JaneEspenson.com

Such a delightful letter just arrived from Alex in Texas! He tells me he watched my “Band Candy” episode of Buffy when he was eleven. Surely a typo. Eleven?! Is that even possible? I’ll just be shuffling off to my hip replacement surgery now.

Anyway, Alex (who writes his letter in script format, hilariously), asks a number of good questions. I’m going to address one of them here. He has clearly followed my advice and procured himself a number of actual produced scripts, which has him wondering if his spec script should include the Cast List and Set List pages that you find in produced scripts. Nope. It should not. Just a title page and then into the script, please. If you’re writing a spec pilot you will occasionally find someone who includes a page with an evocative quote to introduce the series, as you might include at the beginning of a novel, but I would tend to discourage this too. It smells pretentious to me.

The only thing non-standard that I might actually encourage is to include your last name as part of the header that runs across the top of every page. So it would look something like this:

Fabulous Girls – “Pilot” – Espenson [page #]

I suggest this just because you’re writing specs to get your name out there, so why not give everyone the maximal chance to see your name?

Thanks for the letter, Alex! It made me laugh! Great work! I wish I had advice about agents, contests, etc, but all I can do is suggest persistence and research and wish you good luck! There must be someone out there with a lovely and complete list of spec script contests, but I’m afraid it isn’t me. And the agent sitch — well, I can only say I hope it opens up again soon, because getting agents to read new writers right now is difficult. And yet… every year I go to a new job, and there is usually a writer there who is reporting to their very first job. So it happens. It can happen for you.

Lunch: Vietnamese food — rice noodles with pork and shrimp and that devastating sweet sauce. Fizzy lemonade.

Yowza! ANOTHER “I wish I’d written that” situation. This time, it comes from Friend-of-the-Blog Maggie, who posts this wonderful entry about jumpstarting the creative process. This list is so good I’m going to go do all of these things at once — you’ll find me asleep on a train. Seriously, check it out.

And while you’re there, look at some other entries too. Maggie does a great job of reminding us (well, me, certainly) that the writing process is *fun*, that there’s a reason we have picked this. This is a staggeringly important thing to keep in mind.

And it brings me to something else. I’ve been banging my head against a certain scene in my pilot. It was just too long, featured incidental characters whom we aren’t really invested in, and was so packed full of pipe that it simply couldn’t get much shorter. And of course, attempting to shorten it just meant that I took out all the jokes and character moments, which made all the pipe that much pipier… oh, it was awful. And suddenly, yesterday… brainstorm. The scene disappeared. The same information is now delivered by some of our regular characters in a fast-moving series of intercuts between two separate scenes about emotional manipulation, instead of just about information-imparting. Ahhh. That feels better.

Whenever a scene fights you to that extent, when it simply refuses to get written, take a step back and make sure there isn’t something you can do to get rid of the scene. EVERY scene should have a reason to exist beyond moving the story. And once you find that reason, it won’t just be easier to write — it’ll be fun to write.

Lunch: Leftovers from a delightful meal I called in from Acapulco (the chain restaurant) last night… enchiladas and beans and rice. Mm.

So I’m finally watching the pilot of “Friday Night Lights.” Fantastic. There’s some lovely writing in there. There’s a lot of that thing where you’re being forced to make inferences about who people are and how they’re connected without ever being told anything overt, and there’s just enough info so you can get a handle on it without it ever feeling engineered. And overlapping dialogue, I’m always such a sucker for that and never feel like I use it enough. And strong regional voices and funny moments that never feel jokey. I finally had to turn it off. I’ll go back to it later, but right now it’s beating up my self-esteem. Sometimes watching something really good is inspiring. Sometimes it’s paralytic, because you end up staring at your own words and muttering, “Why aren’t you better?”

So, reasoning from this experience, you know what you might find fun and inspirational? Read something bad. Something really bad. It doesn’t have to be in script format — in fact it’s likely not to be. Look for something abominable — there’s loads of it on the web. Read someone’s first try at Simon and Simon fanfic or whatever. Find something really bad and truly roll around it in.

