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Remember this excellent piece by E. E. Knight on writing blunders? I’ve been thinking a lot about them, especially the one about not starting your narrative with the character waking up in the morning. This particular prohibition is spot on and I think there’s something really interesting to be learned from it.

Keep an eye out for the waking-up opening, and you’ll start to see it everywhere in movies and stories. I googled, “the story opens with,” and “waking up,” and found, among other entries:

“The story opens with Engineer Jack waking up…”
“The story opens with a girl waking up…”
“The story opens with Kelly waking up…”
“The story opens with Robin waking up…”
“The story opens with Will Barrent waking up…”

Yup, everyone loves it!

Here’s why. It’s good. Waking up provides a natural starting place, and it allows you to establish a character’s ordinary life and the ordinary status of their world before the inciting incident takes place.

So why avoid it? Because everyone loves it. It’s just become so familiar now, and it’s so easy that it shows a lack of effort and imagination. In pitching a pilot this very season, I had to take a few extra minutes to find a better opening to the story, because my brain went right away to that waking up/morning routine. The opening I found? Much better. Anything that makes you think, tends to make you write better, and the main sin of the waking-up opening is that you can write it without thinking.

Lunch: pork loin, havarti cheese tart, mashed potatoes

Okay, ready for more information from guest speaker and friend-of-the-blog Marcia? If you recall, Marcia is an accomplished writers’ assistant, with access to inside information about the job that I simply don’t have. So, once again, take it, Marcia!

Here’s where I say what you’ve been hoping I wouldn’t. Writers’ assistant jobs are near impossible to get if you’ve never been one. What’s equally frustrating is that a large percentage of those who end up in my position for the first time, get there by pure, dumb, luck. Being good at the job is how you land consecutive gigs, but that first one? Luck is a big part of it. There’s an unfortunate Catch-22 nature to the hiring of a writers’ assistant. No one wants an inexperienced writers’ assistant, but new writers’ assistants can’t become experienced if no one will hire them. Which is where connections come in. This won’t come as a shock to most readers, but being in this business is often like being in the mafia. It’s more than just a little helpful to know someone to get your foot in the door. That’s not to say the totally unconnected can’t find a job, but connections on all levels should never be overlooked. Nor should you feel the need to take the “I can make it on my own” stance. Take the advantages you can. Sure, connections may have gotten you the job, but it’s your abilities that keep you in it. Staying employed consistently is based only partly on who you know, the rest is the reputation you cultivate.

(LisaKlink’s October 4th blog that Jane linked you to had some particularly good advice for those right off the bus. [The blog is here. You can page down to the relevant entry. – Jane]The only thing I’d recommend caution with is her “find a way to stand out” piece of advice. She’s not wrong, but you want to make sure you do it in a way that doesn’t get under the skin of your fellow underlings. Because, though it may work to get you in good with the writers, it’s also those little people on the same level as you or thereabouts that recommend you for future work. For example, when I get hired as a script coordinator on shows, I do my best to make sure MY writers’ assistant and MY writers PA are hired. By which I mean, the people I’ve worked with in the past who I know will work hard for me, are people I don’t mind spending 18 hours a day with, and who don’t have a chip on their shoulder about the work. Anyway, where were we?)

So be sure you really want this when you give it a shot. You’re going to have to stick it out. For some people, it’s a short journey, but for most of us, it’s a long, winding road with many twists and turns. There’ll be disappointments along the way. Show’s get cancelled, orders are cut short, all ending your chance of a bump to staff writer in the future. Not to mention, there are plenty of show runners unwilling to see you as anyone other than the guy/gal who clacks the keys. But don’t let that discourage you from continuing on. There are also those show runners who will see that you’re working just as hard as everyone else to make their show a success, and reward you for it, if not in this production, than a subsequent one. You never know where that next job will come from, where it will lead you, who in the room will sell a pilot, and who will be able to give you the push you need to land what we’re all trying to land… a seat at the big kids table.

Thanks so much, Marcia! Jane here again. I hope you all found that helpful. And I wanted to leave you with this. One of my fellow writers this year at Battlestar Galactica began the year as our writers’ assistant — “clacking the keys,” as Marcia put it. Now he’s one of us. It happens.

