JaneEspenson.com

Remember when everyone was saying “my bad”? It had a brief popularity, totally blowing the equivalent form “mea culpa” right off the charts. Now I hear neither much. I suspect that self-blame is just out of fashion.

And yet I should note the fact that I let the closing date for the ABC writers’ fellowship slip past us uncommented-upon. My culpa, seriously. Especially since I got a big packet of blog-letters delivered to me today, some of which are from people asking pressing questions about their fellowship submissions – how to compose the bio, and that sort of thing. Oops. The mail is collected for me and sent to me in batches, so there can be a substantial time-lag. Sorry about that. I hope you all feel happy and comfortable with what you ended up submitting. Besides, I have no inside knowledge of what the ABC people look for in a bio: diversity, I guess, so I hope everyone stressed the things that make you different, culturally and otherwise. Ever been in jail? Mention it. It’s different and it’ll go better than if they find out later.

I also hope everyone took the day off after dropping their scripts into the mail. Because the day after *that* should be devoted to starting the next spec script! Yay! A new show to pick, a new world to learn, new voices to master!

In fact, one of the letters asks a great question about selecting the show to spec next. Austen from New York has written a spec “The Shield”. She has been told that she should have “two spec scripts that complement each other and one ‘wild card’ script.” Good advice.

So now she wants to know how to pick a script to “complement” the Shield. It’s tempting to think about a show that is “opposite” to the Shield and come up with… what? “Reba”? But the fact is that what you want is opposite, but not too opposite. She’s going to want a drama.

She asks if it should it be network instead of cable? Or a show that draws more female audience members, like Grey’s or Medium?

Yeah. Pretty much, Austen. There aren’t a ton of specable options right now, and I think you’ve done a good job of pointing at two choices. Grey’s Anatomy and Medium would both complement the Shield. “Veronica Mars” would provide even more contrast, but I’m being told that it’s still considered a bit out of the mainstream. It could work as your “wild card” spec.

Speaking of which, that wild card could be anything from Veronica to a mainstream show like House to something SciFi like Battlestar to something bizarre like a novelty Bonanza or Columbo spec or a spec pilot or whatever.

Austen asks a further question. Given that she is a woman writer, should she be conscious of the fact that her spec is for a show as aggressive as The Shield – a show that is assumed to be very masculine? Strangely, no. For a town that is in some ways very hidebound and traditional and sexist, I have found no resistance to women writers on even the most violent and male-dominated shows. Although women are still under-represented, it looks to me like we’re under-represented in a very even-handed way. This is just my Jane’s-eye view. Stats could show me to be wrong. Mea Badda.

But I do know for sure that lots of women writers have spec “Shields” or “Sopranos.” And lots of men wrote “Gilmore Girls” and “Buffy” specs. Which is good. Of course, that also means it doesn’t really set you apart. You can’t sell yourself as the girl-who-writes-tough-specs. Maybe a lot of us had the same idea.

So everyone out there, boy or girl, slip on a skirt and write some Grey’s Anatomy. You’re going to want something to contrast with your cop shows.

Lunch: cherry yogurt, granola and coke-with-grenadine.

You know how sometimes kids are running around in a store or a restaurant or the DMV, squealing and touching people and everyone is smiling at them and thinking they’re so cute, but there’s one lady sitting alone who stares at them, blank and unsmiling, until she suddenly breaks out a frown that sends them hurtling back to their parents, silent and ashen with fear?

I am that lady.

Now the thing is, you know me. You know I’m a sweetheart, always with a song in my heart, a dance on my hips and candy in my purse. But I can only be pushed so far. And, truly, is there any sound as chilling as the laughter of children? (I’m sure *yours* are delightful, by the way. Totally the exception. I hear good things.) You might assume that I don’t have a lot of opportunity to have conversations with little ones. And yet, I can tell when children’s dialogue has been written thoughtlessly.