What you’re going to notice are all the things that you do really well. The things you do so well that you don’t even think about them anymore. The mistakes you don’t make — totally on-the-nose dialog, stories with no events in them, characters who are clearly awkward stand-ins for the author of the story. If you’re writing spec scripts, you aren’t sitting at a keyboard for the first time, pushing the notion of fiction around in your brain like an interesting new insect. You’ve either learned, or have always instinctively known, things about writing that others don’t (yet) have access to. It can be very encouraging to remind yourself of all the things you know, all the weapons you have in your arsenal, to look back at the road you’ve traveled to get here.

By the way, it’s possible this is terrible advice. Most teachers point to the inspirational power of great works, not to the power of “at least I didn’t write that.” But sometimes terrible advice might be just what you need!

Lunch: fake veggie pork sausage and fake eggs. I need to buy some real food.

Let’s suppose you’re creating a lead character for your spec pilot. You know you want to give him something to want (a possession, a person, a goal, an accomplishment, a state of mind..). And you know you also want to give him some kind of vulnerability to make him lovable, and to make the audience worry about him.

Well, once you’ve given him that thing to want — hey! — you’ve got vulnerability built in! The fear of not getting it, of getting it and losing it, of not being worthy of it, of having it stolen, of realizing it’s not a worthy goal, of realizing it doesn’t exist, all these are really cool vulnerabilities. And, most importantly, you get to play with what the character has to endure or to risk to go after that thing that they want. Every desire brings vulnerability with it.

So when you’re building that character, don’t just think about the thing they want, but think about how wanting that thing makes them vulnerable. A great example of this is the main character in Ugly Betty. Betty wants a career in publishing, and to get it she’s willing to put herself into a world where she’s open to ridicule every day. Totally vulnerable, totally lovable. Come to think of it, it’s the same formula that makes American Idol such a juggernaut: kids enduring insults and talent limitations in pursuit of a dream! The pain is part of the wanting. The pain IS the wanting.

Now, not every character is as transparent as Betty or Clay Aiken. What House wants is more complicated, since I don’t think he knows what it is that he really wants (peace in the form of loving acceptance, I’d say, but I’m a big softie). But, anyway, the Betty model is a pretty darn useful one.

Lunch: chili with artichoke hearts topped with avocado

Let’s talk about act breaks again! Whee! I love this kind of analysis, don’t you? It’s amazing, all the little things that go into giving a show its own “feel.”

I’ve talked before about how you want to break the act at the moment of maximum tension and danger. I love breaking an act in the middle of a scene. Someone has a gun (or a romantic ultimatum) to our hero’s head and before she can do anything about it — BAM — there’s a car commercial! The audience dives for their remote to skip the commercial, and rejoins the action where it left off, all shaky with concern.

However, some shows don’t do this. There is an argument that breaking a scene in the middle gives the show a “soap opera” feel. Or that the audience feels manipulated. Or perhaps there’s just a tradition that has evolved over the years of a show — Gilmore Girls, for example, doesn’t like to break an act this way, although I never heard a reason given. It simply didn’t feel like the show. (Now that I really think about it, though, there may be a very good reason for not doing this on Gilmore Girls. The show is very much about the way things play out… the attenuation of awkward moments, the gradual realization, instead of the sudden chilling slam. To artificially punctuate those long scenes with an act break really might work against the mood of the show.)

If you’re writing a spec of an existing show, this is another reason to study your produced example scripts and do whatever they do. If you’re writing a spec pilot, you get to decide for yourself about the kinds of act breaks you want to write. Just make sure that you don’t end an act on a moment of satisfied resolution. The scene can be over, but make sure the tension is still up in the air — after all, someone can issue that romantic ultimatum and then exit, leaving our hero alone to contemplate it as we…

FADE OUT.
END OF ACT WHATEVER

Lunch: fondue and broccoli at The Grove (big L.A. shopping destination — I bought jackets.)

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