JaneEspenson.com

So, tonight, I stumbled upon a rerun episode of “Scrubs” on Comedy Central while waiting for The Daily Show to start. And I saw a lovely example of a neat trick that can be a real help when you’re writing a spec script. It’s the ol’ unanswered question trick. And it’s based on the notion that you don’t need to explicitly give the audience any information that they can figure out on their own, because audiences like to figure things out. And, even more importantly, that they secretly like to be kept waiting.

It’s such a simple trick. If the story’s been building up to a big question like “Are you leaving me?,” “Will you marry me?,” or “Are you a vampire?,” you can have a character finally get up the nerve to ask it, and while the audience is waiting, breath all bated, pulse all poundy, you cut away to some B-story scene. Then come back to the character who asked the question, behaving in a way that tells you what the answer was: they’re crying, dancing, or lying bloodless in an alley. There’s something totally compelling about never having to hear the actual answer. This is *even though* it seems as though you’re violating one of the basic principals of screenwriting by moving a big moment off-screen.

The truth, is, of course, that the big moment, in this case, is not the action, but the reaction. And it’s made all the more powerful because we join it in progress, and because we aren’t given it when we’re braced for it, but somewhat later. It’s like that trick where someone pretends to punch another person, then pulls the punch, and then sucker-punches ’em real fast as soon as they relax. Neat, huh?

Lunch: Tamales at “Mexicali.” Get this, they were totally over-salted. That never happens. Weird.

Hello, Gentle Readers! I’ve been shamefully absent recently, as a fierce writing schedule and the holiday left me unable to blog. But I have returned. And I’ve got a good one for you today.

I was talking with a producer of feature films the other day who was raving about a script she had just read. She commented, with some surprise, on the fact that she wasn’t just enjoying the movie that the script could become, but that she was actually enjoying the script in and of itself. Scripts, she pointed out, aren’t usually the most satisfying form of written literature.

But they can be. A spec script is the only kind of script in the whole world that is ultimately intended for a READER, not a VIEWER. If you can make it read like a short story, with a sense of flow, of narrative verve, you’re going to positively delight your readers. One way to do this is to try to give the script a sense of a conventional flow of sentences, allowing them to bridge over the different tiny units that make up a script. Here’s what I’m talking about. Let’s suppose you’re writing the last action line in a scene. Try adding a little bridge into the next scene. Like this. (Keep in mind that these entries aren’t good at depicting script format.)

—

She closes the book, looking troubled. And then suddenly we’re in…

INT. HOSPITAL

—

See how that worked? You can also do something similar to lead from action into dialogue. Like this:

Davis SMACKS the club into his hand as he says:

DAVIS
You’re a very unlucky man

—

Another good place to do this kind of thing could be at the end of an act:

And before we’re even sure what we’re seeing, we:

CUT TO BLACK.
END OF ACT ONE

—

You can still obey all the conventions of script writing, while sort of laying standard sentence structures on top to produce sentences that would almost read uninterrupted if all the choppy script formatting stuff were taken away.

You don’t have to do this all the time. You don’t want the script to read as if you’re so new to the script form that you’re simply over-elaborating. Just throw this technique in here and there to give the script some readability.

For some reason, this technique also seems to convey confidence. There’s something about it that suggests the writer is loose and relaxed. That also will impress a reader. Which is a very good thing.

Lunch: A piece of homemade pumpkin pie. Mmmm.

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.

Oh my. I have been busy. I’ve been on set, my friends, watching the shooting of Andy Barker, PI. Fun! Hanging out with Andy Richter? I’ll say it again — fun. This is going to be a great show, people.

And I picked up a neat tip. When it’s very late and very cold, and they bring the hot foil-wrapped burritos around… get an extra one just to tuck against your belly under your coat. It’s like a hot water bottle only with beans. Delightful!

By the way, those of you who live in Southern California, or who happen to find yourselves in an area where a show or movie is being shot, might enjoy doing a little work as an extra.

