Argh Ink

Hi! Jane Espenson here. Thanks, Jenny, for letting me sit in.

I’ve been invited in to help publicize a new book of essays, edited by me, about Firefly/Serenity. Called “Serenity Found,” you can find it here. And, as long as I’ve dropped by, I thought I’d add a few thoughts to the stellar writing advice you get here at Argh Ink — I adore the writing workshop, don’t you?

Since Jenny specializes in prose, and I, almost exclusively, write scripts (no one really uses the word “teleplays”), I thought I’d talk about the difference between the two forms.

Someone here asked if someone who is good at dialogue should write scripts instead of novels. Not necessarily. After all, it’s not like novels don’t need good dialogue. I think it’s a matter of the form you’re drawn to and the kinds of stories you want to tell. I’ve always read a lot of novels, and as a kid I wrote short stories, but television entranced me. I just knew it was what I wanted to do. Not movies, just television.

Part of the appeal, for me, is that in television, almost always, you’re writing for pre-existing characters while emulating someone else’s writing style. I adore doing this. My favorite writing assignments in school were always of the form, “Rewrite a fairy tale as if written by Robert Penn Warren.” Lovvved it! It’s not bad to want to create your own characters and develop your own style, but if you can have fun manipulating characters and voices that are already in place, then TV writing will be really fun for you. I call it chameleonship. And, of course, it simply isn’t part of what you’d normally get to do in short stories and novels.

As the questioner implies, of course, writing good dialogue is an important skill for script-writing. (Although every now and then one encounters established TV writers who write clunky dialogue and have thrived on good story-telling instead. A friend of mine once described another writer as having the ability to rewrite dialogue until it achieved “the sound of heavy objects falling from a closet.”) Good dialogue-writing skills are partly inborn, I believe, stemming from a good ear for how people talk. But a lot of it is certainly learnable. If you want a character to tell another character “I missed you,” but that’s just too bald a statement for this particular person to make, have them say, “I really– You were gone a long time.” There. By having them start a sentence they never finished, the audience will figure out what they were going to say and pulled back from.

This is actually a special case of a larger rule-of-thumb: people get less articulate, not more, when they’re emotionally moved. Want to write an emotional moment? Increase your quotient of stumbles and restarts.

I believe that even if you did nothing more than adopt that simple trick, you’d see your dialogue take on a fresher sheen. Of course, novels have dialogue, too, so, as I said, the ability to write good dialogue doesn’t mean you necessarily should steer yourself toward the script world.

The kinds of stories you want to tell, though… *there* you might find an actual clue to your career destiny. Perhaps your dream project has a plot summary something like:

A woman gradually comes to terms with the loss of her only child by moving to a vineyard in Tuscany where she communes with the grapes under the shadow of a crumbling castle for twenty years, ultimately realizing that life — like wine — requires patience, and that both are to be savored.

Novel. It takes place over years and requires an expensive location — making it hard to produce (a consideration even in spec scripts. You want to look like you can write to a budget). And, most importantly, it’s hopelessly internal, about unspoken mental changes that aren’t visual.

Now, television can tell internal stories, generally by manifesting internal states in some visible way. On Buffy, we did this by portraying inner demons as outer ones, for example. And many, many shows have adopted the convention of physicalizing mental debates through the use of a hallucinatory-style visit with a dead character. But, in general, television is better at things you can actually see.

The final thing I can think of to help you read your career compass is the process. Much of television writing is collaborative. You “break the story,” i.e. turn an idea into a list of scenes, as a group. And in sitcoms, you even rewrite it as a group. There’s still the solitary experience of going off to turn an outline into a script, but you do have to be able to function in a group. You already know, I’m sure, if that appeals to you or not.

So how does any of this relate to a book of essays about Firefly? Well, if I wanted to tempt any of you away from writing between hard covers, I would point out that every now and then you get to be part of a phenomenon like Firefly, where a show fires so many imaginations that the fans, and the writers, and the actors, and even the critics get to go on a ride that overshoots the planet it was aiming at.

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Addendum!

Here are some answers to questions selected and adapted from those you guys submitted to the site:

What do you like to read?

Oh, lots of different things. I have a sizeable commute right now, so I get a lot of unabridged books on tape. My favorite recent read was Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let You Go.” I don’t even want to tell you anything about it — not even the genre. Read it without a set-up, as I did. Brilliant. And, yeah, reading is more relaxing for me than scripted television, which can sometimes feel like homework. Not always, but sometimes.

Recommend a TV show.

