JaneEspenson.com

I’m planning a whirlwind last-minute trip for the 4th of July – just a long weekend, really, but fun. As a result, I got to go buy travel books the other night! Whee! Hey, you know what books I love? Those “100 Places to See…” books. Usually travel guides assume that you already know you want to go to Maui or Peru or Greece or whatever. But those books open it all up, and you end up considering places you’ve never thought of. That how I ended up in Tobago a while back… one of those books said it was the place to go, and it was.

Those books remind me of a great brainstorming technique that my friend Michelle told me about once. It’s called “One Hundred Bad Ideas.” It’s just what it sounds like; you make a list of one hundred bad ideas for a sitcom or a drama or for a House spec or for a movie or a short story. The fact that you’re calling them “bad ideas” frees you up to put down absolutely anything that crosses your mind. After all, they’re *supposed* to be bad. But, truth be told, you don’t really have one hundred bad ideas. Once you’re thinking about your subject, and being free and accepting with all your ideas… some of them are going to be good. Possibly really good.

Do it pretty fast. A quarter hour, maybe, until you run dry. You probably won’t complete the list. You’ll run out of ideas, bad and good, before you reach one hundred. But the fact that you will try as hard as you can to finish it, also means that you’re not settling for the first idea you came up with. This is incredibly valuable. The reason I started my writing career with *two* spec Seinfelds is that I had a better idea when I was halfway through writing the first script. I’d jumped on my first idea too soon.

I actually, right now, have a file on my computer called “100 bad ideas for a sci-fi drama.” It has 52 entries – that’s when I fizzled out. I actually love about fifteen of the ideas on the list, and will probably invest some time in all of those fifteen, playing around to see if they can be turned into something. Most of the ideas are, however, legitimately bad, as they should be. I was going to excerpt the list here, except that I have realized that one’s bad ideas are a very personal thing. We all need to feel free to put down *very bad* ideas without fear that anyone else will ever see them.

Okay, if you insist, here’s one of the more detailed entries: “A person is split into two people, a man and a woman. They need to solve a task together to re-integrate. They hate each other, but must stay together always or lose any chance of becoming one again.”

A wee bit contrived, no? Other entries are much shorter, by the way. “The Monkey’s Paw, the series,” that kind of thing.

So go crazy! Especially if you’ve decided to tackle a spec pilot. Looking for a family sitcom idea? A single-camera half-hour idea? A cop drama with a twist? One of each? Start making lists. You’ll be amazed what you’ve got kicked into the corners of your brain.

Lunch: tofu pups and fresh tomato.

Addendum: Friend-of-the-blog Jeff Greenstein adds this story from art school: “On the first day, my painting teacher told the class, ‘You are about to paint 100 bad paintings. So just go ahead and get ’em out of the way so you can start painting the good ones.'” Nice!

He adds:

“I think of that often when I look at my early spec scripts.”

Remember when everyone was saying “my bad”? It had a brief popularity, totally blowing the equivalent form “mea culpa” right off the charts. Now I hear neither much. I suspect that self-blame is just out of fashion.

And yet I should note the fact that I let the closing date for the ABC writers’ fellowship slip past us uncommented-upon. My culpa, seriously. Especially since I got a big packet of blog-letters delivered to me today, some of which are from people asking pressing questions about their fellowship submissions – how to compose the bio, and that sort of thing. Oops. The mail is collected for me and sent to me in batches, so there can be a substantial time-lag. Sorry about that. I hope you all feel happy and comfortable with what you ended up submitting. Besides, I have no inside knowledge of what the ABC people look for in a bio: diversity, I guess, so I hope everyone stressed the things that make you different, culturally and otherwise. Ever been in jail? Mention it. It’s different and it’ll go better than if they find out later.

I also hope everyone took the day off after dropping their scripts into the mail. Because the day after *that* should be devoted to starting the next spec script! Yay! A new show to pick, a new world to learn, new voices to master!

In fact, one of the letters asks a great question about selecting the show to spec next. Austen from New York has written a spec “The Shield”. She has been told that she should have “two spec scripts that complement each other and one ‘wild card’ script.” Good advice.

