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Hello again, Gentle Readers! I’m fascinated by all the parts of the television writing world that don’t generally communicate with each other. Even sitcoms and dramas often seem to live in very different worlds. Get farther out and it’s a different galaxy: game shows, daytime dramas, late-night comedy… it’s all TV writing, but it can follow totally different procedures. I recently corresponded with Friend-of-the-Blog Syndi, a writers’ assistant at Sesame Street. Here’s her account of their process.

Syndi:

The Sesame Street writing process seems so simple compared to what you’re used to. We have a team of 10 writers, which includes our head writer. The entire group meets a couple of times for some general brainstorming. Then, the producers decide how many of the 26 episodes will be assigned to each writer. Then, to each writer, I assign a show number (we use show numbers instead of titles), a letter of the day, a number of the day, and an assortment of muppet and human cast (per script).

Any changes that the producers would like to see are communicated to our head writer via our Executive Producer. (The Exec. Producer has ultimate say.) Once those changes are put into the script, it’s pretty much ready to be met on in a production meeting. Any changes that come out of the production meeting would constitute a revision, or at the very least, revised pages.

How cool is that? Can you imagine getting your assigned letter of the day? It’s easy to get very near-sighted about TV writing, and to think that the whole world is primetime drama and comedy, but there are many fine streets in the world, and one of them is called Sesame.

Look around and make sure you’re aiming at the job that really interests you, because there’s more than one way to do this.

Lunch: a Caesar salad with garbanzo beans — nonstandard but delicious

Gentle Reader Sharla in Boulder has a great question. She’s been writing spec scripts for existing shows, so that she’ll have some really great samples to submit for fellowships. With those finished, she’s moved on to writing spec pilots, so that she’ll have those ready for when she actually needs to get an agent and a job. Don’t you love it when someone works their plan? It’s inspiring. But she’s hitting an interesting obstacle.

“While writing my fellowship spec, I was working with characters that had so much background. Based on what they’d done and said in the past, I was able to craft their dialogue to fit the voices I knew and loved. And even when I did write an off line, when I read back over it, I could usually tell, oh, this doesn’t sound like so and so. Now when I’m writing my own characters, I seem to have lost that intuition. Since I’ve just created them, I don’t know what they sound like! […] In a way, I feel like it should be freeing to write for my own characters, but it’s like it’s too much freedom. I just can’t get their dialogue to focus.”

Yes! I know exactly what you mean, Sharla. I faced the same thing when I started writing pilot scripts, and that was after I’d had years of professional experience of writing for other people’s characters. This is a great question.

I’ve found two different approaches that can be helpful:

1. Borrow and combine. There’s nothing wrong with continuing to write for characters you know and love, just grafting them into your script. Got a tough, interestingly flawed character? Try using Starbuck’s voice. Got a blowhard character? Ted Baxter’s voice isn’t busy. It’s like dream casting only with characters instead of actors. Since the circumstances of your story will make new and unique demands on the characters, the voices will naturally have to be adapted, which will prevent your script from sounding like a series of clips from other shows. You can also combine traits — give House’s way of speaking to a female character or combine two characters to make someone new. It’s not stealing, it’s adapting. There’s nothing wrong with using someone else’s springboard to dive into your pool.

The second option is harder, but much better:

2. Identify a type and use it to create your own breakout character. Sometimes, when you meet someone, you realize they remind you of someone else you know. And it’s not a physical resemblance, but something else — a way of dealing with others and a way of interpreting the world. When that happens, you are identifying a type. It’s most obvious with crazy people. If you’ve had encounters with crazy people, you’ve probably found that some of them remind you of other crazy people you’ve encountered before, and you’ve probably developed your own way of dealing with them based on what’s worked before. You’re predicting their behavior. You do it with less extreme personalities, too. Your cab driver suddenly reminds you of your father-in-law, or your new boss reminds you of your college roommate, and you form certain expectations about how they’re going to act, what they’re going to find funny, what they’re likely to say in a situation. It’s the meticulous observation of types that can allow comedic actors to create instantly successful and memorable characters, and it always works best when a type is familiar to us from interactions, but hasn’t yet been presented to us as an archetype. The “aging Brit rocker” type is now growing familiar, but not long ago, he was running wild in the world, not yet pinned to the collection board. The “cougar” hadn’t been captured regularly since Mrs. Robinson and now she’s everywhere. The “teen girl cynic” — new-ish and ubiquitous! What’s the next type to be observed and captured? Find it, pin it down, write the heck out of it! You’ll have Barney from How I Met Your Mother or Tracy from 30 Rock and your script will sparkle.