I adore Friday Night Lights for its dialogue. 30 Rock is the best comedy since Arrested Development. But I’m lucky enough to be on the best show on television, Battlestar Galactica — check it out for subtle writing. Everything is intricately shaded… moral choices, personal interactions, political nuances. And there are killer alien robots! Whoo!

Favorite Buffy Episode.

Overall: Hush, Once More with Feeling (the musical), Fool for Love
Mine: Harsh Light of Day, Superstar

How far do producers/ writers do research on the viewer’s taste before they get started?

They do focus group testing on the pilots — where groups of recruited viewers give their responses to characters and stories. But these are notoriously bad predictors of success. I think the executives generally end up simply responding to what they like and don’t like. Theoretically this should work, since all of us are television viewers, no matter what our job is. Their taste is likely to be as good an indicator of what viewers want as anyone’s is. I think sometimes maybe we get into trouble when someone (an executive or a writer) tries to guess someone else’s preferences and ends up underestimating them.

Would you sometimes like to show a character in more detail but feel fenced in by the time frame?

Absolutely. If you could see the scenes that are cut from shows right before (or after) shooting, you would see some lovely character moments.

What was it like to work for Gilmore Girls?

It was fun and incredibly educational with respect to story structure. They structured stories in a way I’d never seen before: much, much looser with respect to the traditional rules of drama. What they’d lose in, say, on-screen conflict, they’d gain in verisimilitude — episodes unfolded in a very naturalistic fashion. I learned a huge amount.

(Again about Gilmore Girls) How do you pull off that rapid-fire dialogue?

Write a lot of it and make the actors talk fast. Their scripts were literally almost twice as long as a Firefly, Buffy or Battlestar script. The actors had to be letter-perfect and they had to rocket through it.

Are there big differences in writing comedy for a script as opposed to a novel?

I wish I knew. I’ve observed the same thing this questioner does, that sometimes TV-style comedy on the (prose) page can feel forced. I think maybe some kinds of jokes require the light touch of an actor? I have to think more about this.

Do you think that well-written shows still have a chance on network television?

Certainly, cable has traditionally been the home of quirk. They could afford to focus on a niche audience while the network broadcasters still had to think about the “broad” in their name. But this year some more idiosyncratic offerings came to network, and I think that will continue. And certainly the existence of Friday Night Lights and 30 Rock and The Office should make us all feel very good about the state of network TV.

If you could wave a magic wand and write a sequel to any film or TV series, what would it be and who would be in it?

I would love to see Alien Nation come back — one of the best metaphorical uses of aliens I’ve ever seen. The idea of telling stories about immigrants and other marginalized people through the stories of literal aliens is frakkin’ brilliant. Casting? Oh, how ’bout Nathan Fillion as the human cop and Alan Tudyk as the alien?

As a television writer what impresses you in an episode that the rest of us might not notice? When was the last time you watched tv and thought “gee, I wish I’d written that.” Why did the episode impress you?

Hmm… I’m still raving over the “Three Stories” episode of House from two seasons ago. Brilliant. It impressed me because it had such confidence in its story-telling. Watch it and imagine trying to describe to someone the unfolding of the gradual reveal that House is telling his own story. It sounds crazy. And on screen it works. When you see that, you’re dealing with a confident writer. By the way, if you’re writing a spec script, appearing confident in your skills is a HUGE part of your goal. As big as telling a good story.

What are some of your favorites among the new crop of TV shows (if any)?

I haven’t checked out a lot of them yet, but I enjoyed the Chuck and Reaper pilots. But no matter how good anything is, it’s too early to write a spec for a new show. So watch and wait.

How do you balance giving “secondary” characters enough screen/page time, getting readers or viewers to connect to those characters even though they are maybe not the main “draw” to the show?

You have to keep all your characters in mind as you break the story. Give them a point of view on the events that they witness. In a way, they can be far easier to service, since they can have more extreme, less nuanced points of view. Anya, Paris, Baltar… they can say totally outrageous things that steal the show. It’s not hard to fit them in when you know they’re always going to be interesting.

I read one of your blog posts about exposition — about “hiding the pipe.” Could you elaborate on that some?

Hmm… it’s hard to search my blog, isn’t it? Others have pointed this out. I think I will have to write a book. Something like “Dirty Tricks for Screenwriting,” don’t you think? I’ll keep you posted.

Anyway, I think I found the entry you’re referencing. I talk about avoiding opening a scene with a piece of exposition, as in opening a scene with “Tell me again why we’re lurking outside the Mayor’s house at midnight?” The problem is that you want to get exposition out of the way, to get it all shoved into the reader/viewer’s head so they can understand the scene, so it’s tempting to try to it fast and forcibly. Resist that temptation. Relax and let the reader figure out what’s going on as the scene unfolds. It’s all right for people to be a little confused. They’ll pick it up. Ever join Law and Order 15 minutes in? It’s a totally plot-driven show, and of course they’re making no effort to catch you up… but you do catch up. Readers and viewers are better than we give them credit for at dredging their own exposition out of our words.