So now she wants to know how to pick a script to “complement” the Shield. It’s tempting to think about a show that is “opposite” to the Shield and come up with… what? “Reba”? But the fact is that what you want is opposite, but not too opposite. She’s going to want a drama.

She asks if it should it be network instead of cable? Or a show that draws more female audience members, like Grey’s or Medium?

Yeah. Pretty much, Austen. There aren’t a ton of specable options right now, and I think you’ve done a good job of pointing at two choices. Grey’s Anatomy and Medium would both complement the Shield. “Veronica Mars” would provide even more contrast, but I’m being told that it’s still considered a bit out of the mainstream. It could work as your “wild card” spec.

Speaking of which, that wild card could be anything from Veronica to a mainstream show like House to something SciFi like Battlestar to something bizarre like a novelty Bonanza or Columbo spec or a spec pilot or whatever.

Austen asks a further question. Given that she is a woman writer, should she be conscious of the fact that her spec is for a show as aggressive as The Shield – a show that is assumed to be very masculine? Strangely, no. For a town that is in some ways very hidebound and traditional and sexist, I have found no resistance to women writers on even the most violent and male-dominated shows. Although women are still under-represented, it looks to me like we’re under-represented in a very even-handed way. This is just my Jane’s-eye view. Stats could show me to be wrong. Mea Badda.

But I do know for sure that lots of women writers have spec “Shields” or “Sopranos.” And lots of men wrote “Gilmore Girls” and “Buffy” specs. Which is good. Of course, that also means it doesn’t really set you apart. You can’t sell yourself as the girl-who-writes-tough-specs. Maybe a lot of us had the same idea.

So everyone out there, boy or girl, slip on a skirt and write some Grey’s Anatomy. You’re going to want something to contrast with your cop shows.

Lunch: cherry yogurt, granola and coke-with-grenadine.

I’m a member of the Television Academy, so I get to vote for the Emmys, which is pretty cool. This year I was interested to learn that the process was going to be internet-driven for the first time. Yesterday was the due date for nominations, so the previous night as I logged onto the super-secret internet site, I was filled with feelings of entertainment-based power. But, I quickly realized, the internet only provided a location on which the academy had posted all the shows and episodes which were eligible for nomination. The actual ballot itself was still a fill-in-the-bubble paper dealy which had to be in the offices of the accounting company by 5PM yesterday! Yeeps!

So I spent my afternoon, yesterday – literally my whole afternoon – driving downtown, parking, walking to the correct building, turning in my ballot and driving home. Hours, this took, gentle readers. Traffic, confusion, lots of walking… The guard in the building had a sort of harried look as he escorted me to the correct elevator. I asked him if he was seeing a lot of people walking in with yellow envelopes today. “Don’t *even* ask,” he said wearily. Well, apparently I wasn’t the only writer in town who misunderstood the rules.

Sometimes we misunderstand them. And sometimes we break them on purpose. You’ve probably been told not to “do the director’s job” when you write a scene. You already know that you shouldn’t specify a bunch of shots. And you’ve probably also been told not to tell the actors every time you want them rub their eyes or scratch their nose or take a sip of something. You should let them do their own scratching. And yet, there is a situation where specifying this kind of thing can be very useful. Especially in a spec script. Because, of course, you don’t have to worry about ticking off the actors. You’re writing for readers, not in order to be produced. No actors at all. So, you can feel free to *use* those little actions to control the pacing of your dialogue.

Here’s what I mean:

GUY
Someday, I swear, I just have this feeling that something transformative and wonderful is going to happen to me.

Guy takes a sip of his coffee, thoughtful.

GUY (cont’d)
Or something transformative, anyway.

See that? I was able to give the reader something like the same effect you’d get with (beat) or (then), but with a little more style, a little more sense of the length and quality of the pause. A little more help with the visuals.

And even better, if you can capture a distinctive action that’s associated with an established character, you help give your script that authentic feeling. A Buffy scene feels even more like Buffy with a little “Giles pauses to clean his glasses” in it. And everyone loves a bit of “Adama looks sharply up from his desk,” or “Michael glances uncertainly toward the camera.” I know I do.

Lunch: I bought a jar of a sort of lentil-based stew at a Persian market. Tried it over tofu noodles. Yummy!

