JaneEspenson.com

You know what’s been bugging me lately? Words and phrases being used almost but not quite correctly. Sir, you mean “unkempt,” not “unkept”. “Whirlwind,” not “worldwind.” You might mean “incidents,” or you might mean “instances,” but you certainly do not mean “incidences.” And, Miss, you must mean “hot on the heels of,” not “hot OFF the heels of.” Good lord!

Oh, and if you say that someone looked as though “butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth,” you mean that they had a very cold expression, not that they looked sweet and harmless — what’s your reasoning there? That they look so benign they wouldn’t even harm butter?

The only thing wrong with feeling superior about knowing how to use these words is that each of us has a matching supply of words we’re using wrong without even knowing it.

This is yet another reason to make your friends read your scripts and give you honest and thorough feedback on issues like these. By the way, for stuff like this, you don’t even need to rely on your screenwriting friends. Try giving a copy of a script to your most literate “I only read the classics” friends. They may not have anything useful to say about space battles, but they are very likely to be the ones to tell you about the difference between “invoke” and “evoke,” “lie” and “lay,” and about that weird second “i” in liaison.

Lunch: Penne Arrabiata

Sometimes you think you’re being perfectly clear, and you’re not. I once wrote a line for an episode of Buffy, for the character of Xander. If I recall how it went, Xander was using whimsical phrasing to convey that he thought someone was crazy. It went something like this:

XANDER
Spike may have gone to the land of the twirly hand gesture next to the temple, but he was right…

No, really. I thought it was clear. The mental image of someone using their index finger to make a swirling motion next to their forehead to signify crazy is so unambiguous that I was certain everyone would be amused by the idea of a character describing the gesture rather than making it. Ha! Hilarious. No one commented on the joke and I assumed it was golden. And then we were on stage, shooting the scene, and it suddenly became clear to me that no one had the slightest clue what I was going for.

The problem, as I’m sure you’ve figured out, resides mostly in the word “temple.” The notion of forehead-corner just isn’t the first meaning of the word that comes to mind. And “twirly hand gesture” is pretty vague as well. The sentence that seemed to me to call up a clear and familiar gesture, seemed to most other people to call to mind someone waving their arms around next to a synagogue. Which they found strange, but not so strange that they called me on it.

I think in the moment we ended up playing the incomprehensibility of the line. Xander says it, everyone stares at him and he makes the gesture — Buffyphiles will recall if that’s what ended up happening , I’m sure. It’s not exactly the joke I intended, which was supposed to be swift and smooth, but it works fine. The point of the story is that moment of realization: I’d written a joke that was totally opaque, and no one pointed it out because they had no reason to even think there was a disconnect. This is why, when you ask your friends to give you notes, you have to ask them questions, not just take what they give you. “Did you get this line? What do you think it means?” — those are valuable questions that will help you make sure you’re accomplishing what you think you’re accomplishing.

Lunch: clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl. I can’t resist a bread bowl. You can eat it!

So, have you watched it yet? I’m talking about Joss Whedon’s “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”. It’s hilarious and you really should go watch at once.

Check out the joke in the first segment, the one about “Bait and Switch.” This is a brilliant joke. Go watch it and then think about it for a bit. Figure out how it works and then construct your own jokes using the same principles. Genius!

Lunch: tostada

I was in a situation recently where I had to create an original character for a series of scenes. Great. I gave him some interesting character traits and wrote some dialogue that reflected those traits and I was happy with the result. Then all the scenes had to be made drastically shorter. Instead of being a character with a dozen lines, this guy now had half that many. And suddenly, he didn’t pop any more. There was no sense of a character there anymore, just a person who said things.

The problem was that what can read as character complexity over lots of lines can just read as random noise in the short run. If you need a character to pop in just a few lines, it’s going to be hard to make them display the interesting apparent contradictions that give a character depth. I would recommend that you pick a nice simple description: optimist, trouble-maker, peace-maker, crank, blowhard, naif. Now you’ve got a way to focus their few lines and the audience has a hope of getting a sense of their core nature. If you ever get to come back to the character for a more extended scene, you can give them planes and angles then.

And it’s not as if you’re doomed to stereotype, either. You can write an interesting, even surprising, optimist. I know you can! And, of course, you can pick a trait that’s unexpected for the context. An innercity innocent or a plucky hell-denizen may have only one salient characteristic, but it’s an unexpected one given their situation.

Lunch: sushi at Echigo. Oh boy, I love that warm rice.

I’ve written on this topic before, but since it’s a revelation I keep having, it seems like it’s worth talking about again. There is tremendous value in writing out your stories in prose form before you begin writing. Write the A-story straight through and then do the same for all B-stories or even runners. It’s easy to grow enchanted with the transitions and themic connections between your stories and fail to notice that something within one of the stories isn’t working until you write it out as if it were going to be played straight through.

There’s another reason to do this, that I’m just now realizing, and it has to do with the nature of prose versus script or even outline-style writing. When you’re telling a prose story, you have to be very explicit about the subtextual stuff that won’t be explicit in what is seen and heard. I’m talking about sentences like “this is the moment in which our hero realizes that he’s been unfair,” or “with this event, we sense that the tide of the war is turning.” These are the things that sometimes seem unimportant in a script because they’re relegated to the sometimes-ignored stage directions, or because they’re such an evident presence that they never have to be said at all. But they loom large in prose story-telling of the type I’m talking about and they keep you focused on the most important part of script-writing: the sense of WHY IT’S IMPORTANT TO TELL THIS STORY.

The big turns, the realizations, the take-away emotional impact of the story are contained in all that unspoken stuff that makes up the bulk of a prose-style story document, but which remains discreetly behind the curtains in the script. Tracking it is crucial, but it can be elusive. There’s no cure for that as good as writing it the heck down. In order.

THEN, of course, rearrange what you’ve done into a standard outline, with all the scenes in the actual order they’ll appear in the script and with some thought given to transitions. You don’t get to skip that step.

Lunch: cheese, olive pate, avocado and one of those tiny loaves of French bread

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