If that isn’t enough… if you still need to explain things, try to avoid obvious clunkers like having one character tell another character things they both know. Tell-tale sign, the phrase “as you know…”.

Do you think screenwriting courses such as McKee’s workshop are useful for novelists hoping to try out the screenwriting world as well?

When I was in the ABC/Disney Writing Fellowship the studio sent us all to take the McKee course on their dime. I enjoyed it a lot and learned a lot. My only caveat is that analysis like his can make it all sound very difficult — like you’re going to need a slide rule or something. The truth is, learning to write for television is lot like learning to speak when you’re a baby. You don’t need rules, you need examples. Read enough scripts and study how they lay out their stories. Then formulate your own set of constraints based on what you’re seeing. Try to lay out your own stories so they strain as few of the constraints as possible. Bam! You’ve got a killer spec script!

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Thank you, Jenny! I return your stage to you! And thank you, Gentle Readers for your questions and your attention!

Lunch (exclusive for Argh Ink readers): that heirloom tomato salad again

Okay, Jane Espenson will be here tomorrow, so now’s the time to post some questions so she knows what you want to talk about. (Can you tell this is my first guest blogger? Not organized here.)

What do you want to know?

Okay, I’m only in NC for the night and damn glad to be off the road since it’s looking like the trip Google said would be ten hours is actually going to be twelve. Did the first six today and can I just say to the people living in Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina, you live in really beautiful states. When it’s gorgeous from the interstate, you know it’s beautiful clean through. For most of the way, I was just sailing, heaven outside the car and Springsteen in. “Thunder Road” was particularly fine. Of course, you miss a lot if you stick to the interstate. I was most tempted by the “Ona Whim Antique Shop” because I couldn’t figured out if Mr. Whim had a sadistic sense of humor when naming his daughter, or if somebody was trolling for impulse shoppers, and I wanted to ask, but I stayed the course.

But enough about me. Someone fabulous is going to be here on Tuesday, Oct. 30, doing the first ever guest blog on Argh Ink:

Jane Espenson!

If you’re a Buffy fanatic, you’re probably doing the fan squee now. Jane wrote “Band Candy,” she wrote “Pangs” (the one with the funny syphilis), she wrote “Earshot” and “I Was Made To Love You,” but that’s just the beginning. She invented Dennis in the Angel episode “RM w/a VU” (one of my all time faves, if only for the way Cordelia snarls the line, “The bitch is back!”), she’s worked on Gilmore Girls and Battlestar Galactica, she contributed to the Tales of the Vampires comics which are wonderful, and she has a brilliant blog at http://www.janeespenson.com/ where she gives away her wisdom and experience and what she had for lunch. She is, in short, freaking fabulous.

And on Tuesday, she’s HERE. (Small break while I lie down for a moment to recover.) No, really, she’s going to guest blog here on the difference between writing novels and scripts, and I’m going to ask her about graphic novels, too, because I know that’s a third language. So get your questions lined up now. (That’s why I’m giving you four days notice, although now that I think of it, you’ve never had trouble coming up with questions or comments before, so this may be overkill. Oh, well.)

Oh, and she also wrote the “Shindig” episode of Firefly and has just edited the second collection of essays on Serenity, the movie that followed the criminally short-lived series. The collection is called Serenity Found, and it follows Espenson’s first edited collection Finding Serenity.

SERENITY SPOILER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Maybe she can explain why Wash had to die. Not that I’m bitter.

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Where was I?

Right. Jane Espenson, guest-blogging here, Oct. 30.

I know, I haven’t been here. Well, it’s been hectic. The Cherry Con was an absolute riot, including the part where Rox brained herself on a table trying to throw something at somebody, and the part where Rachel brought chocolate from England which I’ve been eating myself sick on ever since, and the part where we all put on boas and glasses with red lights in them and tiaras and basically diva-ed ourselves into hysterics. It was a lot like a three-day-long kid’s birthday party. The flamingo head-boppers were also a hit.

