KRAFTY ON KINDLE!

I see that CRAFTY TV WRITING: THINKING INSIDE THE BOX is now available in a Kindle edition!

Theme Versus Territory

Several times now over the past few years, I've run across people asking me, or someone else, to clarify the "theme" of a TV show. Maybe this is a thing they teach in film school, I don't know. Thing is, I'm not really sure that successful television shows have "themes," in the sense of having an overall point that they're trying to make. Certainly television episodes can have themes. But a whole TV series?

I don't think people watch television shows in order to have someone make a point. This was a bone of contention on a show I worked on a ways back, where my producer kept insisting that every episode had to make a point, and every story line within it had to make the same point. It got in the way of telling fresh stories. I think people watch television shows in order to be told dramatic or comically compelling stories.

Does MODERN FAMILY have a theme, other than "hey, families are wacky"? Or 30 ROCK, other than, "hey, show people are wacky"? Does CSI have a theme, other than, "wow, there are a lot of bad people out there!"?

I think a show needs a territory. It needs a vein to mine. It needs a way to generate hundreds of stories. The problem with defining a theme for a show is that it limits your territory. Some stories may relate to your theme, but some other perfectly good, entertaining stories will have absolutely nothing to do with your theme.

Worse, if your show has a theme, you are more or less telling the audience how every episode is going to end, and how your main character is going to act. After four or five episodes, your audience is going to go, "Yeah, fine, I get it." And tune into another episode of THE SIMPSONS, whose endings are practically impossible to predict, because it has no theme at all.

(And at this point, you are probably trying to figure out a theme for THE SIMPSONS to prove me wrong. Yeah, they have endings where the family is back together again at the end. You could claim that there's a theme of "family is important." But I don't think that's what the episodes are about.)

Maybe talking about theme helps execs get a sense of a show. But I don't think in terms of theme. I think in terms of story engine. What's going to keep the show moving? Give me a show with a great story engine and no theme and I'll tune in every week.

The Show Writes the Show

My dear friend Shelley Eriksen gave a very touching tribute to Peter Mitchell when he received the Showrunner Award at last night's 2010 WGC Awards. The theme of her speech was that Pete Mitchell does not, in fact, hate you. But one other thought stood out. Once when she was working on a show with him, he pointed to a script he had written, and said something on the order of, "It doesn't matter who's got the writing credit," pointed to the title of the show on the script, "That's who writes the show."

The show writes the show. Your job as a writer is of course to satisfy the showrunner and make his or her job easier. YOu do that by finding the voice of the show.

You do, of course, bring your own talent and ideas. But ideally you are pouring all your talent and ideas into telling stories in the voice of the show.

I had an interesting experience on ep. 1.06 of NAKED JOSH, where I wanted to do an episode with a certain tone, and it became clear that the ship had already sailed on the tone, and I was trying to write an episode that was not the show. Even though I was the co-creator, I had to acknowledge that what the show wanted took priority over what I wanted.

The show writes the show.

An Epiphanical Conversation with Mark McKinney

Mark McKinney is one of the luminaries of Canadian television. He started his career as one of the iconic KIDS IN THE HALL, and then graduated to writing and performing on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. He has written (and acted) for Aaron Sorkin on two shows, SPORTS NIGHT and STUDIO 60; he is one of the creators (and actors) of the brilliant series SLINGS AND ARROWS. He is currently showrunning the funny and touching LESS THAN KIND for CityTV/Rogers. Created by Marvin Kaye and Chris Sheasgreen, the show follows a dysfunctional family in Winnipeg that runs a less-than-successful driving school.

Thanks to the Banff Worldwide Television Festival's wonderful Juli Strader, I had the great fortune to get to sit down with Mark McKinney and pummel him with questions. He in turn pummeled me with words. You would not believe how fast this man speaks. I wound up with six pages of half sentences, and I type pretty fast when I'm not trying to spell.

And he used the word "epiphanical." Correctly. More on that in a bit.

CRAFTY SCREENWRITING: LESS THAN KIND is billed as a comic drama. Is that accurate? And would you say there's a qualitative difference between comic drama and comedy? Does it deliver different goods?

