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The mission statement for this blog is to talk about the writing of spec scripts. But, fairly frequently, I meet people who don’t write at all, but who read because they’re simply interested in the process of writing for television. Hi, non-writers! Welcome! And, I suppose, you writers might also sometimes be interested in knowing something about the process beyond the spec script part.

Which leads us to a cluster of questions sent in by gentle reader Jason in Tennessee. He’s a Buffy/Angel fan, intrigued by the shows’ complex mythology. Take it, Jason!

“I’m curious about the way a mythology is developed — is it planned out at the beginning of a series by one person, or is it built slowly by several writers? Where does a seasonal arc come from, how is it broken up from episode to episode, and what sort of flexibility do writers have for including pieces of overall seasonal development into their own individual, stand-along episode?”

He goes on to ask “how the demands posed by outside forces (network politics, sponsorship, special effects, budgets, guest directors, etc.) impact the writers, and also the integrity of the show’s seasonal story arc.”

Holy cow, Jason. That’s a lot of questions. The answers, unfortunately, tend to vary wildly from show to show, so it’s going to be hard to be coherent here. Let me try.

The mythology of a show sets out the rules of the world and how the main characters fit into it. The basics of the mythology are actually part of the initial pitch when a writer is trying to sell a series to a network. So, yes, that is generally the work of one writer — the show’s creator. Of course, that creator will have had help and input from all sorts of places, including his or her friends, fellow writers and certainly from studio or network execs.

And, as you might expect, the mythology as initially devised doesn’t cover enough to take a show though many seasons without being augmented, altered and affected, as you point out, by outside forces. So the writers have to be a bit flexible. And sometimes of course, they have to ask for an audience’s indulgence. Androids don’t age, so please ignore our actor’s subtle wrinkling. Or, we know we had Frasier say his father was dead, but now he’s not, so… um… I guess he lied before?

Seasonal arcs, the continuing story lines that shape a season of a show are sometimes developed seasons in advance, but usually are planned during the first meetings of a show’s staff at the beginning of the writing year. They might be developed committee-style, or they might be decreed by the show runner. Sometimes arcs are sketched out separately for a number of main characters (Desperate Housewives, clearly, has this). And some shows, undoubtedly, don’t even have the arc planned, but rather let it develop. So I’m afraid there’s just no one answer to this one either.

But let’s imagine we have a seasonal arc in place. It doesn’t, obviously, come broken into 22 different segments. So, as the staff works together to “break” (i.e. devise a rough outline), for each episode, they have to figure out how, how much, and if, they are going to advance the arc in any particular episode. Since a writer is never sent out to write an episode until they have an outline, no individual staff writer really ever has to decide during the writing of an episode if they’re going to advance the arc or not. That’s already been determined during the break. But, again, there is variation here between shows — some allow writers more or less autonomy in making changes during the writing process. One show I know allows writers so much autonomy that an individual with a brainstorm could end up changing the whole season arc — you know, if the show runner liked what they did and didn’t send them back to change it. Other shows are very rigid.

Finally, we reach the question about outside forces. Again, it just serves to underline the need for flexibility in questions of this kind. Many a staff has laid out a season arc and started writing scripts only to discover that an actor is pregnant, quitting or untalented enough that they need to simplify some emotions. Or perhaps the network vetoes a choice. Or issues of cost might curtail the big season-ending parachuting sequence. Or maybe someone just comes up with a better idea.

However, two of the factors that were listed in the question aren’t really forces to worry about too much: sponsorship and guest directors. I’ve never been on a show where a sponsor affected our story-telling. And I’d be pretty pissed if it happened. And in TV, most directors are “guest directors” and they also have limited powers to affect how we write the show. They might have notes, and often they have suggestions for cool ways to shoot something that the writer might not have thought of. But it would be, I think, fairly unusual for a director to do anything that would affect a seasonal arc, or even the main point of any one episode. They simply usually weigh in too late in the process, after the script has been written, rewritten and approved by everyone involved.

So, there you go. The short answer: Every Show Is Different. This is one reason that I think it’s valuable to work on a variety of different staffs before you run your own show — you get exposed to many different ways to handle these issues. Television isn’t written by only one procedure. Even the Very Best Television is created in many different ways. Clearly, there’s more than one way to skin a cathode ray tube.