Lunch: escargot and a greek salad in Squamish, Canada

Are you working on a lightly-humorous hour-long spec pilot? Are you finding yourself getting bogged down in plot moves and client-story elements that fail to even capture your own attention? Are you longing to bring the focus back to the main characters? Here’s a crazy thought: maybe your show isn’t an hour. Maybe it’s a (single camera) half-hour.

This won’t work for all shows, of course. If you’ve got a cop or lawyer show that hangs on dense plotting, or if it’s dark drama, it clearly won’t feel at all like a half-hour. But if it’s got a light tone, some funny, and doesn’t necessarily hang on lots of plot moves and suspense-filled act breaks, then it might work well as a half-hour.

Imagine that you were given the job of going through a stack of “Ugly Betty” scripts and cutting them down to a half-hour length. What would you lose? You’d probably cut all the arc elements, the running mystery stuff. You’d simplify the A-story too, reducing plot complications while trying to keep all the funny character moments. “Ugly Betty” obviously works well as an hour, but I suggest that if it were a spec script, that a half-hour version of it would have definite appeal as a little gem of characterization: funny, fast, and short.

[CLARIFICATION: I am not suggesting writing spec Ugly Betty scripts as half-hours. I was unclear here. What I meant was that if Ugly Betty had been a spec pilot, it would have worked well as a half-hour spec pilot.]

It’s not a prescription, but it’s an option.

Lunch: Vietnamese pho, this time with tripe in it. Yum! Tripe’s fantastic!

I have received a lovely letter from Gentle Reader Eurie in Studio City. It includes a recipe for a Vanilla Frappuccino, which is an unexpected bonus! She writes asking about humorous or otherwise personalized stage directions. Eurie:

My all time favorite script line of Buffy is from “Innocence” when Joss… writes something to the effect of “The bastard actually winks at her.” […] Do you recommend this level of spunky personality in writing our spec pilots to help our work stand out? Or is this an indulgence extended to established writers?”

This one has an easy answer. Yes! I recommend this kind of writing. Absolutely. Feel free to put personality and opinion in your stage directions. It makes you sound confident and it helps the reader keep track of what you’re intending them to take away from the script at any given point.

However, as long as we’re in the neighborhood, there is one thing that you will find in the stage directions of produced episodes that you shouldn’t adopt. I’m talking about hyper-specific instructions on set design or visual effects or props. I’m talking about stage directions like: “I’m seeing the room as having a claustrophobic feel, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a small room. Let’s just make sure that it’s laid out to have a cramped feeling.” You’ll see things like this all the time, but it’s not appropriate for a spec, for the obvious reason that material with this level of specificity is intended to provide guidance to actual production people, which you don’t have.

But jokes? Personality? Attitude? Yes… do that, please!

Lunch: quiche and Tater Tots

So, you’ve got your ABC/Disney and Warner Brother’s applications all submitted, maybe something for Slamdance, too, and now you feel like you’re in limbo. What should you do now?

Write! You don’t have another deadline breathing down your neck right now for which you have to spec an existing show. So this is the perfect time to write original material. Write a couple spec pilots — a comedy and a drama, perhaps. Write some one-act plays and submit them to play-writing contests. Write a short film script. Write a feature. Write short stories and send them to magazines and journals. Write a comic book. Write a novel if you’ve got the patience/time/confidence.

Read books about writing and apply what you learn. Read film and television scripts and notice how they work. Outline your favorite episodes of television as you’re watching them. Fill notebooks with creative ideas that you can go back to years from now when you’ve got a looming pitch meeting and you need something fast!

Make friends with writers. Take writing classes, join writing networks, chat with other writers on the net. Heck, start a writing discussion group if you can’t find one in your area.

You might feel as though you should be doing something more active — landing that writers’ assistant job, for example — but if there isn’t progress in that direction at the moment, take it as an opportunity to write write write. Because when someone finally says, “hey, send me something so I can see your stuff,” you really, really want to be ready. You want to say: “I have an original pilot, a humorous short film script and a feature script for an action movie; which would you like to see?” You don’t want to say, “Sure, I have something I just need to polish and then I’ll send it along,” because that tells the person you only have one script and it’s not even done! Think about it. If someone said that to you today, what answer would you give?

Lunch: cold stuffed tortellini from the salad bar

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