MARK MCKINNEY: Good question, man. What we have is a truly [air quotes] "situational comedy." It's not a three camera show. We have a crazy dad, narcissistic brother... everyone does their little comic bit to create a hysterically funny scene. Can it be as funny? I hope so. But the tone is qualitatively different from a sitcom.

Is there a qualitative -- I don't know, are we overthinking it here? There's a consistent lightness to the themes you introduce in a comedy. Ours is more to the WEEDS end of the spectrum, seriocomic. The themes themselves can change from comic to serious.

CS: In Canada we do sketch comedy and faux newscasts, and we do single camera comedy. Why don't we do seem to do full out multicamera sitcoms in Canada?

MM: I think it's a challenge to put together a writer's room and populate it. A sitcom is really labor intensive. You need ten to fourteen bodies. And you need some gag guys and some structure people, and somebody who can step on the floor and showrun. A sitcom is a big beast. And all those people need to be experienced already. We have some people like that, but not a full room.

I hope one day we'll be able to do that. If we can repatriate the great comedy talent that's working in LA. There are some really good writers down there. For example, Gary Campbell, he's back now. He might intuit how to do it. Rob Sheridan is a state of the art -- one of the world class funny guys. If he wants to do three camera, maybe he'll figure out a way to do it. But you need a critical mass. You can't cheap out. You can't say, "We'll get an experienced comedy guy, and the other four from DA VINCI'S INQUEST.

CS: You've worked with Aaron Sorkin on two of his shows. What have you learned working with him?

MM: Certainly that I'll never be able to replicate what he does. He told me a story from deep in his childhood, listening to the neighbors argue. Fascinated by the sound, not the words. Absorbing the rhythms--

CS: --the music --

MM: -- the music, yeah. And that's how his ear is so acutely tuned, because it's musical. That's how he has such interesting varied dialog, going from banter to witty to semi-serious to semi-sweet.

We have a lot in common, and I like his shows. When I'm writing, I'm not aping it. But I think my span is wider. I can go from the darkest KIDS IN THE HALL idea up to two friends hugging in the moonlight, with a guitar, turning on the tear taps.

He uses a writing room in a different way than I do. On STUDIO 60 we pitched story. He was hungry for story, he'd come down to the writing room and we'd pitch him the beats, something he could latch onto, something he could run with. We'd pitch plot lines, present a resolution -- then he'd go away and, I think without any editing at all, write the episode.

And I understand why he had to do that, because for him it's about the music.

When I'm doing a show, I would never dare write the whole thing. We have writers, and they do their thing. Of course, you have to rewrite for tone all the time.

CS: (Realizing) My god, is LESS THAN KIND the first time you've actually run a show?

MM: I've sort of done of it all along. On KIDS I was participating -- there were sort of 15 of us showrunning. And SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE was entrepreneurial. If you wrote the sketch, you ran it. You worked with the costume designers, you were on the floor. This is the first time I've taken the title.

CS: So that answers a question I'd planned to answer about what were your personal and creative criteria for taking over LESS THAN KIND rather than focusing on developing your own shows, or working in the States...

MM: I read it, and I got invested in the material. I met with Marvin and Chris, had a long coffee with them, liked what they saw in their show. It was the family that was interesting. It just smelled right. And they wanted to do the same kind of show -- no-joke comedy [which I unpack to mean: comedy based not on a funny line or gag, but on the situation as the whole], actor-based casting--

CS: -- is that --

MM: -- maybe that was more me. A lot of writers and directors don't understand what actors can do. When you have Maury Chaikin, you change the way you write the role. You write to the actor.

CS: You experimented with an interesting narrative technique of having a voice over describing everything that was happening on the screen. Is this a new narrative technique so the show can simulcast on radio?

[A bit of background here. LESS THAN KIND aired amidst a comedy of errors any one of which, in the States, would have got people fired, and any three of which would have provoked an LA jury to bring in a verdict of justifiable homicide. Shows aired late, cut off early, aired in the wrong aspect ratio. One episode was heavily promoted and then pre-empted. The show aired repeatedly with the "second audio programme" turned on -- a voice-over provided on an encrypted second channel so blind people can follow the action.]

MM: That's an Ira Levy phone call. We had too much stuff to worry about.

[Ira Levy is the Toronto producer of the show. I asked him about it, but he grinned and kind of brushed off the question.]