ADDENDUM: Please note that these aren’t the only options. They’re just two that I have found helpful. You can also, of course, come up with a unique character unlike anyone you’ve seen or met, or you can pattern a character after one person you know — there are many ways to go about it. I just happen to like the two I listed.

Lunch: the 2 cheeseburger meal from McDonalds in the car on the way to Norwalk to vote early. VOTE EARLY!

Sometimes I receive kind letters tucked between the pages of novels or other works of prose. The notes are from the authors, which overwhelms me — people who manage to put together book-length amounts of prose impress me beyond my own meager words. Books — have you looked at these things? The words go all the way to the margins! Do you know how hard that must be?

Sometimes the authors are pointing out a reference in their book to the influence of Buffy on their lives. Thank you very much on this score to Brianna Hope Jacobson, the author of Mortified, a collection of teenaged writings edited by their now adult authors, and Doreen Orion, author of Queen of the Road an off-beat travel memoir. Thanks also to Jennette Fulda (Half-Assed, a Weight-Loss Memoir), Austin Grossman (Soon I Will Be Invincible), Lani Diane Rich (The Fortune Quilt and Maybe Baby among others), and Eugene Ramos (one of the nine collective co-authors of The Artifact) for their wonderful words. James Kennedy (The Order of Odd-Fish) was especially gracious in his note. And there are more, the books currently residing in my home on various bookshelves and resisting my efforts to locate them.

Sometimes these authors mention that they’ve found something in this blog that applies to their variety of writing, and that they’ve been able to apply it. I’m tremendously flattered to think that might be true, since I myself write entirely — other than a few short stories and this blog — in script format.

But today I had a thought that is directly applicable to prose writing, so I’m going to lay it out there. It’s about the granularity of detail in a scene. (Do novels have scenes? I mean, they do, but I’m not sure they’re called that. You know what I mean.) Sometimes a novel has been sweeping along, covering days and weeks efficiently, and then you get a long slow start to a scene — I’m thinking of a specific one in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. (SPOILER ALERT) On page 159, chapter seven starts with “Ashima sits at the kitchen table on Pemberton Road, addressing Christmas cards.” And the action slows to a maddening crawl. On purpose. We hear about the cards, the envelopes, the address books, the tea kettle. She gets a call, ends the call, the scene goes on, and the fine fine grain of the scene tells you that something very important is about to happen. And it does. Ten full pages later. And, my goodness, those are a great ten pages because you’re so tense throughout that you’re in danger of cracking open. (END SPOILER ALERT)

It works because the readers know that a scene wasn’t included for no reason, so they keep waiting for the reason, but it also works, I think, for a deeper reason having to do with the human brain. The precise reporting of inconsequential details mimics the way our memories go into retentive overload in dangerous or emotional situations. It’s the effect that makes spills and collisions suddenly seem to go into slow motion as we experience them, because we’re suddenly hyper-aware of every moment. A great prose writer like Lahiri can capture that feeling on the novel’s page.

Now, can you apply this to script writing? Yes! And since you’re presumably writing spec scripts, not scripts for production, you can achieve it remarkably easily through the novel-simulating magic of stage directions. Don’t make them long, because the readers will skip them, but make them frequent and you’ll get the effect of slowing down the reader, slowing down the scene. Do it right (a mild suggestion of danger inherent in the situation helps) and you’ll get suspense. Let me try it. Let’s say that John is making a phone call as he walks down a empty city street on a cold night:

He picks up the quarter and pauses, looking around…

See how it’s all suspensy? It’s not just the situation, it’s the level of detail and how it slows it all down. Sometimes you want danger to blindside your character, and that can be great too, but if you want suspense, play it like a novelist.