Lunch: I reheated a left-over Croque Monsieur from Campanile. Grilled cheese that tastes like fondue. Wonderful.

I took a sewing class in junior high school. We all had to. Everyone took one quarter each of wood shop, metal shop, sewing and cooking. I suspect it was considered quite innovative at the time, allowing girls and boys to be injured in various ways all at once. Anyway, the shop classes were kind of fun. My mother still owns the enormous wooden desk name plate I made for her. It takes up a large piece of her dresser. And I did well enough at the cooking. I’m motivated enough by the prospect of eating pie, to be willing to learn how to make pie happen. But the sewing. Oh man. Patience and fine muscle control? Oh dear me, no. I was given a passing grade provisionally, on the condition that I continue to come by the sewing room to finish up my unwearable skirt. I never went back. I didn’t even wear skirts, and I had no faith that my circle of fabric was ever going to be one anyway.

But I found this entry today on a web site about dresses. Read it through. It’s not about dresses! It’s about writing spec scripts!

When she talks about touching all the fabrics in the store — that’s watching tv. And then there’s reading about writing, natch. Hence this blog and all those ‘how to write for tv’ books. And picking a garment based on what you already own and like — that’s selecting a show to spec.

The only difference… you don’t need to buy a new machine to write a spec. The one you’re sitting in front of right now is all you need.

I swear, that web site made me feel like I could sew. I hope it makes you feel like you could write a spec. Because you can.

Lunch: a big homemade salad with cucumbers and beans in it

Hey, Gentle Readers, get ’em while they’re hot! Copies of Bob Harris’s new book Prisoner of Trebekistan are sailing off the virtual shelves! And along the way, I’m learning so much about this whole other side of the business of writing. It’s fascinating. Turns out that authors don’t get Nielsen ratings. How do they stand it? Anyway, exact sales are hard to judge. But the anecdotal evidence is piling up that people are reading / people are loving. There was a rave review in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, for example, that burned up the pages with the warmth of its praise. Run on over to Amazon and grab yourself a pile o’ copies!

And as long as we’re in the neighborhood, the book also serves as a great example of the “what is it about” school of writing. This was the phrase that Joss Whedon drilled into our heads over at Buffy. It’s an important approach to writing that will, guaranteed, make your spec scripts sparkle and stand out from all the others.

Plot is hard. So when you find a series of events that actually string together to make a story — a beginning, middle, end — it’s tempting to consider the job done. In fact, it’s tempting to throw your arms in the air and caper in circles singing “We Are As Gods.” But unless the story is *about* something, all you’ve done is come up with a pile of stuff that happens. And that can leave readers and viewers with a sense of arbitrary action, a sense that a different pile of stuff could’ve happened without it making a lot of difference.

When writing a spec (or even an episode of a show for which you’re being paid), the mistake is in starting with the story. Instead, think first about what you want the episode to be about — is it about the triumph of love? The destructive quality of envy? About how expecting the worst in others brings out the worst in oneself? About how emotional resiliancy is better than virtue? About kindness trumping truth? About how love isn’t blind, but wishes it were? About how emotional infidelity is worse than physical? About how an anticipation of betrayal can cause that betrayal? About how denial can sometimes be a choice? About how living a happy life is also a choice and not an event?

Find something like that — something you believe in. Now, you’re ready to find a story.

Non-fiction, of course, makes this whole process harder, because you *can’t* change the events to reflect what you want the story to be about! You have to find a marriage of events and meaning that doesn’t distort either. That’s hard. That’s why, when a nonfiction book manages to do it, it’s so darn satisfying. Remember that book “Into Thin Air”? It accomplished this. And “Prisoner of Trebekistan” does too. In it, we see how an attempt at becoming a Jeopardy champ leads to a tentative embrace of learning, which then catches fire and turns into a transformative quest. It’s about how knowledge changes your life in touching, unpredictable and hilarious ways. Now that’s something to be about.

If you’ve already got a spec story that you love, you might have already done some of this subconsciously. See if you can articulate what the script is about. Then go back through the script and find places to make the “about” powerful and clear. You’ll end up with a script that will justify all that capering and god singing.

