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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.

Remember how I told you all once about how sometimes you will have the exact same idea for a script as someone else does, and that doesn’t mean that someone stole it. Even if you totally told your writing class about it or whatever?

The title of last week’s Ugly Betty: “The Lyin’, the Watch and the Wardrobe.” The title for one of our Jake in Progress episodes last season: “The Lying, The Watch and Jake’s Wardrobe.” Hee! So close and yet so clearly independently-arrived-at. If you’ve got both a watch and some clothing in an episode, it just kinda makes sense. And there’s always lying, so that’s just built in. Some ideas are just in the air.

And if you really think that someone took your idea for your spec script? Even then, you don’t have to sweat, because you’re gonna beat ’em on execution. No spec script wins a contest or an agent or a job based on the idea alone. Much more attention is given to whether or not you got the voices, the tone, all that other good stuff.

Lunch: chicken soft tacos from Del Taco. With Mr. Pibb. I have mistakenly identified this as Dr. Pepper in past posts, but Del Taco is actually only down with the Pibb.

So, all right, let’s talk more about that thing about not building a spec around a guest character. I’ve tended to follow that up by saying that centering a spec around the show’s main character is best. And certainly, there are shows where that’s the case. Most shows, in fact. A House without House at the center will not stand. BUT…

Friend-of-the-blog and dazzlingly successful writer Jeff Greenstein has told me of the specs he wrote, with his then writing parter to get into the business. Specs that got attention, that got them meetings. Their trick? Write to the underdeveloped character. Hmm. Interesting, no? This only works, of course, in a show with a strong ensemble, in which the series can shift the focus around a bit. And, of course, the main character should come into it somehow… crucially affecting or being affected by the story.
A good way to approach this technique might be to think about the main story being centered on the *relationship* between the main character and the underutilized ensemble character.

The example Jeff told me about was a spec episode of Murphy Brown, in which the story was created to center on Miles’ 30th birthday. Miles was a strong supporting character, who hadn’t, at the time the spec was written, been given tons of air time. And the topic of age/accomplishment is obviously well-chosen to get a reaction from Murphy.

I’m reminded of some of the Buffy episodes I wrote — “Superstar,” and “Storyteller,” specifically. This is one of my favorite things to do (although I have to say that the original ideas for these episodes came from Joss). I love taking a character who is secondary (or tertiary), especially if they tend to be discounted by the others, and showing how they are the masters of their own house, the centers of their own universes. In real life, no one is a tertiary character — everyone’s feelings count for as much as everyone else’s, so I like it when the same thing holds in Fictionland.

Be careful, gentle readers, don’t lose sight of the center of the show, make sure it’s an episode you think the actual writers of the show might write. Then pick part of the ensemble that has been out of the spotlight… and light it up!

P.S. Such good mail lately! Thank you to Micky in Long Beach for a great letter — good luck on the writing career, Micky! And a generous note from Cheryl in Lodi offers encouragement to Angie, the recent correspondent who contemplated giving up our ink-stained pursuit. Cheryl is finding that success in screenwriting doesn’t have to be limited to the under-30 crowd. She encourages Angie to hang in there. Thank you, Cheryl! I haven’t heard back from Angie — I hope that means she’s too busy writing spec scripts!

And candies! German chocolates from faithful German reader Nic! Wow! Thank you!

Lunch: scrambled eggs and cream soda

We were talking about action sequences, in answer to a question from Karen in Virginia. And I promised to tell you a little about writing action on some of my more recent non-Buffy shows. So here goes:

On Battlestar, I was confronted with something different than Buffy. Space-adventure type action, with CGI effects. Turns out, it didn’t really make any difference. Just like at Buffy, it was all about picturing it first, then writing it. And, as always, just as it is when writing spec scripts, the secret is to study the produced scripts. I studied how the ‘real’ Battlestar writers wrote the action stuff, and then made mine sound like theirs. Very lean and spare, just like they do it.

It’s probably worth noting that I still left the action stuff for last, but this is for different reasons than it used to be. I used to dread it, and leave it for last in the hope that the script elves (Tinker, Polish and Tweak) would take care of it for me. Now I leave it for last because the emotions in action sequences tend to be really straight-forward, so I can just skip over them while writing, without any fear that something subtle will happen in the scene that will affect the emotions in the next scene. These scenes get left for last because they’re the least important, not the most feared.