I try to look at it as -- if we had tried to survive a regime change at an American studio -- usually every show greenlit by the previous regime is killed off unless it's a runaway hit. They renewed us for a second season, not even based on ratings, but based on the strength of their own feelings for the show. So I'm grateful to them for that.

[Mark McKinney is a very nice guy.]

CS: We hear a lot about the strengths of the American system and the weaknesses of the Canadian system. What are the strengths of the Canadian system?

MM: We benefit from being under the radar. This is one of the quirkier shows, and whether it would have survived on American TV -- we get to do interesting, different kinds of work. On the other hands the cable shows in the States have caught up. But it's kind of miraculous the shows I've been involved in.

CS: Certainly SLINGS AND ARROWS is as good as anything down South.

MM: We're seeing a maturity to the infrastructure. Our industry is coming up. In Winnipeg there are probably two good crews now, which was not the case ten years ago.

[In other words, you can now have two productions working at the same time, with a full complement of experienced, skilled people on set.]

When I first came up, there was NIGHT HEAT, and you heard stories about how they had to fly in a grip from LA. That will never happen again. Our directors are as good as anybody.

[Ron Moore said the same thing during his talk, that his Vancouver crew was as good as any he's worked with in LA.]

I think we have an opportunity if we can get this government to work with us, to solidify this industry. I've been stepping back and forth between the two countries because I've never felt safe in Canada, never felt like I was guaranteed a living here. They like to take a bash at funding those effete liberals, but it's a billion dollar industry that provides jobs.

CS: So what would make us lose you to the US.

MM: You have to stay an artiste. Working on STUDIO 60 was just a stellar creative opportunity. You mean, what would make me mope like Eeyore back across the border with my busted balloon? In a way, I may be starting to get impervious. I'm very lucky that I've gotten to a threshold where I can piece together enough employment. But it would be disheartening to think that another generation might not be able to trust this country, and then we'll miss this window of opportunity where they are buying our shows.

CS: You wake up and you're the Minister of Heritage for the new national unity government. What do you do to fix Canadian TV?

MM: I don't really-- I've only recently started seriously thinking about these things, so I can't -- there has to be a permanent funding situation. I went to [Konrad von Finckenstein's CRTC breakfast], and he's talking about the YouTubes flying out of control, and my kids show me things with 66 million hits that I've never heard of. The world is changing. We have to have a business plan, to make institutional the support that government has for Canadian drama. And as I say I've just really started thinking about this. So I don't want to misspeak. Is it defending CanCon? Is it limiting exposure to American television -- if you could even do such a thing? How do you take our farflung creative assets and make them work for us, knowing that there is an opportunity to get our share of the American entertainment pie. It will take some tweaking, but also some constancy.

But let's start talking about our ratings. You see people in Ottawa talking as if we're making movies about some obscure event in the war of 1812. People have to understand that Canadian shows are successful, it's a real business, that's it's a really valuable asset. And no one talks about that. Obviously I exclude French Canada; their language barrier serves them well, and everybody knows they have a vibrant industry. But we have one, too. And if we can count on that, then we can silently and stealthily steal back our fair share of the North American TV landscape.

CS: What do you think are the most interesting shows on television for you, as a writer, to watch? Do you watch shows you enjoy, shows you want to learn from, or do you have some other criterion?

MM: Well it all changed with SOPRANOS. That was an epiphanical moment for me.--

CS: (Vaguely chiding) "Epiphanical"?

MM: Yes. (Going with it.) It gave me a case of epiphanicosis. It put me in an epiphanicoma.

It's taken me a while but I've started to be able to watch SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE again, which I couldn't for a long time after I was on the show. And it's amazing. Lorne has got better about maximizing the comic density of the cast. I think this is the best cast ever. I watch it like a fan now. I can watch KIDS IN THE HALL, too.

I watch THE DAILY SHOW and COLBERT. Not really cartoon comedy -- THE SIMPSONS or FAMILY GUY. My favorite shows are complex dramadies. BEING ERICA. MAD MEN.

I'm not really into serialized shows, cop dramas, hospital shows.

I don't really analyze shows, but I can't help watching shows in a slightly different way. It's great, being a showrunner, watching MAD MEN unspool. You see how certain characters flower, and others he lets drop. You can see the grand design.

CS: Thank you so much!