Writing for kids is really hard. Especially if you aren’t around them a lot. And it’s really tempting to write kids to sound like other television kids. This leads to (at least) two common choices:

The “and stuff” choice. This style of kids writing looks like this:

KID
And, and, and then? And then? I saw the monster and I ranned and ranned and then there was a lady and I fell down and stuff.

This child is an idiot! This style is marked by run-on sentences, grammatical errors and little tags like “and stuff” or “or sumpthin’.” You’ve got to be really careful with these things. Your readers are going to know that this character is a child. You don’t have to hit them over the head with exaggerated child-speak.

The opposite choice is the “little adult” choice. This style looks like this (taken from an actual script for a show that will go unnamed):

PUNKY
(to the dog)
Well, Brandon, we gotta trust somebody sometime.

Most usually the “little adult” style is used as a comedy device, in which case it’s not the writer mistakenly thinking that’s how kids talk, but the writer looking to get character-based humor out of the idea that *this* child talks this way. This style is obviously hugely popular and has been used in lots of successful shows. I’m not slamming these writers. I’m simply encouraging you to be aware that by now this is not the… freshest choice.

By the way, if the child also extorts money out of an adult, it’s extra funny.

Man, I am cranky today.

If your spec HAS TO have a child character in it, I’d advise you to keep the part small and simple, and try to aim down the middle, on the intelligence and self-awareness scale. Make him or her sound as much like a real child as you can, but keep in mind that the character description is going to do a lot of that work for you.

Lunch: dim sum

A new Harper’s magazine came yesterday. Yay! In a few minutes, I’m going to settle into bed with the puzzle. I love their puzzles – they’re cryptics, like the British-style crosswords. Do you know these? You have to do all these different sorts of manipulations to the clue to get to the answer. The first time someone showed me one of these puzzles, I was in college. And for the first quarter-hour of the explanation, I simply could not understand what I was being told. The answers to the definitions sounded arbitrary, not uniquely-defined, amateurish. And then it all clicked into place. Oh! The puzzles weren’t unsophisticated. They were, in fact, far more sophisticated than any puzzle I had done to that date. I simply had misunderstood the entire explanation because I had expectations about what I was about to hear. Sometimes we get halfway through something, and think we know where it’s going. But we don’t. It’s more sophisticated than we thought.

Keep that in mind as we look at the following joke I heard recently on a rerun episode of The Simpsons. Moe is talking with his old bartending professor:

PROF
Describe your tavern in one word.

MOE
Is crap-hole one word?

PROF
Yes. If it’s hyphenated.

MOE
Then I’m sticking with crap-hole.

The first two lines are a joke. But it’s an old and familiar joke, so they’re not really funny. Then the next two lines make the first two lines funny again. Hee! I love that at the half-way point, you think you’re done, but that it’s a bit lame and unsophisticated. And then you suddenly realize the writer is way ahead of you.

It reminds me of a joke we did once on Dinosaurs that went something like this:

EARL
If you looked up “happy” in the dictionary, you’d find a bunch of words that describe exactly the way I’m feeling right now.

This joke works because, just like in The Simpsons’ joke, the audience thinks they know what the joke is when they’re heard the first half. Then the second half surprises them with its frankness and literalness. It’s like a magician’s version of a joke — misdirection and slight of hand.

It’s a pretty easy kind of joke to write, too. Give it a try. The next time a really obvious joke occurs to you as you’re writing a scene, see if you can adapt it into one of these.

Lunch: papaya salad and a Thai iced tea.

I’m a member of the Television Academy, so I get to vote for the Emmys, which is pretty cool. This year I was interested to learn that the process was going to be internet-driven for the first time. Yesterday was the due date for nominations, so the previous night as I logged onto the super-secret internet site, I was filled with feelings of entertainment-based power. But, I quickly realized, the internet only provided a location on which the academy had posted all the shows and episodes which were eligible for nomination. The actual ballot itself was still a fill-in-the-bubble paper dealy which had to be in the offices of the accounting company by 5PM yesterday! Yeeps!