****CORRECTION: This is not an invite to be an extra on Andy Barker — this is just a mention of the idea of extra-hood in general. Yikes — I should, like, read these things before I post them, huh? *******

Before I got started writing, I signed up with an agency in San Francisco that supplied extras for movies shooting locally. You can completely not see me in “The Doors” for example. I’m also entirely not visible in a television movie about Patty Hearst. It’s fun to get a bit of exposure to the filming process, if you haven’t had a chance to see it in person before. And it might give you a bit of the sense of what it’s like for the writer/producers, watching a scene as it’s shot and trying to figure out, on the fly, how to make it work better.

Which brings me to this. You know that little moment in your script that sort of *bumps* you every time you read it, because there’s something a little off about it, but the moment before it’s so good and the moment after it’s so good, and you can’t really figure out another way to get from one to the other? Well, imagine watching it being filmed, watching that bumpy moment over and over again, watching actors trying to make it work, discussing it with the director… bleahh. Fix it now! Even though you’re writing spec scripts, I think it’s still helpful to imagine *every moment* of your script getting loving attention from a whole lot of professionals. At the very least, doing this can raise your subconscious concerns about your script to the conscious level, where you can fret about them!

Lunch: chicken meatballs, salad and steamed veggies, wheeled out onto the golf course where we were shooting. Fun!

Hi all! I just got an interesting question in a letter from Lilia in Houston! She asks about my writing space: What’s on my desk? And do I listen to music, eat, take breaks etc? Well, this is a fine opportunity to talk about how there’s no magic formula.

My main laptop computer has died, so now I’m using my old back-up laptop, which doesn’t have a wireless card. So I’m umbilically tethered to a dealy in the corner. I am now — and always — lying on my back on the floor in the corner of my living room, head propped up against an ottoman, computer on my raised knees, typing while I built a neat wall of blankets and candy wrappers around me. This, as you might guess, is not ideal. Ideally, I would be wireless, which would mean I could do exactly the same thing, but from over there, on the sofa. Notice that I do not have a desk at home. I like writing when it feels… I guess… like lolling on a bed, writing in a diary or something. Like doing something fun. Offices and desks feel like work. If I feel the urge to be really structured, I will go to the library and work there in the Reference Room, with the long tables and the hushed clicking of all other laptops. (I have a desk at work, of course, but I do the vast majority of my writing elsewhere, almost always at home.)

I take frequent breaks to trundle around on the internet or eat Doritos or watch an episode of The Office, but I never keep the TV or music on once I actually start typing. Voices distract me completely. Sometimes I write early in the morning, sometimes I stay up late writing… I have no real pattern.

So forget all that stuff about having to have a writing schedule, or the discipline to work for long stretches of time, or even about having a comfortable and well-ordered working environment. All you know about the people who make those statements is that *they* require those things. If you’re happy writing on the bus, or writing everything in notebooks before you type it, or writing while blasting rockabilly on your ipod, or writing with small children rampaging around you… do it! If sitting at a desk looking at a neat row of sharpened pencils sets your teeth on edge, go slump in an armchair. Don’t worry about your posture — your mom’s not there!

And, as long as I’m answering a question from a letter, I should let you all know that not every letter that I receive gets an answer here. This usually means that I don’t know the answer, and can’t begin to know how to address the question — although I’m always delighted to have received the question. (I keep the letters I can’t answer, by the way, in case I get some kind of insight later.) Sometimes I don’t know the answer because the question is about a topic I’ve never given enough thought to, and sometimes it’s because the question is beyond the scope of the blog. I try to limit myself to topics that relate to the writing of spec scripts. So bigger questions about getting agents, finding contests, finding work… these are simply things I don’t feel qualified to answer other than pointing at my own past and squeaking helpfully that the Disney (ABC) Writing Fellowship got me started. My expertise, I’m not afraid to tell you, ends at the edge of the page.

So keep writing to me… and if you don’t see an answer appear here — well, I guess it’s kind of like winning “stump the band.”

Lunch: a BLT on toasted rye and a lemonade at Bob’s Big Boy. I don’t think rye is the traditional bread for a BLT, but it was very nice together.

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