According to the website, LESS THAN KIND airs Mondays at 9 PM on City TV. Or possibly at 9:30 PM. The site says both:

Songs Pre Lyrics

Q. I'm not a songwriter, so it's probably a bad idea for me to pretend to be, no?

But then what do I do in the script? Especially when the lyrics are helping move the story forward?

• JOHN
• (song)
• [Verse 1]

But that doesn't tell you what the content of the song is.

Another idea is:

• JOHN
• (song)
• [Verse 1, about how he wishes she would stay]

I'm hoping neither of those is right, because they're awfully clunky. And I'm hoping I don't have to write the lyrics myself, because chances are the lyrics wouldn't be more elegant than what's above. And I can't afford to bring a songwriter aboard before I get funding.

If you're not a lyricist, just describe the song. But I would do it in the action, not in dialog. It confuses the reader when there are things in dialog that aren't dialog.

I would venture to say it is almost impossible to get a movie musical set up that's not based on a Broadway musical that's already a hit. The person writing in, though, is writing a short film, and the financing is apparently not an issue.

You can do the same thing if there's a song on the radio: "There's a song on the tinny radio, a sad song that sort of fills the air without grabbing your attention." You don't need to write the lyrics for that, either.

Con Brio But Without Logic

FRINGE is losing me fast. And I'm its core audience.

(Ep. 2 SPOILERS)

When you have a science fiction show, it's the ordinary drama aspects of the show that will kill you. I can, for the sake of argument, accept that some kind of genetic flaw creates a baby that grows to an old man in 6 hours, even though that violates the law of conservation of mass. (Where did the 8 lb. baby get the extra mass to become a 100 lb. old man?)

But I can't accept, in any television show, that a creepy guy can walk into a strip joint, make friends with a pretty woman who works there, get her to go home with him, and then convince her to go into his abandoned warehouse. Are you frakking kidding me?

At that point, the show ceases to take place in the same universe I live in.

(And even if she's hooking -- an abandoned warehouse? I don't think so.)

I'm also disturbed that the show is establishing a template where they will solve the mystery, in every third or fourth act, by some science-fiction deus ex machina. In the pilot, Agent (should be Special Agent) Dunham goes into an isolation tank, drops LSD, has a spinal hookup to a guy in a coma, and comes out with a face. In this episode, it turns out you can take the images off a dead person's retina.

I wouldn't mind the latter in the first act; I'll accept most anything as a premise. But not in the third or fourth act, where it's helping the heroes. That's going to alienate the audience. Why get involved in the mystery? In act three or four, Dr. Goofyhead is going to explain how you can use Google Maps Beta to locate the characteristic heat signature of an empathic metamorph, and hey! There she is in Harvard Square!

I think there's a lot of bad, sloppy writing in FRINGE, and there's no excuse for it. It's all visual and cool, but I can't get involved, because the show is insulting my common sense.

At least HEROES is coming back. See, I have no problem with HEROES, even though it violates most of the laws of physics -- because the characters more or less make sense. The only insults to my common sense are the science fictiony ones. You can break the laws of physics. But don't break the laws of character or story.

Editing Exercise

Here's a fun and instructive exercise in editing:

Get your hand on the FRINGE pilot script, and cut it down to 55 pages.

For bonus points, get your hands on the FRINGE pilot itself, load it into Final Cut, and trim that baby down to a TV hour.

I bet you get a perfectly good episode out of it. I bet it's better than what aired.

If you want to do this project but set on "Easy," do it with the MIAMI VICE pilot. Cut that down to a TV hour. Should be a piece of cake; TV took its time in those days.

UPDATE: Well, that was fast. Peter has thoughtfully located the FRINGE pilot script. Thank you, Peter!

Teaching in Charlottetown, PEI in June

As part of the PEI Screenwriters Bootcamp, I'm teaching a four day seminar on TV writing in Prince Edward Island June 2-5, courtesy Telefilm and the Island Media Arts Cooperative. You must be a Canadian in the Maritimes to participate. The deadline is tomorrow but if you're interested, please email Louise Lalonde at youthinkyoucanwrite@yahoo.ca and let her know I sent ya. The website says the deadline is the 21st, but it's been extended to today, and if you can get your app in by Monday, I'm sure it'll be okay.