So I spent my afternoon, yesterday – literally my whole afternoon – driving downtown, parking, walking to the correct building, turning in my ballot and driving home. Hours, this took, gentle readers. Traffic, confusion, lots of walking… The guard in the building had a sort of harried look as he escorted me to the correct elevator. I asked him if he was seeing a lot of people walking in with yellow envelopes today. “Don’t *even* ask,” he said wearily. Well, apparently I wasn’t the only writer in town who misunderstood the rules.

Sometimes we misunderstand them. And sometimes we break them on purpose. You’ve probably been told not to “do the director’s job” when you write a scene. You already know that you shouldn’t specify a bunch of shots. And you’ve probably also been told not to tell the actors every time you want them rub their eyes or scratch their nose or take a sip of something. You should let them do their own scratching. And yet, there is a situation where specifying this kind of thing can be very useful. Especially in a spec script. Because, of course, you don’t have to worry about ticking off the actors. You’re writing for readers, not in order to be produced. No actors at all. So, you can feel free to *use* those little actions to control the pacing of your dialogue.

Here’s what I mean:

GUY
Someday, I swear, I just have this feeling that something transformative and wonderful is going to happen to me.

Guy takes a sip of his coffee, thoughtful.

GUY (cont’d)
Or something transformative, anyway.

See that? I was able to give the reader something like the same effect you’d get with (beat) or (then), but with a little more style, a little more sense of the length and quality of the pause. A little more help with the visuals.

And even better, if you can capture a distinctive action that’s associated with an established character, you help give your script that authentic feeling. A Buffy scene feels even more like Buffy with a little “Giles pauses to clean his glasses” in it. And everyone loves a bit of “Adama looks sharply up from his desk,” or “Michael glances uncertainly toward the camera.” I know I do.

Lunch: I bought a jar of a sort of lentil-based stew at a Persian market. Tried it over tofu noodles. Yummy!

They’re tearing down a building near the one I live in and putting up a bigger, fancier one. I had some concern that my pretty view would be blocked, so I went to the public hearing at the … what was it … some kind of planning commission. I imagined that I was letting myself in for an evening that would manage to be both boring and contentious. It wasn’t as bad as I feared, but, yeah, there were aspects of both boredom and contention as the issue of parking garage clearances was debated. There are some TV jobs that feel like that. You have to sit and listen to people arguing passionately about adjective choice on an episode of “Mom’s in the Kitchen,” or whatever.

Which brings us back to bad television. Yesterday, I talked about the benefits of bad television. But bad TV is more than just a crappy wonderland of writing examples. It’s also potential employment. If you’re writing spec scripts, you’re doing so in hopes of being hired by a show. Sure, you might be hired by House or Battlestar or Veronica Mars. But you might not be. You might instead be hired by “Cat’s Got Your Tongue,” a new drama about a kleptomaniac demon passing as an ordinary housecat.

What do the writers on “Cat’s” do, then, to try to get a better job the next time they’re on the market? They write spec scripts. Even very experienced writers sometimes have to write fresh new specs. If you’re on a high-profile show, you can use the actual episodes that you have had produced as your samples, but if your show is more obscure or not respected, you’re going to have to write something better-known and classier. Some writers embrace this as a chance to prove to themselves that they can still write quality. And, in a way, isn’t that part of the glory of the spec process? It gives us all a chance to see how’d we do if we were handed an assignment by our Dream Show.

So keep Tivoing the good shows, and keep collecting produced examples and keep polishing your spec-writing instincts. You’ll probably be using them for a while.

Oh – and don’t worry that as a not-yet-hired writer your specs will be competing against the specs of people already in the business… they’re competing for higher-ranking jobs. You all are just competing against each other. And you KNOW you’re better than each other.

Lunch: quesadilla and a coke.

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