JaneEspenson.com

Have you read “A Martian Wouldn’t Say That”? It’s a hilarious collection of memos from television executives to television writers, and some responses going the other direction, too. Many of these, obviously, are from the earlier years of television, in which these communications presumably actually involved “memos.” Anyway, it is sooo funny. Trust me. You will actually fall over laughing, so consider a helmet.

One of the great exchanges in the book has to do with an executive’s surprise that there is no clue in a character’s dialogue that that character is black. The writer replies that this was an intentional choice. The exec’s reply: “Well then, how will the audience know?”

I’m reminded of this exchange sometimes when I read scripts that attempt to capture the voice of a character with a particular background… ethnic, national or even, say, vocational. The spec script versions of Spike or Giles (from Buffy) are sometimes positively stuffed full of “bint”s and “bloke”s. And every word out of a soldier’s mouth is an acronym or a “yessir.” And the Southerner spouts folksy sayings about grits and drops “y’all”s like magnolia leaves. It’s as if the writer is asking “how will the audience know?” Well, they know Giles is English because he sounds English. No matter what he’s saying. That’s how an accent works. You don’t have to try very hard to convince your reader that he sounds English.

You have to, to this extent anyway, trust your readers to know the voices of the characters that you’re specing. Let them do the work of “hearing” the character’s background; don’t try to do it for them. If you push it, you’ll end up with a sort of parody of their speech that’ll pull the reader right out of the script.

As in most things, follow the lead of the produced scripts. Use any specialized vocab no more often than the show does.

Sometimes I really think the trick of the spec script is to show off without looking like you’re showing off. Sometimes I really think the trick of success in general is the same.

Lunch: a very nice “Buffalo Chicken Salad” from the Cheesecake Factory. Actual pieces of fried chicken in the salad kept it from being too healthy.

Well, it’s time to open the ol’ mailbag again. Nic from Germany has a question about the spacing between action lines and character lines in a script – is it single or double. Oh! I love an easy question. The answer is whatever the produced example scripts do. As always, the point with technical execution stuff is not so much to do things right or wrong, but to do them the way the show does them. Get those produced examples! Nic—you were looking for Gilmore Girls scripts, right? Check out scriptcity.net for these.

If you simply cannot get produced examples of the show you want to spec? Well, if you’re using Final Draft, you’ve probably noticed that it has built-in templates conforming to the styles of many existing shows. These will help you get those little technical things right. If you’re still at sea? Well, I guess you can use the format of another show – most hours have a very similar format. But if this is really the situation you’re in, you might want to consider specing another show. It’s just too hard to get it right without produced scripts – and I’m not just talking about formatting details; there are so many other elements you can only get from produced scripts. You might think recorded episodes are good enough examples, but they’re really not.

There’s also a fantastic letter from Ryan in Canada. He wants to know how a Canadian might get work in the US TV industry. Well, Tracey Forbes was a Buffy writer who moved from Canada to take the Buffy job, and the way she got in always seemed very smart to me. She worked in Canadian TV first, got established there, then had her agent, armed with produced Canadian scripts and a strong US spec script, look for work for her here. It didn’t even take that long – it’s not like you’ll have to spend ten more winters huddled over the meager warmth of your LA dream. I think getting set up there first is more likely to pan out than to try to go from zero to Hollywood. I want to be clear here, that I’m not thinking of this as a disadvantage, but rather as an option that the rest of us don’t have — an extra way in.

Also, as I tell everyone, check out the ABC Fellowship. It might be a good option for you. Good luck to you, Ryan!

(By the way, this is probably a good place to mention that I’m not an expert on stuff like this… just a humble scribe with opinions on spec writing — ask everyone you can, Ryan. Maybe someone will have a better answer.)

A big wave and thank you to the other writers, including Jen, whom I met at the Serenity premiere. Hellooo!

Lunch: boysenberry yogurt and “reverse” Pocky — chocolate cookie on the outside, chocolate goo inside.

Hey, it’s Wednesday night. Wednesday night is when a new America’s Next Top Model episode suddenly appears on my Tivo. Whee! Isn’t that, increasingly, the way television seems to occur? With Tivo, and with DVDs, and with episodes available for download onto one’s microwave oven or whatever, we’re finally getting that programming on demand thing that I’ve been demanding since I was thirteen and couldn’t get home from dance class before Soap was half-over.

When a broadcast schedule becomes irrelevant enough, it will disappear. And when it does, it will take with it the most common problem with television scripts, both of the spec and professional variety. Namely: they come in too long.

When shows don’t have to fit into a neat little grid, they won’t have to be tucked into their little Procrustean beds at night. But until then, the page count of your spec script is very important. Look at the produced scripts of the show you’re writing. You can get away with a spec script that’s a few pages longer than these, but I wouldn’t recommend anything more than that. It will start feeling long to the reader, and atypical of the show. And that’s the last thing you want.

You’ve probably been startled at how much your story has expanded. This is almost certainly your problem, not the reverse. So you have to cut.

You’ve probably got good instincts about the first things that have to go. Beginnings of scenes, the middle of long speeches, trivial greetings between characters, jokes that are funny but that don’t move the story forward. They may be hard to cut, but it’s clear they have to go. And there are the little things, too. Streamlining the wording just a little bit might pull up a page; nudging a compound word onto one line with a slight margin adjustment might get rid of that orphan on page 50.