When to Stop

Ken Levine has a particularly crafty post about when to stop writing for the day. Check it out.

If things are going well, I stop when I can't tell if I'm writing crap or not, usually around 12 pages. If things are not going well, I stop when I run into a story problem I'm not solving. Then I walk the dog. Or sleep. Sometimes the answer comes.

I once went to bed telling myself to come up with a comedy series pitch. And I did!

Wrong Format?

Q. I was curious about your thoughts on a new series on Fox: The Return of Jezebel James. The format seems off or just plain wrong. This very well could be me but it feels like a one camera show and not a sit-com with a laugh track. If it is a little awkward in its format would this be a creator issue or a network issue? Once a show is bought can it's whole format be made to change to fit into something else entirely?

I haven't seen the show, but there could be a genre problem like you're seeing. The creator could have conceived of it wrong, for creative reasons, or because a network exec asked for a sitcom. Or, the network could have asked him to turn a single camera comedy into a sitcom for budget reasons, or because of market research, or because of the mix of programming they're looking for.

Denis Leary's half hour series THE JOB failed. If you watch it, you can clearly see its similarities to the later, successful RESCUE ME. What didn't work in a half hour format worked very well in hour.

I've occasionally come in with a pitch that could go either half hour or hour. That way, if the exec "hears" a half hour show, it's a half hour show. If they hear an hour show, it's an hour. They tend to hear the kind of the show their network has room for. My preference is to do hour shows -- they're no more work to write than a half hour, but they pay twice as well. But I'd rather have a show than no show. Bear in mind, though, that Canada has half-hour dramas, a form that barely exists in the US.

It's good that you're thinking this way. Don't just tune out a show, "this sucks!" Think about why it sucks. The makers must have had something in mind. Where did they go wrong? Sometimes (COP ROCK) it's easy to figure out. Sometimes it's harder. I'm convinced that FIREFLY failed not because it was a space western, but because Joss Whedon's storytelling might have been a bit too surprising for the broadcast audience. You just never knew where an episode was going to end up. And on broacast, that's not necessarily a plus.

Coming Up With New Pitches

One of the missions we have given ourselves, Lisa and I, is to come up with new show pitches. Particularly procedural pitches, because that's what CTV tells me they want.

It's hard to come up with new pitches, because all of the obvious, fertile territory is already under cultivation. You have to find the strip of creek bottom up in the mountains that has grown over. It is much easier when inspiration just comes to you. But I find myself coming up on a New Year with a bunch of pitches under option, but nothing to pitch. You always want to have something to pitch.

A movie is a story. It's easy enough to come up with a new movie idea; just come up with a new twist on an old story. It's easy enough to come up with the characters: just figure out what characters you need to tell your story.

A TV show is generally a family of characters. Ideally it is a family of characters who spend their time at a venue: a cop shop, a couple of apartments, the White House, NCC 1701. For a procedural show, it is ideally a family of characters who spend their time at a venue where stories regularly walk in the door: a law firm, a hospital, a restaurant, a hotel.

That's why there are so many shows about cops, lawyers and doctors: it is not too hard to come up with new episode pitches so long as people keep committing crimes, going to court and getting sick, in so many different ways. A great episodic episode needs more than a clever new crime, legal situation or ailment. But for a show to reach 100 episodes, you're going to have to hack some episodes out. If you don't have a venue where stories walk in the door, or an ongoing story arc, you're going to really have to work for every springboard.

So we're trying to think of venues where stories walk in the door that are not cop shops, law firms, courtrooms, hospitals, hotels or restaurants...

That's Better, Your Majesty

We finally caught up with THE TUDORS on DVD. We had given up in frustration halfway through the season on the CBC. The plot lines didn't make any sense. Fine scenes, fine acting, utter confusion from scene to scene. I surmised that in cutting down the episodes from BBC length to CBC length -- let us say from 52 minutes to 44 minutes, though I can't vouch for the exact timings -- something important had got lost.

Well, now we know. THE TUDORS is very fine television on DVD. The episodes make perfect sense. The pacing is good too. Nothing jars. The episode we watched tonight built up to a satisfactory emotional climax. It was an entirely different show than the hacked-up episode we watched last month.

I'd love to talk with whoever edited this down, or whoever ordered her to do it this way, and ask why the CBC version was edited as it was.

