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Are you working on a lightly-humorous hour-long spec pilot? Are you finding yourself getting bogged down in plot moves and client-story elements that fail to even capture your own attention? Are you longing to bring the focus back to the main characters? Here’s a crazy thought: maybe your show isn’t an hour. Maybe it’s a (single camera) half-hour.

This won’t work for all shows, of course. If you’ve got a cop or lawyer show that hangs on dense plotting, or if it’s dark drama, it clearly won’t feel at all like a half-hour. But if it’s got a light tone, some funny, and doesn’t necessarily hang on lots of plot moves and suspense-filled act breaks, then it might work well as a half-hour.

Imagine that you were given the job of going through a stack of “Ugly Betty” scripts and cutting them down to a half-hour length. What would you lose? You’d probably cut all the arc elements, the running mystery stuff. You’d simplify the A-story too, reducing plot complications while trying to keep all the funny character moments. “Ugly Betty” obviously works well as an hour, but I suggest that if it were a spec script, that a half-hour version of it would have definite appeal as a little gem of characterization: funny, fast, and short.

[CLARIFICATION: I am not suggesting writing spec Ugly Betty scripts as half-hours. I was unclear here. What I meant was that if Ugly Betty had been a spec pilot, it would have worked well as a half-hour spec pilot.]

It’s not a prescription, but it’s an option.

Lunch: Vietnamese pho, this time with tripe in it. Yum! Tripe’s fantastic!

There is a thing that happens sometimes when you’re coming up with a story. If you’re still convincing yourself you can write without an outline, then it happens a lot. I’m talking about when a character doubles back on their own arc, ending up emotionally back where they started. A woman in love with her husband is told he’s been cheating. She leaves him, then learns she was lied to and goes back to him. She’s in love with him again just as she was at the beginning. It might feel like emotional movement as you’re writing it, because she’s angrily backing her bags at one point, and begging him to take her back at another, but since the beginning point and the ending point are the same, the story feels like a big never-mind.

Sometimes something similar happens with a pair of characters in conflict, who both change position and then both change back, twisting around each other in an awful double helix.

The problem actually grows out of good writers’ instincts. You want to write scenes in which something changes. So you have your character change. But then there’s another emotional scene. So you have them change back. It’s a yo-yo. Add another character and you can see how the helix thing happens. When I tried writing my very first spec script I had two characters switching positions so often that I ended up titling the script, “The See-Saw,” hoping that hanging a lantern on the problem would make it a virtue. It didn’t.

Keep a watchful eye out for this. Complicate your character’s emotional life so that going back to the starting place isn’t an option, put them in a three-dimensional world so that they can move off in unexpected directions, plan your scenes so that you aren’t improvising moves that you haven’t thought through.

Ban the yo-yo!

Lunch: butternut squash soup, edamame

Kathy in New York City writes to ask a question about aging spec scripts. She’s got a Grey’s Anatomy spec that is being quickly rendered antique by plot and cast developments on the show. She wants to know if she needs to update the script, or throw it out, or simply hand it over with the caveat that the show has changed out from under it. This is a common problem with the current surfeit of arc-driven shows. The shows change quicker than one can write the specs!

To answer the question, you’re probably best off replacing the script with an all-new effort, Kathy. That way, you’ll still have the old one and you can certainly hand it over with the “this got old” explanation in case someone wants to see it, but you’ll also have something brand new.

To answer the broader question, this is one of the reasons that the current trend is to write original material. It’s more in demand anyway, and it doesn’t present this problem. If you really want to write a spec of a show that already exists, you might want to pick one that is somewhat less arc-y. House, for example, although it has character arcs, usually relegates them to a smaller percentage of the script and is therefore easier to keep current.