Lunch: Left over garlic-cheese bread from the Smokehouse restaurant and canned beans from Australia.

Did you know that in the FBI, agents are either referred to by their names or by the title “Special Agent”? None of this simple “Agent Scully,” “Agent Mulder” stuff. Never done. Ever. I know that because we had a technical advisor on one of the shows I worked on recently who was a real live active FBI agent. Of course we ignored him on this point. “Special Agent Jones” sounds stilted, unlikely and long. Sometimes the truth is stranger than than fiction, and sometimes it’s just wordier.

Two of the shows I’ve worked on recently have employed technical advisors. This is incredibly helpful to the writers on a staff. On The Inside, the advisor kept an office right there among the writers. Very helpful. He’d tell us all about what we got wrong, until he gradually gave up on the “Special Agent” thing. Battlestar Galactica has an expert too, for astronomy and, as far as I can tell, all other things scientific. I got fascinating notes on my script from him. Did you know that radiation is different than radioactivity? You did? Oh, so that was just me, then.

Anyway, this is all in service of a question from Nic in Germany. She’s asking about how much research she needs to do on the diseases and medical terminology in her Grey’s Anatomy spec. Of course her question also applies to everyone writing a House spec. And there’s all that law stuff for the Boston Legal spec-ers. And police procedure for The Shield. And what about inside late-night-TV stuff that’ll be useful if Studio 60 becomes the next hot spec? If you’re a writer employed on those shows, you have resources. Some shows even allow their writers to simply indicate where the techno-talk goes, and then let the advisors suggest lines. Star Trek: The Next Generation writers were known to simply write “tech tech” as a temporary line until the advisors weighed in. But for a spec, you don’t have this option.

I can only say, hail the internet. Remember how the parents in Lorenzo’s Oil became experts on their son’s disease? Well, that’s you, and the spec script is your son. You simply have to do the work. You can make up stuff where you simply have to, but try to be as accurate as you can.

A great source can be those nonfiction cable shows like “Diagnosis Unknown,” and “The New Detectives.” And those “true crime” books, like the excellent ones by Ann Rule, can also be good sources for crime stories. Newspaper items are also useful. Take a real story and change it to conform to the needs of a television story, and you’re starting out with data that you *know* is good.

For example, all this current spinich stuff is ripe for picking! If I were writing a House spec right now, I’d be studying all the articles and thinking about how a food contamination outbreak could complicate the diagnosis of some completely unrelated disorder. (Maybe a disease caused an iron shortage, so the person ate a lot of spinach to try to replace the iron, but the spinich was contaminated, and reacted with the original disease, masking it or exacerbating it… )

And, as always, study those produced scripts. If your characters use specialized terminology in their jobs, you can usually master those terms just from looking at how they’ve used them in other scripts. I don’t know what a “chem seven” is exactly, but I sure heard those doctors on ER order it often enough.

Want another Battlestar anecdote? In my episode I had a character refer to a planet’s “atmo,” meaning, obviously, “atmosphere.” It sounded perfectly natural because I knew I’d heard characters in produced episodes use the term. I was right. I had. But they were produced episodes of Firefly. Battlestar character don’t say “atmo.” Oops. Make sure you study the *right* scripts.

Lunch: A Whopper Jr. from Burger King. It really did taste char-broiled, but not in a good way. Kind of a lighter-fluid flavor. Bleah.

Remember when I told you all, a while back, about Melinda Snodgrass? She’s the writer who actually had her Star Trek: The Next Generation spec script produced. Amazing. Specs are supposed to be writing samples only! The only interaction an actor is supposed to have with a spec script is to ignore the person typing one at his local Starbucks. When I told you about Melinda, I said she was the only writer I knew of who had ever accomplished this feat.

But today I learned of another such case. One of the writers on the Andy Barker P.I. writing staff was working as a P.A. on Third Rock from the Sun when he wrote a Third Rock spec. He was able to convince one of the writers on staff to read it… and the next thing he knew, he was sitting in the writers’ room, watching his script being polished up before it went in front of the cameras.

How ’bout that? It happens, Gentle Readers. It happens. Maybe it’ll happen to you.

Lunch: steak and baked potatoes and strawberries at Arnie Morton’s. The steak did not arrive as rare as promised. Sigh.

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