When you have to cut down a complicated episode, the first thing you do is find the D story, if there is one. That's the least important story, the one that has few ramifications for the A story, and doesn't reflect theme. Cut that. There's most of your time savings.

A full hour show can have a D story. A 45 minute show probably shouldn't. Simple as that.

There is an obvious choice in episode 5. There's a plotline where a minor character goes off and has a gay affair with an episodic character, introduced for no reason I can make out except that someone wanted to bring teh gay. The entire plotline could have been cut with no damage to Henry's romance with Anne Boleyn or the the power politics, which are after all the point of making a show about Harry VIII.

If you need more savings, try to find some pageantry that can go. And sex scenes that go on longer than needed for story. Spectacle of any kind can go. Sure, it's production value. But the audience is tuning in for a story.

Whoever recut THE TUDORS (or ordered the actual editor how to recut it) got it exactly wrong, I feel. He started by trimming a little bit from all the scenes, throwing all the pacing off. He cut scene buttons. He cut key character moments. He left in the spectacle, the sex, the pageantry and teh entire gratuitous gay plot line.

And so, the episodes on CBC feel folded, spindled and mutilated. To the point where I actually fell asleep in the middle of one.

I'm going to take a wild guess that no writer was involved in the re-editing of these episodes. Which is a shame.

So how do you write for a series that you know is going to be cut down?

Simple. Almost any full-hour show you might right for, whether for the Beeb or for pay cable, has multiple story lines. Just make sure that the D story fits nicely on the plastic. Make sure that its connections with the other stories are thematic, rather than plot. Don't put any crucial information in the D story. That way when you have to kill it, you don't get blood on your carpet.

Make sure that whoever's re-editing the episodes knows what you have done.

If you can't be bothered -- say you are writing SOPRANOS for HBO, and you are more worried about groundbreaking TV than what it might look like re-edited and re-aired for a conventional network -- then make darn sure that at least one of the original writing staff, and ideally the showrunner, is present for the re-editing sessions.

Somehow I don't think that happened here.

Another Way to Put It

Kay mops up various thoughts from her inbox, but leaves on crucial question out there that you should be asking, whether you're writing a spec script, or (as seems increasingly popular) a spec pilot:

make sure that your lead character is special. Unique. Because otherwise, why are you telling their story?

That's a terribly good question. Why are you telling the hero's story?

And I'd turn it around to ask: in what way is your hero not special? In what way is his or her problem like yours, or mine? In what way is he or she confronting issues that illuminate the human condition?

It's the tension between the special and the ordinary that makes a series great. A science fiction show that gets too far out there won't work because it's not based in the viewers' reality. A cop show that's just like all the other cop shows won't work because who has time to watch another cop show?

Finally Up to Speed

Eleven pages of rough draft today. That's a good day's work any day. (Unless my staff and I have for some reason just been parachuted into a ongoing production and we need to rebreak the next episode and then write it from scratch for a production meeting tomorrow. Speaking hypothetically, of course.) In development, I like to get five good pages in a day, once I'm writing pages; a good day could bring anywhere up to fifteen, at which point I usually pack it in so I don't start writing gibberish.

Except the first day. Many days, the first page often seems to take me the entire first day. Go figure.

It's taken me a much longer time to get up to speed on this script. Various people liked the outline, and I didn't feel like there were holes in it. But writing the early scenes proved to be much harder than I thought. I had to rethink practically every scene in the first ten pages -- usually the mark of an outline where you've indulged in too much handwaving.

I don't think it's handwaving. I usually know when I'm handwaving. I think it's because the contemporary urban metaphysical I'm writing isn't really plot driven, although it pretends to be. It's really character driven, following the Rule of Joss I've mentioned elsewhere. So it is harder to gauge when I'm taking too long to get into the A story. On a broadcast hour, you really want your A story up and running in the first five pages if not in the teaser itself, and you ought to have your first plot twist at the first act break. Not on this show. On this show, the A story is merely the catalyst for the drama. So if the drama needs eight long pages before we meet the episodic character -- the Person With A Supernatural Issue -- it's going to get them.

(DON'T try this on broadcast. Who knows, it might not even work on cable. But I think it will.)

