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Several times during my career, I’ve heard experienced writers tell variations of the same funny true story. They’ve turned in a script to the network for approval, and the network executives have grimly told them that there are big problems with the script. They require that some character be fundamentally changed, or that a theme be entirely reworked, or that some other sweeping change needs to be made. In part two of this funny true story, the writer makes a one-word or one-sentence change to the script, like adding the word “proactive” to the character’s initial description or adding something like “He stands victorious, his mission complete,” to the final stage description. In part three of the funny true story the writer hands the script back to the network, expecting to be slapped for their impudence, but is instead praised for having made such a substantial change in such a short time. No one is sure exactly what was changed, but they know it felt better this time.

The moral of this story is NOT that network executives don’t know when something feels wrong with a script. In fact, they do. Instead, the moral is that sometimes the person giving you notes on your spec script — your friend or family member — might not have a sense of which script problems require big solutions and which require small adjustments. All they can do is let you in on it when something that they read doesn’t feel right. They’re about pointing at the problem. As the writer, you’re in charge of finding the solution. So listen and don’t panic. The change you need to make might not be as big as you fear. It’s like that old saying: sometimes the biggest fractures need the smallest bandages.

Lunch: knockwurst with sauerkraut

When you’ve finished a draft of your spec script, you give it to friends to read, right? And then you wait for their reaction, as if you’re being tested. Well, you are, kind of. But here’s something interesting — you’re also testing your friends.

You’re going to need input over your spec-writing career and beyond. Writers often — almost always — have friends read drafts before they submit them, even once they’ve got well-established careers. And they know *which* friends to hand them to because they’ve paid attention to which ones read carefully, which ones give constructive advice, which ones share their sensibility…

So start paying attention now. If one of your readers likes everything you do, well, that’s perfect if what you most need is an ego-boost (which is possible), but it’s not great if you really need advice. If another one has confident and specific recommendations but can’t answer simple questions about the plot, then maybe they didn’t read as carefully as they think they did. Someone else might be good at detecting problems, but might also leave you so demoralized that you lose confidence in your ability to fix them!

If you test your readers a little bit and keep track of them, you not only figure out whose notes work for you, you might even end up with a sort of tool kit of readers: someone who can help you sharpen your jokes, someone else who senses structural problems, and someone else to fluff the ego (it really is important).

Lunch: soup and the “thai crunch salad” from CPK

I don’t normally like to tell tales from the writers’ room in this blog, gentle readers. But I do have to let you in on this. Every day, at 4:15, guess what happens in the writers’ room at Eureka? Automatically, apparently unbidden, bowl after bowl of hot fresh buttery microwave popcorn is loaded onto the table in the writers’ room. Every day.

That is just *one* of the reasons that you guys should keep polishing those spec scripts!

Speaking of your spec, let’s talk stage directions for a moment. You’ve probably figured out that I’m a big fan of them. I’m always telling you to make them poetic, to use them to convey a sense of style, of fluid storytelling, to do the work that visuals do in a produced episode. However, they do slow down a read, and you need to be careful not to overuse them.

Let’s imagine, for example, that you have scripted the following moment (this is adapted from a moment in last week’s episode of The Office):

MICHAEL
Wouldn’t you ladies like a male stripper at your party?

The camera finds the owner of the voice — it’s MEREDITH.

In my opinion, this reads better without all the information about how you intend it to be shot — without the indication that the speaker is off-camera, and without the stage direction. Like this:

MICHAEL
Wouldn’t you ladies like a male stripper at your party?

MEREDITH
Shut the hell up, Angela!

The joke still plays, and it reads cleaner, quicker, and I think funnier, without the indicated direction. I think the second option is preferable, even though the reveal of the usually quiet Meredith was very funny in the produced episode.

It can be tempting to use directions all the time, in order to transfer the episode as it exists in your head, into someone else’s head, but you have to be careful not to try to stuff too much in there. You’re auditioning for the role of writer, after all, not director.

