A Writer's Life

Inside the Writers Rooms

Two showrunners, Javier Grillo Marxuach and John Rogers, are giving aspiring a screenwriters an inside peek, literally and figuratively, into their writers rooms for MIDDLEMAN and LEVERAGE. It's great stuff. Today, John explains the process behind plotting their stories. (The picture is of the MIDDLEMAN staff, with my friend Javi on the far right).

Our Worst Script

I published the post below on this blog in July 2006...and forgot all about what I said I'd do at the end. Now I am following through...

Ken Levine writes today about the worst script he and his partner ever wrote.

In 1993 my writing partner, David Isaacs and I did a short run series for CBS called BIG WAVE DAVE’S starring Adam Arkin and David Morse. It ran that summer, got 19 shares, kept 100% of MURPHY BROWN’S audience and was cancelled. At the time CBS had starring vehicles in the wings for Peter Scolari, Bronson Pinchot, and the always hilarious Faye Dunaway so they didn’t need us.

We were given a production order of six with three back-up scripts. We assigned the first two back-ups to our staff and planned on writing the third ourselves. When the show was cancelled we put in to CBS to get paid for the additional scripts. They said fine, but we had to turn in the completed scripts. Gulp!

Bill Rabkin and I had almost the exact same experience on SEAQUEST. We'd already turned in the outline for  episode 14 when we got canceled. But in order to get paid for the teleplay, we had to write it. We did it in one day, while we were packing up our office. I still live in fear that some sf fan will stumble on a bootleg draft at a scifi convention, post it on the net, and people will think we actually write that bad. I'm in Germany now, or I'd post an excerpt. I'll try to remember to do it when I return.

UPDATE March 8, 2007:  Okay, here's an excerpt from "About Face,"  the script Bill and I wrote in a day to get our script fee. We knew no one would ever read it. All you need to know to follow along is that Piccolo a man with gills and Darwin is a talking dolphin (I'm not kidding).

Writing Drama

I just read a review copy of the third edition of Yves Lavandier's WRITING DRAMA. The book was translated from the French edition by Bernard Besserglik, so I am not exactly sure who I should blame for how dull the writing is. But I can certainly point the finger at Yves for the pomposity and the sheer wordiness. WRITING DRAMA is actually a very good book about writing – whether it's plays, scripts or books -- with lots of practical advice and important lessons about story structure, character development, and dialogue to offer. Unfortunately, I've read software manuals that are more lively and engaging.

Yves is obviously a bright, educated guy who has seen a lot of movies and thought hard about them…and he wants to be sure you know it.  So to get to his very good advice, you have to endure lots of irrelevant digressions, pointless footnotes, self-indulgent pontificating, and lots of tiresome repetition (and far more examples and film references than are necessary). However there's so much practical wisdom in the book that I wish he'd had a decent editor or at least followed his own good advice:   

Economy – the art of condensing a text, of conveying as much information as possible in a compact form – is highly gratifying to the spectator. […] the writer should work through it again adding stylistic features and as many touches of humour and poetry as can be managed, in other words, the literary flourishes that make it more agreeable to read, and thus improve its chances of pleasing…

If he'd taken his own advice, the book would have been a quarter of the size and much more useful, not to mention more readable (For starters, he could ditch what amounts to a 30 page introduction, in which he actually tells the reader they might want to skip ahead a few pages).

There's a lot to criticize about the book, particularly his lecturing about what's right and wrong about certain movies, his inane rules for writing for children, his ponderous deconstruction of comedy, and his opinions on television writing. But all that said, I would highly recommend the book to aspiring writers…and even established professionals looking for a little refresher. It worked for me. I am in the midst of adapting a book that I optioned and his book really got me thinking about my task. Reading WRITING DRAMA definitely helped me focus…to sharpen my outline and refine the character arcs. And I have been a working, professional screenwriter for a while now.

Yves begins his book by stating a few points that should be self-evident, but it's amazing how many writers of scripts and novels today seem to forget them:

[Writers] are all without exception writing for other people, for that set of others known as the audience. A work of drama exists only for and by virtue of the public. It takes two to speak this language: writer and receiver, with the actor-character as intermediary. Indeed, however much the actors pretend to be addressing each other, everything they say is directed in just one direction: at the spectator. […] Writers who do not take the trouble to master the language of their art, in other words to find out how the public receives and perceives drama, are too often inaccessible. Perhaps they believe that it is up to the public to be curious about their work, when it fact it is up to them to stimulate the public's curiosity. […] Drama does not exist because there are writers of drama; it is rather that writers of drama exist because there is a human need for drama. Whether he likes it or not, the writer's role is to meet this need.

His lengthy section on conflict and emotion is particularly strong.

Conflict is at the heart of drama because conflict is at the heart of life, of which drama is an imitation. […]  Conflict is a revealer of personality, which is why the great writers of drama have used it so abundantly. […] Conflict means opposition and thus obstacle.

He later writes, in his chapter on character, that:

The action that a character adopts when faced with a conflict, either to prevent it or to overcome it, is one of the best indicators of the kind of person he is.