Still, since the pacing doesn't have to be the same as every other hour show, that means I have to figure out by my gut what the pacing has to be. Free verse, after all, is actually harder than poetic form, because it has to rediscover its own form with each stanza, and not just come off as wordburger. This is free verse TV.

However, as a general rule, if you're not writing to act breaks: keep the story interesting, and all will be forgiven, so long as you build to a climax and wrap it up in the end.

Now back to my pages...

Closing In

I'm closing in on an outline for episode 3 of the series I'm developing. Everything seems pretty good except the climactic scene. Of course, that's what the whole episode is leading up to and supporting. The keystone, if you will. So I better fix it. On the other hand I am pretty sure that there is a good fix to it out there, I just have to find it. At which point the whole structure will work.

Writing one of these episodes feels something like a military campaign. Sometimes I feel like I'm striking deep into the heart of enemy territory, leaving just mop-up to do afterwards. Sometimes I feel like I'm fighting a war of attrition, maneuvering for position, trying to create and exploit a weak spot in the enemy line.

Okay, let's get out of that metaphor, too hostile.

Some of the scariest writing in the world is episodes two and three of a series you're trying to create. The pilot is hard work because you're introducing characters and at the same time trying to tell a good story. But the hardest decisions come in the next two episodes, where you're trying to figure out exactly what your show is. In the pilot you told one sort of story. Are you telling that kind of story every week? If it's a premise pilot, well, you can't tell that story again, can you? How much does one episode rely on the previous one? How much are you going to vary the tone? Does the character who got the most exposure in the pilot still get the most exposure, or is it an ensemble show?

In episodes 2 and 3, you discover which of your characters are really core cast and which are merely recurring. The pilot won't tell you that. I just cut a character out of episode 3 that I could have sworn was core cast. I guess he's not. On the other hand, there's another character that seems to be starting a story arc, at a minimum. I'm still waiting for one of the core cast to show me a real story. He just keeps hanging on, there, with D stories.

Once I finally beat this outline into the ground (again with the hostility, Alex!) I'll be in pretty good shape. Once I have an outline I like, I feel like all I need is time and effort; I've lost the fear that I won't be able to come up with anything.

It's just about time to show this to my "Director of Development" to see what she makes of it... Hon, you got a minute?

Well, Damn, Kay!?

Trust DMc to smoke out that my old writing group buddy, Kay Reindl hath now a blog. It's called Seriocity. (Actually she's had it for a year, so it's filled with bloggy goodness. But I never spotted it!)

Kay has a wit like Dorothy Parker. We kept her in the writing group even though she never showed us anything she was writing. (She was writing all the time, just not bringing it into the writing group.) She was fondly dubbed "The Queen of Spleen."

Kay got her break in style. If I remember the story correckly, she was writing barbed commentary on a Millennium fan site about how broken a certain episode was, when she got an email from Chris Carter. Yes, the showrunner. Who liked to read the fan sites.

He wanted to know, basically, "Since you're such a smartypants, how would you have fixed it?"

She told him.

He wrote back, basically, "Hmmm. Yeah. That would have been better. Got any spec scripts?"

She wrote back, "Sure. It just needs polishing."

At which point she and her writing partner sat down and banged out a spec in three days.

And they got hired onto the show.

Every now and then showbiz will work the way you would, naively, hope it would. Just to screw with everybody. Star Trek: The Next Generation was actually willing to read your spec Star Trek: The Next Generation script. If they liked it, they bought it.

Do not haunt fan sites hoping the showrunner will recognize your brilliance. Do not send spec scripts of the show you'd like to write for, to the show you'd like to write for. Your mileage will vary.

But do be ready to seize the day.

Rule of Joss

I'm working on my metaphysical pay cable series, and as a massive sf&f geek, I find myself tending to look at episodes from a point of view of "what is the cool sf&f antagonist in this ep? And I have to remind myself of (what I'll call) the Rule of Joss: don't start with the sf&f antagonist. Start with where is the hero emotionally? What is Buffy's real-world emotional problem this week? Now, what is the sf&f antagonist that best catalyzes that emotion or problem?

In other words, if you have a ghost story, your story shouldn't be about the ghost. It should be about the protagonist, and why she's seeing a ghost. What is her problem that confronting a ghost will help her resolve? It could be a fear she has to confront, or a bad decision, or a moral qualm, or likely a combination of all of those. But the ghost is only there, narratively speaking, to take your hero through her story.