Lunch: chicken piccata with mashed potatoes and broccoli

I watched an episode of Medium the other night, gentle readers, and I noticed something interesting. They do very abrupt scene transitions on that show, clearly on purpose. The space between the last line of dialogue in one scene and the first line of the next one is generally the same as between two lines in the same scene. It gives an interesting effect, because as a viewer you have to adjust on the fly — oh, we’re in a new place now — over and over.

I haven’t seen a produced Medium script, but it would obviously reflect this stylistic choice. Scenes wouldn’t end with the very-commonly used, almost automatic stage direction: “Off her reaction, we… CUT TO:” since the cuts do not come off reaction shots.

The question on the table, then, is, to what extent is it important that your spec script reflect stylistic idiosyncrasies like this one? (I’m not just talking about Medium here, but about all the shows you might spec and all their little quirks.)

There’s actually not an obvious answer to this one, since, as we’ve discussed before, you never know if the person who is going to read your spec will be very familiar with the actual show. As a result, it’s possible you could violate all sorts of rules that a show follows and still be fine if your storytelling is sharp and your dialogue is snappy.

But why not get it right? If I were writing a Medium, I would execute the scene transitions in their established style. I would also try to make it very, very clear that I was making the choice to do so. After all, you don’t want an uninformed reader to think that you’re making abrupt, jarring transitions because you don’t know how to do lingering emotional ones. I might even go so far as to do something like this:

ALLISON
Some line of dialogue

INT. NEXT LOCATION

And I would do some kind of variation on that for the first several transitions, making it clear that I’m making a choice. I wouldn’t even blame a writer for going so far as to write a stage direction like:

And in classic Medium-style, we cut right into:

Lunch: tried to get to sushi, but LA was a big snag today. Ended up at Jack in the Box with those stuffed jalapeno things. Good.

Ooh, gentle readers, you know it’s always a fun day when there’s a guest speaker. Today I’ve invited showrunner-type Jeff Greenstein, currently of Desperate Housewives, to speak a little more about highbrow jokes and obscure reference jokes in general. He speaks first about jokes whose brows are so high they’re not even on their own heads anymore:

“You know, the best examples I can think of are some of the jokes in the “earlier, funny” Woody Allen films. Jokes that wind up getting a laugh on pure rhythm, even if you don’t get the reference, e.g.: “As Balzac said, there goes another novel” or “When it comes to relationships, I’m the winner of the August Strindberg award.” [Another] one of these is SO ASTOUNDINGLY OBSCURE that it’s actually TRANSCRIBED INCORRECTLY in the published script of Manhattan: Diane Keaton’s character refers to her crippling headaches as “like Oswald in Ghosts” (meaning the syphilitic character in the Ibsen play), but the transcriber, obviously assuming Oswald means Lee Harvey, renders the line as “like Oswald and ghosts,” which means exactly nothing.”

Hee! I love knowing this stuff, don’t you? Now, it’s pretty clear that a joke at this level of difficulty is not going to help your spec script. The rhythm of a joke might draw a laugh in a crowded jovial movie theater, but it’s not something that works very well on the printed page.

So I suggest you aim a bit lower. There are certainly reference jokes that are almost as obscure, though not highbrow, and this makes them at least a bit more likely to find an audience. Jeff gives a really cool example:

“… [M]y all-time, ALL-TIME favorite obscure-reference joke was on 3rd Rock. They had a scene in which Dick Solomon (John Lithgow) goes to the airport to pick up his supervisor, the Big Giant Head, played by William Shatner. “How was your flight?” asks Lithgow. “Terrible,” Shatner replies. “There was some kind of gremlin on the wing!” Lithgow gasps: “THE SAME THING ONCE HAPPENED TO ME!!”

Of course this is a staggeringly ingenious reference to the fact that Lithgow and Shatner played the same role, that of a terrified airline passenger who thinks he sees a gremlin on the wing, in the Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” — Shatner in the original series, and Lithgow in Twilight Zone: The Movie. Phenomenal.”

Readers aren’t going to be impressed by an easy joke. Writing an easy joke is like being an easy date. Make ’em work for it. They’ll appreciate it more.

Lunch: cheese-jalapeno bagel from the local Coffee Bean

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