And thanks again for the lovely notes, all you prose writers out there!

Lunch: “Green Eggs and Ham” from the breakfast menu at Moe’s, a (primarily) burger place in the valley. Lots of spinach and avocado. A new discovery!

I’ve mentioned the amazing Friend-of-the-Blog Jeff Greenstein before, and here he is again with a great idea. He suggests that I talk about the right way to open your spec pilot. Yes. This is huge — a lot of people never read past the opening, so making it as perfect as possible is crucial. Jeff says: I am a big believer that the opening line of a pilot (or the opening image, or the teaser) should be the series in microcosm.

Yes. Exactly. I agree. I do this and I suspect many other writers do as well. In fact, Jeff is prepared to prove that they do. Here is a darn impressive list he composed:

In the Cheers pilot, the teaser is Sam with an underage kid who’s trying to get a drink using a fake military ID. Kid says he was in the war. Sam asks what it was like. “It was gross,” the kid replies with a shudder. “Yeah, that’s what they say — war is gross,” Sam replies. The teaser gives you a sense of the place and the guy.

The West Wing pilot: In a bar, talking off-the-record with a reporter, Sam Seaborn is distracted by a hot girl who’s giving him the eye. This show is about politics and sex (well, it started out that way), and the “backstage” lives of people in government.

Wow. That’s a fantastic list. I would add the teaser of the pilot of The Wire, in which a detective gently interrogates a neighborhood kid about a senseless murder — the gross illogic of which the kid takes in stride. The series’ whole sense of an overwhelming inescapable system of crime is there in that scene.

And the Buffy pilot teaser? Remember, it was that bit that looked like the girl was about to be munched by a vampire, but in fact SHE was the vampire? It told you to throw out your dramatic expectations, that danger could come from anywhere, and that women were going to have some power in this world. It was Buffy’s own story, but told from the vampire side first.

Writers tend to agonize over their teasers, especially that first page, and especially if the project is a pilot. If you’ve just shrugged and started with your main character waking up in bed, then I’d suggest that you might’ve missed a really good opportunity. Think about the heart of your show — what’s the central dynamic? The central message? Is there a way to capture it in your opening sequence? Go ahead, agonize. It’s good for you and your spec.

Lunch: wonton soup at Noodle Planet.

Sometimes you think all the puppies are born and then there’s one last puppy. Here’s one additional thought for yesterday’s litter of script errors. Fellowships that ask you to submit spec episodes of series that are already on the air often specify that you can choose any show currently airing, or words to that effect. In an effort not to be the four thousandth The Office spec that a particular reader has to read on that day, let’s imagine that you decide to be more original. That might be a good idea, but try not to drift too far afield. If only one of the readers is familiar with the show you’ve chosen, then you’re in luck, you only need one reader. But what if none of them are?

You’re probably safe with off-net but critically popular shows. I mean, yeah, Mad Men is obviously totally spec-able, and you can dig deeper if you want — I’m thinking of something like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. And shows that have been around a while, like Monk — that’s probably pretty safe. But in the television multiplex we now have some more obscure shows. It’s very important that the readers know how to evaluate your mastery of voices that you did not create. Don’t make it harder for them to do so. Don’t drift too far off the ranch.

And if you go the other way and decide to go with The Office? Well, the show is packed with clear voices, which makes it, frankly, a lot easier to write than a show with malleable mushy characters. You should be able to feel it when you’ve nailed, for example, a Dwight line. Yow! But of course, all the other talented aspirings are out there pumping their fists too. So make your script memorable. Don’t try to do so with a really crazy out-there concept that the show would never do, since the whole point is to be exactly like the show. Do it by making the concept precise, making the turns surprising but not random, and making sure that every joke is the best it can be. There’s always another joke. Don’t be afraid to think of an alternate for every joke in your script — even the ones you like. You don’t have to change to the new one, but what if you find something better? You’ll only find the better joke if you look for it.

Lunch: scrambled eggs with salsa and French bread toasted in the oven

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