But sometimes you do all that stuff, and it’s still too long. Too often, writers look at the choice: cut story or cut character, and they choose to cut character. Story is the skeleton of the episode, they reason. It can’t be removed because it holds it up, gives it a shape. Character stuff is flesh. Reducible in many ways and not strictly necessary. Hmm. If you follow this reasoning, you’re going to end up with the spec script equivalent of a top model. Skin and bones with no meat. A lightweight of a script.

Look at your story. Is there a chunk that can go? Can you lose one whole misdiagnosis from your House spec? Can someone have one little piece of information earlier that moves the story ahead faster? After all, what do you remember from your favorite episode? The time House thought it was syphilis? Or the time he kissed Sela Ward?

Story is important, but it’s only important because it’s the stuff that happens to your characters. A ticking clock is meaningless in a room with no one in it.

Lunch: In ‘N’ Out burger. My God.

I had a delightful afternoon of Scrabble yesterday with my friends Kim and Michelle and Jeff. Little dogs playing at our feet, tiles clicking softly… Fantastic. I’ve known Kim and Michelle since we were all in the Disney Writers’ Fellowship together. It was that kind of bonding experience, and I cannot recommend it highly enough (It’s now the ABC Writing Fellowship). In addition to meeting people who will be your friends for life, you also get good practical writing advice and the thrill of seeing doors open that would have been hard to even approach otherwise.

As part of the fellowship, we television fellows (as opposed to the feature fellows – we were recruited in two camps), wrote a series of comedy spec scripts under the guidance of Disney executives. Comedy scripts only, because Disney was only producing comedies back then. We also were required to attend at least one sitcom taping per week. This began as a treat, and quickly became a chore. Our chaperoning executive actually pulled us out of the audience at Blossom one week because the Joey Lawrence fans were making a high-pitched sound of delight that was causing us physical harm.

There was also a strong recommendation that the execs made to us. They told us to hold our own little mini table reads at home, using the other fellows as actors, so that we could hear our specs. Nothing fancy, just a group of people with scripts on their laps. Having this kind of read is a suggestion you will probably hear from others as well.

I would exercise caution.

Homemade table reads are great if you’re writing a feature or a pilot or a play. If you’ve created the characters, I mean. You can learn a lot about what makes dialogue sound natural. You’ll also realize how very, very, long a chunk of dialogue is when it’s read out loud. You’ll probably end up cutting words out of every line you’ve written.

But even then, there is a downside. If your friends are not actors, they may butcher what you’ve written. And then their awkward line readings are in your head!

And if you’re dealing with a spec script for an existing show, you’ve got even bigger problems. One of your most precious aides in this whole process is your ability to “hear” your actors reading your lines. You want to be able to “hear” Hugh Laurie or Edward James Olmos or Jamie Pressly when you read your script. And the one time that I GUARANTEE that will not happen is when your friend Missy is reading the role of Dr. House.

So be careful. Unless you’ve got Hugh coming over anyway, and he’s able to lend a hand, you might end up doing yourself more harm than good. Many would disagree with me, of course. If you try it and it works for you, then that’s great. But I rely so heavily on my little metaphorical inner “ear,” that I keep far away from anything that will get between it and me. (I also like my literal inner ear. It keeps me from falling down.)

Lunch: chips and dips and wasabi peas eaten while Scrabbling!

Many years ago, I read a friend’s spec feature script. It was a murder mystery, a classic who-dunnit. In the script, there was an obvious suspect. He was shifty, clearly hiding something, and the clues all pointed to him. And then there was his brother. Clean and above suspicion — I think he might’ve been a senator. But he shared a blood type with his brother (this was significant in crime-solving many years ago), and they also shared an agenda that overlapped on many interesting points, some of the same enemies, that kind of thing.

My friend the writer knew that clever readers/viewers would be looking for a twist. He knew they’d know that Brother Shifty didn’t do it. That they’d suspect Senator Brother. So he tricked ’em! The end of the screenplay revealed that it was Brother Shifty all along!

Thud.

We all have to deal with the fact that audiences are onto us. They anticipate most of our tricks. The only response to this is either to play a different game, stop writing who-dunnits, or to make fancier tricks. The untwisting of a twist is not gonna get it done. Because no one is going to enjoy being told that the killer was the guy standing over the body with the bloody knife.

What my friend needed to do, of course, was come up with another option. Recently, the other option of choice has been confidante/best friend/lover of the investigator, the one person they trust. But audiences have caught onto that one, too. If my hero beds a new girlfriend during the course of his investigation, I pretty much assume she’s the killer. If he gets crucial advice from a brother cop who’s been tracking this killer for years, well, then, it’s the cop.

If he has a new girlfriend AND a brother cop? Well then, now it’s getting interesting. But whatever he does, the writer can’t look backwards at Brother Shifty or Senator Brother. He needs to keep pushing ahead. Maybe even by twisting the twist again: It’s the investigator himself, rendered unable to remember his own act! (Seen it)

It’s a terrible game, really, since in order to be shocking, each new step forward pushes credibility that little bit farther.

Keep track of what a savvy audience is going to anticipate. They ‘ve been watching TV shows (or, for YOUR audience, reading spec scripts) for a long time now. They’ve seen a lot of twists. Not just in who-dunnits, either. In all kinds of stories. They know that if the heroine of your sitcom kisses a guy she just met in a bar, that it’s going to turn out to be her new boss and/or her roommate’s boyfriend. They know that if she meets a great guy on the phone that he won’t look like what she pictured when she meets him in person. Think about what they’ve seen before, anticipate it, and then shoot past it. And good luck. This is hard business, surfing the anticipation curve.

Lunch: a ground turkey with fennel seeds thing I found in the South Beach Cook Book. Really good!

« Older Entries

Newer Entries »