They’re tearing down a building near the one I live in and putting up a bigger, fancier one. I had some concern that my pretty view would be blocked, so I went to the public hearing at the … what was it … some kind of planning commission. I imagined that I was letting myself in for an evening that would manage to be both boring and contentious. It wasn’t as bad as I feared, but, yeah, there were aspects of both boredom and contention as the issue of parking garage clearances was debated. There are some TV jobs that feel like that. You have to sit and listen to people arguing passionately about adjective choice on an episode of “Mom’s in the Kitchen,” or whatever.

Which brings us back to bad television. Yesterday, I talked about the benefits of bad television. But bad TV is more than just a crappy wonderland of writing examples. It’s also potential employment. If you’re writing spec scripts, you’re doing so in hopes of being hired by a show. Sure, you might be hired by House or Battlestar or Veronica Mars. But you might not be. You might instead be hired by “Cat’s Got Your Tongue,” a new drama about a kleptomaniac demon passing as an ordinary housecat.

What do the writers on “Cat’s” do, then, to try to get a better job the next time they’re on the market? They write spec scripts. Even very experienced writers sometimes have to write fresh new specs. If you’re on a high-profile show, you can use the actual episodes that you have had produced as your samples, but if your show is more obscure or not respected, you’re going to have to write something better-known and classier. Some writers embrace this as a chance to prove to themselves that they can still write quality. And, in a way, isn’t that part of the glory of the spec process? It gives us all a chance to see how’d we do if we were handed an assignment by our Dream Show.

So keep Tivoing the good shows, and keep collecting produced examples and keep polishing your spec-writing instincts. You’ll probably be using them for a while.

Oh – and don’t worry that as a not-yet-hired writer your specs will be competing against the specs of people already in the business… they’re competing for higher-ranking jobs. You all are just competing against each other. And you KNOW you’re better than each other.

Lunch: quesadilla and a coke.

There is a small white dog who lives with an old lady in my building. The dog’s name is Precious. I think she might be an old lady herself. She never begs for attention — doesn’t want to offend by taking up your personal space — but given the smallest encouragement, she’s all over you. She’s like a respectful but ultimately eager red-carpet correspondent at the Oscars.

Ha! Analogy! I’ve talked before about using analogy in dialog. But a quick search of my own scripts reveals I do it even more in stage directions. It can be a quick and evocative way of conveying exactly the effect you want.

Some of you may have been instructed to avoid flowery and figurative language in stage directions. But even the sparest stage directions have room for analogy.

In produced scripts, these can serve as helpful guidelines to actors and directors about what you’re looking for, like this one from a Buffy episode:

“Dawn concentrates, and very slowly, she lifts one foot… And falls face forward like toppling timber, landing out of frame.”

Or it might be an instruction to an effects person. This fragment is part of a description of a ghostly figure attacking Buffy:

“…two thin arms forming to crush her like a coiling snake”

Or perhaps to an animator. This one is from Animated Buffy:

“Cordy freezes, looks around, like a shark smelling blood.”

But since you’re writing spec scripts, all of your analogies are instructions to a *reader*, helping them quickly and easily picture what you had in mind. The fact that they also color the read with emotion is a bonus. A huge bonus. One that the ultimate viewer of an episode would never know about, but that a reader gets the full effect of. It can be a spec writer’s secret assistant.

“He sits astride her, hunched like a vulture,” does more than accurately describe a posture. It sets a tone for the interaction. “Angel hovers over and behind Griff like a storm cloud,” tells you not just that Angel has snuck up behind someone, but that something big and dark and dangerous is about to happen. In a script I read recently, there was a description of people “eaten away by disease like gypsy moths.” Wow. Talk about setting a tone… tattered, sad, inevitable, unclean, passive, gray… it’s all in there. Accomplished in seven little words.

Don’t overload your script with these, of course. It’ll start to read like a parody of that noir style — “She sashayed into my office like a trolley car with a drunken conductor” — Fun, but not right for your spec Grey’s Anatomy.

Find those non-verbal moments in which you’re going for a specific look or feel, and see if an analogy doesn’t serve you well.

Lunch: Chicken wings from Koo Koo Roo.

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