It's not the only way to write a ghost story. Many commercially successful ghost stories have nothing to do with where the hero is emotionally. The NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series, for example, are all about the villain. And even a nifty horror movie like DESCENT, which starts the heroine in a truly horrific place emotionally before she even goes spelunking, is really about the cave and what's in it. But the SF&F movies I find stick with me the most are movies, first of all, about what it's like to be the hero. BLADE RUNNER, even the much maligned theatrical version, is not primarily about the replicants and their desire to live; it's about Deckard and his humanity. (Which is why I find the director's cut unnecessarily on-the-nose and self-indulgent.)

Start with your hero. What's the emotional process you want her to go through? Now, how can your supernatural antagonist (or science-fictional situation) put her through that process?

A Messy Desk is a Sign of a Working Mind

Q. I kept wondering how "The Office" fits into your breakdown of acts and storylines. It seems very nontraditional in so many ways...First off, I can only seem to find a very obvious A and B storylines--no C. And the acts--they don't seem to be clearly defined beyond the cold opening and Act1.

Acts are easy to find on television. It's not a conceptual thing. When they cut to a commercial, that's the end of the act. If they only cut once, you have two act comedy. If they cut twice, it's three acts.

Likewise, if you're finding only A and B storylines, then maybe that's all they have. There's no law says you have to have C stories. An A and a B give you the ability to cut out of one story and go to another. Then you can give your secondary characters things that they want, which interfere in interesting ways with the protagonists of the A and B stories getting what they want ... and now you have an episode.

I think there's an interesting trend away from defining A and B stories too strictly. A show like FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS tracks all its characters as they move through their overall character arcs for the season. When two characters come across each other, are those two stories weaving together? Or is the interweaving the story itself?

I think you can overthink storytelling. It's good to know what your A and B stories are so you know that you have them, and so you can make sure something interesting is happening in every act. But the point is to keep things moving along, not to conform to some theoretical notion of structure.

Just bear in mind that a loose show like FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS is actually much harder to write than a more traditional show like LAW AND ORDER. Free verse was always harder to write well than rhymed verse.

The Kind of Email I Like To Get

Friend o' the Blog Kody Chamberlain writes:

I just sold my first film to Paramount without a script, or a comic.

I had pitched a high concept story idea to Ross Richie at Boom Studios (comic publisher who also sold TAG to Universal, the freelance gig I did with Keith Giffen) with the intention of doing a graphic novel or miniseries of the story. I worked my ass off to build a strong hook and rough direction for the story and dropped it in his email box.

He loved the premise and the concept and insisted we pitch it as a TV series instead, and we could still do the comic whenever. So I said sure thing and he sent it around to a few contacts and got some strong early hits. Ross had a few meetings set up with film studios about various other projects and dropped the concept for my project idea in a few of the meetings. Before I knew it, Paramount made us a pretty strong offer. Cut to a few meetings later and we closed the deal.

So there's proof of the power of a strong hook, and I thank you, sir, for offering up the advice on building a strong hook and insisting that it deserved more attention than most people give it.

See the Variety article about it.

Way to go, Kody.

Two Posts I Like

Couple of nice posts in If This Is LA, I Must Be a Screenwriter:

The Backwards Read:

What you do is go through your script scene-by-scene, starting with the last scene and moving towards the first.

This allows you to really view the scene as a separate entity, and make sure it contains all the drama, action, suspense, conflict, and character it needs, without any reliance on the other scenes.

Later, when you re-enter the forward world, you can check for flow and all those lovely forward-looking things.

And:

Going to Extremes:

I was struggling there for a while, trying to come up with an Ugly Betty story that was actually interesting. Then I got an idea, but when I outlined it... lame alert.

Then last night, I decided to go through every story point and just brain dump 4 or 5 ways to take that point to the most melodramatic, off-the-wall, crazy ass extreme. No censoring, no thinking "that'd never happen". I just wrote.

Guess what, gentle readers?

You got it. I came up with a whole barrel full of really cool ideas that are going to help make this the best never-to-air Ugly Betty spec script I have ever written.

Good point. Your spec will never air. So take it to 11.