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Though Friend-of-the-blog Kate, I have received this very good question from Gentle Reader Katie in Los Angeles. She says:

“I’ve been working on a Dexter spec. I came up with a b-story that I really like, that is thematically linked with Dexter’s a-story in a lovely, subtle way. The problem is that the b-story focuses on Det. Angel Bautista, who is sort of a third-tier character on the show. My instinct was to give the b-story to Dexter’s sister Deb or Sergeant Doakes because they are more prominent on the show. However, the story is working so well I hesitate to throw it out for purely analytical reasons. What do you think are the possible benefits/pitfalls to featuring prominently a character that usually plays more of a supporting role on the show?”

Well, the pitfall is obvious: the person who ends up reading the script might not know the character. I recommend that you beef up the stage directions when the character first appears, to remind readers who it is you’re talking about. That should do it.

And, as if the teeny pitfall wasn’t enough encouragement, there is also a large benefit to what you’re doing, Katie. Bringing a background character to the foreground can be a really good way of making your spec different from others in the stack, and, more importantly, of demonstrating the skill of character-deepening, which is highly valued. In fact, I know a show runner who made it his policy to focus his spec scripts, back when he needed them, on under-utilized characters on purpose, in order to demonstrate this exact skill.

It’s easy to fall back on what we’ve seen established characters do before. Sometimes you might be patting yourself on the back for having “nailed” a character, when all you’ve done is recreate something they’ve already done. If you can give them new “colors,” new behaviors, attitudes, actions that we haven’t seen before but that seem right given what we have seen, you’ve done something really important that provides a good indication of what you’d be able to do on a writing staff. Good work.

Lunch: spaghetti with vegetarian chili on top

So the ABC/Disney submission process is over for another year. Your script is in the mail. That makes today the day you start your next project, right?

When you were writing a spec script for an existing show, I encouraged you to watch as many episodes of the show as you could find. I also suggested that you watch a little bit of the show before a writing session as a way to refresh the “voice” of the show. Well, you can do a similar thing even if you’re not writing a TV spec script. You can even do it if you’re writing a short story or a play.

What I’m suggesting is that you find stories or plays that have the tone and complexity you want yours to have, and use them to make your story or play better. Want your story to feel like it comes from the pages of The New Yorker? Go get a bunch of issues of The New Yorker and study those stories.

It’s okay; I’m not talking about plagiarism — not even plagiarism of style — I’m talking about doing research. No one would expect you to sew a shirt, even an imaginative free-form re-imagining of the concept of a shirt, without at least examining some examples, and perhaps even trying one on and walking around in it. Look at the structure of the stories you like the best, look at how the tone is established, look at how a story can grab a reader with the first sentence, and at how neatly it does or doesn’t tie things up at the end. If it’s been a long time since you’ve written something that isn’t in script format, you’ll have to make decisions about tense and POV, too. Reading other writers’ stories is a good way to understand the effect those choices have.

If you’re going to write a play, making an effort to read and study examples is even more crucial, since few of us already have a stack of plays on our bedside table for leisure reading. The script of a play is probably less familiar to you as a document than a short story or a film script is, so give it some study before you start plotting out what you’re going to do with yours.

I’m still not sure I’m embracing this new model in which TV writing aspirants can use stories and plays as their writing samples, but if you’ve decided to do it, take the time to learn what it looks like when it’s done well, and think about what makes the good ones good.

Lunch: an amazing Indian lunch at a humble Indian restaurant/grocery in Glendale called, I believe, “India Sweets and Spices”. Mixed vegetables, raita, something wonderful made with “snake gourd and potatoes,” pickles, rice, chapati, samosas… wow.

When you came up with the central idea of your spec script, you probably described it to others very succinctly. “House treats an ailing psychiatrist who only allows treatment if she can psychoanalyze House in return.” Or “Michael and Jim spend a day that feels as if they’ve traded lives.” You probably had a tidy little one sentence hook like that.