Those may seem like obvious points, but it's surprising how many rookie screenwriters and novelists fail to realize how important conflict is, thinking instead that witty description in the action and expository dialogue are the best ways to reveal character. Whenever I am writing, and a scene doesn't work, there's usually a problem with the conflict and the objectives each character is pursuing, or not pursuing, in the scene. Yves offers a useful schematic for the basic dramatic process:

Character—objective—obstacle—conflict--emotion

A character seeks to achieve an objective but encounters obstacles, which gives rise to conflict and leads to emotion, not just for the character but also for the spectator.

This not only leads to drama, but also to comedy. Conflict is storytelling and it is character. His chapters on the Protagonist, Objectives and Obstacles are also full of good points and interesting observations:

Some writers refuse to be cruel to their protagonists. It is simply beyond them. They identify so much with their characters that they suffer if they have to make them suffer. They fail to realize that the best way of getting the spectator to share their concern and love for their protagonists is precisely to spare them nothing.

I agree with him. And yet, he later advises:

When a writer wishes to indulge his sadistic tendencies, it is better that he should do so on a secondary character rather than the protagonist.

I am not sure from reading his book where he actually draws that line, but it doesn't matter. I can live with his apparent contradiction. Overall, there's a lot a writer can learn from Yves' book and, despite the wordiness and occasional pomposity, it may be one of the best books on screenwriting out there.

As an aside (and there are many, many, many of them in the book), he's also a persuasive defender of, and believer in, writers as the primary creative force in film-making:

It is the writer's role to determine everything meaningful that goes into a work of drama. In theory, the actors, director, production designer, composer or editor should not have to do anything more than recreate, using their respective skills, the meaning intended by the writer. They are servants of the writer's vision in a sense which, I stress, is by no means pejorative and furthermore requires real talent.

So it's appropriate to close on one of his earliest and truest observations:

[…] people talk as if the screenplay does not exist. Or no longer exists. We are told the screenplay is a transitional phenomenon, existing only  briefly, its relation to the film comparable to that of a caterpillar to a butterfly. This might be true of the object itself, the grubby manuscript that circulates from hand-to-hand on the set […] but it is emphatically not true of the text as a work of art, the product of a writer's imaginings, the film narrative. […] it is often the key element on which the quality of the movie depends.

If you've got the fortitude to slog through this book, and if you can stay awake, you will be rewarded with some valuable advice that will help you become a better writer. (Now if only his publisher could come out with an abridged edition…but with some liveliness, humor and character added!).

As The Crow Flies

My friend Bryce Zabel talks about the development of his TV series version of THE CROW, which is about to be released on DVD. It's fascinating stuff (what's even more fascinating is that he saved his business card):

What do you do when the incredibly violent film you are asked to adapt to a TV audience is based on cruelty, and the main character is driven by a thirst for revenge?

My answer? You expand the premise to fully explore the nature of life after death, and you change the character quest from revenge to redemption.

And how do you handle the fact that the cult film was made infamous by the horrible on-set death of its star, Brandon Lee?

That was a tougher question because the idea behind the TV series was to use the Eric Draven character, the one who'd been in the comics and that Brandon Lee had played. My take was that, tragic as Lee's death was, George Reeves' tragic death did not prevent Christopher Reeve or Dean Cain from playing Superman, and that we would just have to proceed and hope that our own version stood intact on its own.

Fast Track

One of the reasons I have been jetting back-and-forth to Europe a lot lately is because I'm writing and producing a two-hour movie/pilot for Action Concept that will be shot in Berlin in May for  broadcast on ProSieben (a big German network) and worldwide in international syndication. I've waited until we got the firm greenlight before sharing the news with you (I'm superstitious that way).

The project is called FAST TRACK and is about urban street racing (yes, I'm being intentionally vague). The movie will be packed with amazing, street-racing action (check out the Action Concept website to see what these guys can do!) and shot entirely in English. The leading roles are being cast in Los Angeles by Burrows/Boland,  who did LORD OF THE RINGS, KING KONG, CAST AWAY, 21 JUMP STREET, CONTACT, A-TEAM, DIAGNOSIS MURDER and MARTIAL LAW, to name a few.

I'll bring you reports from the set as production moves along.

Inside The Writers Room

Writer/producer Matt Witten talks with Deutsche Welle about the Media Exchange "Writers Room" seminars I've been doing with Action Concept in Germany. Matt sums it up pretty nicely:

American shows tend to be pretty fast-paced and vigorously structured, and the way we structure the action and the conflict for our main characters has been thought through in ways that are fresh for German writers, they haven't necessarily heard it described in these terms. So it gives them a new way of looking at the writing they're doing. They were also intrigued by the fact that in America we have staff writers who meet every day, and we have a head writer responsible for the consistency of the show -- "the show-runner." These concepts are new in Germany, where there is no cohesion of writing staff. Instead, episodes are written by freelancers who turn in maybe just two a year. Another thing in American TV is that directors don't have the power to change the script without talking to the writer.