Kathy also mentions that produced Gray’s episodes have also now touched on some of the plot elements that were still virginal and pristine when she used them in her spec. Hmm. Depending on the degree of similarity, this is of less concern to me. If they’re just themic similarities then you certainly don’t have to worry about anyone thinking you lifted them (if they even know the show thoroughly enough to notice the overlap), and you can take them as a sign that you’re thinking on the same wavelength as the paid writers. If, however, these themes have now been so completely explored on the show that your spec feels like it’s replowing old fields, then you probably should retire the spec anyway on the grounds of sheer exhaustion.

You should pretty much always have a new spec (for either a produced show or an original) in some stage of the process: either plotting or writing or polishing. If you never shut the factory down, you worry a lot less about a fire in the warehouse. Or something like that.

Lunch: bowtie pasta, pesto sauce

The ABC/Disney Fellowship and Warner Brothers’ Workshop provide places to use your spec scripts for produced shows, and the Slamdance Competition is a place to use your spec pilot scripts. So it starts to seem as though there’s no fear of misapplied effort — all your scripts can be sent somewhere. Except not really.

So what’s the sort of television spec writing that has no application? Writing for produced shows that no longer exist. If you have ideas for stories for Firefly or The Sopranos or Wonderfalls, then you might have some fine fanfic, but there is simply nothing else to be done with them that I can think of. Very occasionally, someone will get attention with a clever spec-script re-interpretation of a classic show, but I’ve never heard of anyone who’s been able to do anything with a script for a contemporary defunct show.

I know that some shows have lines of novels that continue after the show is over. I don’t know anything about the process the publishers use to produce these books, except that it’s completely separate from the production of the (ex-)show itself. I guess you should write to the publishing company if you want more info about writing the novels, but this is a very different sort of writing than I address here.

I know it’s hard to let go of a favorite show (trust me, I know), but part of the tv biz is about exactly that. You’re entering a career that will stretch out over many years, and many shows. Don’t get into the business because you’re in love with a particular show. Get into it because you love writing and can imagine finding joy in it even if you aren’t hired by your dream show. Then, when the next Buffy, the next Battlestar, comes along, getting to be involved is a glorious bonus. A really really glorious bonus.

Lunch: bomboletta pasta with lobster — I’ve never had this variety/shape of pasta before. It’s like the wagon-wheel shape before it gets sliced into disks, if you can picture that.

A spec script is a lot like an audition. Actors and writers both don’t get hired until they’ve showed off what they can do. But it can also be more than that. It can also be a lot like an interview, a chance to say a little bit about your background. If there’s something about yourself that you think makes you an interesting addition to a writers’ room, you can use your spec script, especially a spec pilot, to tell your future employer about it.

Now, normally, I’m a bit skeptical about the “write what you know” advice, since, taken too literally, it means that no one gets to write about spaceships. I always point out that it should be taken to mean “write emotional truth as you’ve experienced it.” However, in this specific case, where you’re using a script to sell yourself and your point of view, there is something to be said for drawing on your own personal specialness.

Did you grow up on a farm? Train as a nurse? Witness a crime? Overcome dyslexia? Were you raised by your Filipino grandmother? Are you a twin? Does your family practice an unusual religion? Is your mother a cop? Is your sister a soldier? Did you win the national spelling bee?

If you’ve got something like that, a little hook, the kind of thing you’d drop into an interview situation to generate interest, then it might be worth putting your special knowledge into a script. There’s certainly no reason your lawyer hero couldn’t have a Filipino grandmother, and their scenes, written with authenticity, will probably end up stealing the show.

Now, if you’ve just surveyed your life and decided you’re boring and have never had any experiences, then it might be worth having some. I know a very good smart young drama writer who went out and took a “be a private detective” class. Just like that, he had something to talk about in interviews, something that made him valuable to a show runner, as well as something that could be used to give real authenticity to a spec script.

Remember, a spec might be art, but mostly, it’s a sales document. It’s selling you. Push the product!

Lunch: the “famous tofu reuben sandwich” from Factor’s Deli. Greasy and good. It tastes exactly like a real reuben, only it’s soft. No, seriously, it’s good.

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