I had a party for the Cherry Forum mods on Wed. night–they work for free, the least I can do is give them a party–and Wolfie has been spoiled rotten ever since. He keeps waiting for fifteen women to show up and tell him he’s a gorgeous boy, and all he gets is me saying, “Get out of the trash.” The mods more than earned their keep by putting together Gaffney’s pony, a joke that got out of hand as usual because none of us knows when to quit. Gaffney introduced me to her agent, and I e-mailed her to thank her and said, “The next time we’re together, I’ll buy you a drink. And dinner. And a pony.” And then I saw this pony on Amazon and thought, “That would be good” and ordered it and then waited until the mod party to put it together. Everybody loved the directions that said that in order to insure the child had a “magical experience” when being introduced to the pony, it should be assembled ahead of time because when you open the damn box, all you see is a headless pony. It gave me pause, I can only imagine what it would do to a three-year-old. Then it had to be assembled and the mods did that while drinking wine and other things, and then we turned it on and it started to move, and I’m here to tell you that pony is freakishly realistic. And large. And while I was trying to figure out how to get it to Pat, Molly volunteered to drop it off on her drive east, so she did that yesterday, stunning Pat and freaking out her dogs. So my work is done, thanks to the mods and especially Molly, who took this picture:

And in the space when we weren’t partying at the con, Krissie and Lani and I worked on Dogs and Goddesses (we decided the sequels will be Cats and Gods and Pharoahs and Ferrets) and went to IHoP and Hobby Lobby. They’re both insane for IHoP but they’d never experienced Hobby Lobby before. They’re now making plans to drive here the next time so they can take more stuff with them on the return trip. We also watched a couple of episodes of Pushing Daisies which is my favorite show since Olive sang “Hopelessly Devoted to You” and told Chi McBride that what he’d just told her wasn’t the Truth Bus, it was the Bitchy Crosstown Express. And Lani had never seen Big Trouble in Little China, so we made her watch it, and after that she walked around the house saying, “Son of a bitch must pay” and my personal favorite, “Sorry, sorry, just thrilled to be alive.”

That was the good news. The bad news is that I cleaned the house for the mod party, but ran out of time so I gathered up everything that I couldn’t put away and put it in, you guessed it, the office. Which once again looks like hell. But I’ll fix it. And the rest of the house looks great. Or it will once I get all the chocolate wrappers out of the kitchen. So there really isn’t any bad news. Just the occasional bitchy crosstown express.

So that’s where I’ve been. Chocolate, IHop, ponies, parties, Hobby Lobby, Pushing Daisies in Little China, and many brainstorming sessions. And good times were had by all. Really, what more could anybody want?

I just got an e-mail from Cousin Russ, aka Russ Parsons whose latest book is How To Pick A Peach, out from Houghton Mifflin:

Publisher’s Weekly gave it a starred review:

Equal parts cookbook, agricultural history, chemistry lesson and produce buying guide, this densely packed book is a food-lover’s delight. California food writer Parsons (How to Read a French Fry) begins with a fascinating tale of agribusiness trumping our taste buds en route to supplying year-round on-demand produce, and how farmer’s markets are bringing back both appreciation of, and access to, local and seasonal foods. He then takes readers on a delectable season-by-season produce tour, from springtime Artichokes Stuffed with Ham and Pine Nuts to midwinter Candied Citrus Peel, and provides readers with the lowdown on where each fruit or vegetable is grown and how to choose, store and prepare it. Along the way, he detours into low-stress jam making, the chemistry of tomato flavor, a portrait of two peach-growing stars of the Santa Monica farmer’s market and why cucumbers make some people burp. For readers who have always wondered where their food comes from, why it tastes the way it does and how to pick a peach, a melon or a green bean, this book will be an invaluable resource. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

So you should buy it.

Where was I?

Right, so Russ has just read Agnes and the book begins with Agnes’s first column about how a good frying pan is the one thing you need in a kitchen, ending with:

Besides the obvious braising, browning, and frying, I can make sauces and stir frys in it, toast cheese sandwiches and slivered almonds, use the underside to pound cutlets, and in a pinch probably swing it to defend my honor. If I could find a man that versatile and dependable, I’d grab him.

So Russ sends me the first line of one of his early columns from the LA Times:

Wednesday December 08, 2004

THE CALIFORNIA COOK
Revolution in the kitchen
By Russ Parsons, Times Staff Writer

As far as I’m concerned, there are only two really important decisions in a cook’s life: choosing a mate and buying a chef’s knife. If that seems like an overstatement, you just haven’t found the right knife.

Great cousins think alike. Of course, I can’t make a peanut butter sandwich and Russ can make anything, but still, you can tell we’re cousins. All we think about is food and love. And sometimes, we can’t tell the difference.

Oh, and while you’re buying How To Pick A Peach, get How to Read a French Fry, Russ’s first book. The New York Times gave it a rave for its “affable voice and intellectual clarity” and Julia Child lauded it for its “deep factual information.”

That’s my cousin, folks. I’m very proud.