Reviews and Interviews

Matt Witten and I were interviewed in Lohr, Germany by a Serienjunkies, a German website devoted to television. You can read the wide-ranging interview (in English!) over the next several days here and here.

And my book MR. MONK AND THE BLUE FLU has received some very nice reviews while I have been away from Bookgasm, MyShelf, Gerald So, and Gumshoe Review.

Change is Good

My brother Tod and I were talking the other day about certain authors we know who burst onto the scene with a great book and have been replicating that same novel ever since with ever-worsening results.  It's a dangerous rut for writers to get into, as bestselling author Tess Gerritsen points out.

Selling a book is just the first step in your career as a writer.  Look at all the first-time novelists who later vanished from the publishing world.  They discovered a very painful truth: to make a career in this field, you’ll have to do a lot more than just sell one book[...]

If the books you’re writing aren’t finding an audience, maybe it’s time to write a different kind of book.  In my case, I first moved from romance to thrillers.  I loved writing romance, but I just couldn’t write fast enough to make a living at it. Writing for Harlequin was fun and satisfying, and I loved the genre, but when each book was only earning out around $12,000, I knew I’d never send my kids to college on my earnings as a writer.  As it turned out, I had a great idea for a medical thriller (HARVEST), which was my debut novel on the New York Times list.

But four books later, I could see that my medical thriller sales were flat, and even starting to decline.  By then I had a crime thriller in mind, one that I couldn’t wait to write.  With THE SURGEON, I launched the Jane Rizzoli series.  And my sales have increased since then.

If Harlan Coben had stuck with his Myron Bolitar books instead of shifting to standalone thrillers, would he be the international success that he is now? And if Michael Connelly, Ed McBain, Robert B. Parker, Richard Stark, Laura Lippman, Lawrence Block and Robert Crais hadn't stepped away from their long-running series to write other books (and other series), would their writing have remained as fresh? I don' t think so. I believe one of the reasons they've been so successful is because they've branched out into other areas  (of course, there's always folks like Sue Grafton, Lee Child, Barry Eisler, and Ian Rankin who do just fine without leaving the confines of their series).

It's why I'm glad I had the opportunity the last couple of years to alternate between writing the DIAGNOSIS MURDER and MONK books...they are two very different kinds of writing, even though they are both mystery series. DM is written in third person and is essentially a drama. MONK is written in first person and is primarily a comedy. 

Shifting between genres is also one of the pleasures of screenwriting. I've written, for instance, about lifeguards (Baywatch), private detectives (Spenser For Hire, Monk), werewolves (She Wolf of London), clever dolphins (Flipper), cops (Hunter), FBI agents (Missing), cross-dressing comics (Dame Edna), and just this week I wrote a pilot about urban street racing.

I like to think that the challenge of writing in different genres, characters and voices -- and doing so in books and TV -- keeps me and my writing fresh.

(updated 1.1.07)

Dark Times for Screenwriters?

Paul Guyot pointed me to Nikki Finke's column in the LA Weekly. She says that it's bleak for feature film  screenwriters these days:

“These jobs,” said the admittedly depressed literary agent, “just disappeared.” A manager joins the pity party and describes a litany of givebacks by his scribbling clients: free treatments, free rewrites, free polishes and/or free script-doctoring — all done with the hollow hope that the studio will give these schmucks with Underwoods a paying gig sooner rather than never. As for those sparse scribes offered real pay for projects, they’re buckling under studio demands by cutting their usual and customary by 30 percent. “It’s the bewildering nature of the business right now that nobody has a quote. It’s a quote-free system,” an agent describes.

In a word, it stinks out there for screenwriters, worse even than the fetid stench of the usual shit flung at them in previous years. These aren’t wannabes, either. These are some of the top names in the biz. “I am fucking terrified,” a major scribe tells me about his year of not getting any work. “I can’t believe my career is ending like this.”

It's no wonder so many of them are running to television and narrowing the opportunities even further for TV scribes...

Brilliance

What would happen if Aaron  Sorkin wrote a series about baseball? Emmy-winning writer  Ken Levine gives you a brilliant example.

EXT. KAUFMAN STADIUM -- NIGHT

THE MANAGER, LEO, TROTS OUT TO THE MOUND TO TALK TO BELEAGURED PITCHER, DANNY (THERE’S ALWAYS A DANNY). THE BASES ARE LOADED. THE CROWD IS GOING NUTS. IT’S GAME SEVEN OF THE WORLD SERIES.

LEO
You can’t get a good lobster in this town.

DANNY
Last I checked we were in Kansas City.

LEO
4.6 billion pork ribs sold every year and 18.9 tons of beef consumed annually since 1997 –

DANNY
They like their beef, what can I tell ya?

LEO
But you’d think just for variety’s sake.

DANNY
I can still throw my curve.

LEO
For strikes?

DANNY
I’m not throwing enough?

LEO
I’ve seen more lobsters.

There's more... much much more...and it's hilarious.