But then you started work. You broke the story into scenes, figured out act breaks and an arc and a progression of events and a conclusion. You developed a B-story and braided the two stories together so that they influenced or commented on each other. You made sure all the regular characters had some way to participate in the story. You found interesting character moments that taught us something new about the characters without contradicting what we already know. You found dramatic moments and emotional pay-offs.

Now that you’ve got all that done and you might even have a completed draft, you should check to see if that original spark of an idea that made you want to write the script is still there. Is it still clear that this patient is engineering moments with House in order to analyze him? Is the Jim-and-Michael life-trade thing still in the script or is it just reading like Jim’s having a bad day while Michael has a good one? It’s very easy for the original notion to get muddied while you’re working. It’s like an underlying image that’s been traced through so many layers of paper that it’s rendered indistinct.

Sharpen it up. (Or, if a better concept has emerged during the writing, sharpen that one up.) This is a good time to quiz your test readers. Ask them what the basic idea of the story was and see if they got it. You want people to read your script and not just see a bunch of stuff that happens. You want them to see a story that hangs together as a whole, and that little one-sentence notion is the stapler that makes that happen.

Lunch: Burger King’s Whopper Jr. Burger King features tomatoes a lot more than McDonald’s does. Interesting.

I have a notion, gentle readers. Let me run this past you. I am being told with ever-increasing (almost table-pounding) vehemence that specs of existing shows are no longer what you need to get staffed on shows. You need original material. Spec pilots, short film scripts, feature-length film scripts, plays, even short stories.

But, as we have discussed at length, to get into the ABC/Disney writing fellowship, one of the rare glittering unlocked doors in this town, one needs to submit a spec script for a show that’s currently in production.

Now, traditionally, there have always been only a handful of “specable” shows every year. But it seems to me that since this spec no longer needs to be something universally-acceptable that you can submit *everywhere*, since it will, it appears, probably be used only as part of this one application, perhaps we should consider throwing the doors open a little wider as we contemplate what to send to Disney.

If you’d rather write a Battlestar or a Friday Night Lights than a House, a How I Met Your Mother or a 30 Rock than a The Office, maybe it’s okay to pick something a little more off-the-beaten-track, or a little newer, like that. You’re taking the chance that the person who reads your script knows the show, so keep that in mind, but you are going to do your very best writing if it’s a show you’re passionate about. Remember that it has to be primetime, so don’t throw yourself into an “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” spec, but it might be worth taking a searching look at the primetime network and cable schedules and picking something that you think you can really cut loose and excel at even it’s not the same thing everyone else is doing.

And remember, you can only be as good as the show, so don’t aim low in the belief that you’ll impress readers by elevating a mediocre show. Impress them instead by capturing an excellent show.

Lunch: spicy hot wings with many many napkins

There are some shows that have two distinct types of episodes. Usually the distinction is between “arc” episodes and “stand-alones.” I imagine you already know the difference — one concentrates on developing the ongoing storyline of the season or series, and the other presents a complete story through to a conclusion that doesn’t progress the overall arc. “The X-Files” was a show that had a very clear division between the two types of episodes.

Some episodes have elements of both types: maybe a stand-alone B-story paired with an arc-driven A-story, or maybe an episode that appears to stand alone but that turns out to have a surprising impact on the season arc in its last scene.

Your spec script, even if it is for a show that is predominately arc-driven, will need to have at least some stand-alone elements. In fact, it should probably have as many stand-alone elements as you can get away with. So when you’re looking at produced scripts, using them to try to put together a template for the structure of your spec, try to use stand-alone episodes as your examples as much as possible. If you’re purchasing your scripts and can only afford a few, make them the most highly regarded episodes plus the stand-alone episodes.

Don’t think that stand-alone episodes are somehow less satisfying than arc-driven ones. There can be a temptation to dismiss stand-alones as “skipable” or as easily-resolved-crises-of-the-week, but it doesn’t have to be that way. A stand-alone might not push the storyline, but it can totally push character development. And character development TOTALLY trumps storyline.

Lunch: egg foo yung at the Universal Cafeteria. Very omelet-like.

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