And that, really, leads up to the only trick-of-the-trade that really matters for writing action, now that I think about it: confidence, writing without fear. Action is just all about making a decision. This will happen, then that will happen. She’ll kick him first, or the Viper will be hit from the left. You can’t be vague with this stuff, so commit.

This became really clear when I got to write an action sequence for my latest project. On Andy Barker, PI, the Andy Richter half-comedy I’m working on now, my script required an unusually long action sequence in which Andy grapples with an attacker. Since I had more experience writing action than the other writers (who have spent their writing years becoming far far funnier than me), I tackled the sequence with more confidence than I usually do. And I love how it turned out — I used the props well, came up with cool little moves. I just generally wrote my little heart out. Confidence, I recommend it! And it should be easy to be confident about your action-writing skills since the greatest action-writing skill IS confidence. It’s a moebius strip of self-bolstering rationalization! Hop on!

Lunch: Chinese BBQ pork and noodle soup from Noodle Planet. Mmm.

I have just finished reading the oddest little novel. “As She Climbed Across the Table” by Jonathan Lethem. It’s a nifty little scifi/philosophy/humor/physics love story. You know the kind.

I want to call your attention to the following character introduction: “Georges De Tooth was our resident deconstructionist, a tiny, horse-faced man who dressed in impeccable pinstriped suits, spoke in a feigned poly-European accent, and wore an overlarge, ill-fitting, white-blond wig.” Holy cow. Talk about painting a picture. What I love about this description is that other than the information about field of study, all these things are observable. And yet, they tell you so much about his nontangible qualities.

This man clearly cares deeply about appearances, about hiding his true self. But he also isn’t interested in appearing especially normal. He wants to wear a metaphorical mask, but an unconventional one. And, since the accent is apparently transparent, and the wig is ill-fitting, this man, who is all about the masking, clearly isn’t very good at it. Even before he speaks, I expect him to be pedantic, defensive and self-consciously outrageous in his opinions. But how cool is it that I never had to read any of those words? (I do wish, however, that I knew how the wig was styled. I keep imagining a page boy, but I don’t know. I feel like it would help me understand Georges even better. Don’t you think?)

So I’ve started to think about how details in a character description can be better than piling on the abstract adjectives. A breathless woman in high-top sneakers, a twitchy boy with his shirt buttoned all the way up, an old man with a bandaged ear, a girl who giggles and tugs her sleeves over her hands, a college boy with hair over his eyes, a man with a thin smile and James Bonds’ wardrobe… all these details make us start inferring things about the characters, without ever having to write words like “nervous,” “dangerous” or “shy.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, because I’m writing a pilot. Those of you writing spec pilots are probably thinking about it, too. How much should we describe these new characters were creating?

Out of curiosity, I looked at the Twin Peaks pilot script. Some amazing characters were born there after all, I was curious about how they were introduced. I found that some were barely described at all. The series lead is merely:

FBI field agent DALE COOPER, mid-thirties, handsome in an unremarkable way.

Or course, he immediately begins talking into his tape recorder, making his character unique instantly through dialogue. Other characters are given more of a picture:

JAMES HURLEY, a handsome, clean-cut young man with intelligent eyes, in a black leather jacket, seated in the back corner, his motorcycle boots up on the back of the chair in front of him.

GIOVANNA PACKARD, wearing a coat over a brocade bathrobe, her beautiful hair and make-up in stark contrast to the harsh surroundings…

and

AUDREY HORNE, a delicate, Botticelli-like beauty, with a halo of wavy black hair and dark, haunted eyes.

Look at the last one. When you look at the literal meaning of this apparently physical description, all he’s really saying is that he hopes to cast a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl. But the poetry of the description tells the reader a lot more than that. Does she sound peppy or languid? Vapid or deep?

Scripts are a unique form of literature. Even a spec script has to behave as if the roles in it will be inhabited by actors. So you can’t create every mole on their shin, as a novelist can. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find clever, poetic, visual ways to start building their personalities in the readers’ minds. I’m going to try it in my pilot. You can give it a try in yours, too.

Lunch: A veggie sandwich on a crusty Italian roll from Bay Cities Imports in Santa Monica. Wonderful!

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