting teacher told the class, ‘You are about to paint 100 bad paintings. So just go ahead and get ’em out of the way so you can start painting the good ones.'” Nice!

He adds:

“I think of that often when I look at my early spec scripts.”

There’s a very funny joke on the always interesting Bob Harris blog today. Put in script format, and adapted into, oh, say… a House spec, it would go like this:

Cutty looks up from reading the newspaper.

CUTTY
Why would Rush Limbaugh take Viagra to the Dominican Republic?

HOUSE
To keep his pants up?

Haw! I love it. And I simply *must* discuss this unusual joke form distinguished by a punchline lifted from another joke. Delightful. I was sure I’d occasionally seen other jokes of this type, but I couldn’t recall specific examples.

And yet my mind was fizzing with that feeling of recognized similarity. I finally realized that I was being reminded of the amazing cartoons at Spamusement.com. Have you seen these? They’re cartoons fitted to the subject lines of actual spam emails. Just like the Bob Harris joke, these rely on the humor of working around a pre-existing punch line. I love these cartoons. I’m helpless in their grasp.

But what is it that makes this type of humor so irresistible? Personally, I think it’s because these jokes have a perceived high level of difficulty. It’s like the difference between a prop comic who uses custom-made props, versus an improv guy who has to make funny out of whatever bizarre unexpected object he’s handed. You laugh more at the improv guy because you’re giving him credit for the harder job of being fast and adaptable. As a script writer, you create the illusion of spontaneity. And a joke like this makes you seem really quick and clever, no matter how long you labor over it to get it just right.

If I were teaching a class, I think I’d give an assignment: come up with a new set-up for “to get to the other side.” I bet we’d have some great ones.

Afterthought. After I wrote this it occurred to me that if this were in an actual House script, House’s line might very well be prefaced with “Wait. I know this one…” It feels slightly more like him that way, don’t you think?

Lunch: eggplant stew over tofu noodles.

I did a little checking with my agenting team (yeah, they sometimes form teams), to find out the hottest, latest, up-to-datest info on what specs they’re seeing in the drama world. They agree with me that there is very little in the way of specable drama shows right now. House seems to be the most popular one-hour spec of the moment, they tell me. With some action also happening with Nip/Tuck and The Shield. Nip/Tuck? Still? Really? Huh. They’re a little skeptical about Grey’s, due to the serialized nature. It’s hard to keep it current. (Frankly, I worry about that less than they do.)

So what do they recommend after you’ve written your House? They suggest writing a play, a screenplay or a spec pilot to demonstrate your skills. Certainly not a terrible idea.

(An aside: Following up the spec pilot idea, I had a kind of a neat thought yesterday. Part of the problem with a spec pilot is that the reader doesn’t get to see how well you do at capturing someone else’s characters and tone. So what about a spec pilot that takes off on a well-known movie? You know, as if you’d been hired to write the tv-series version of X-Men or Platoon or whatever? Personally, I think this could be a very interesting project.)

Anyway, this blog — this humble blog — is going to continue primarily to be about writing spec episodes of existing shows. I still believe this is considered the currency of the town by so many people — and by the ABC Writing Fellowship — that it can’t be discounted.

But I’m also going to start throwing in a little advice on spec pilot writing as we go along. Not all the time, but here and there. I’m not qualified to speak to writing features or plays, but I’ve written a few pilot scripts now, and they present some unique challenges that are totally different than anything I’ve talked about. So hang on, because suddenly we get to talk about conceptualizing a whole show, creating major characters and setting a tone… And even naming the series! Fun!

New vistas!

Lunch: that cannellini bean salad I sometimes make. I’m starting to be a little bored by it. We need new vistas in all areas of life.

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