Tightrope Walker

I've been planning to post for ages. I haven't even said what I lovely time I had at FenCon, that's how long it's been. And now I still can't really post, because I'm being crushed beneath the flu on the one side and an immediate and urgent writing deadline on the other. But I wanted to note that KINGS is premiering tonight, and that the script was brilliant. I still remember flipping through it and thinking, "Hey, this seems to be set in an alternate universe. How did Michael sell that to network television?" Also, when I read the script I had no idea what it was about, and it took me till I was quite a ways into it to realize what was going on -- a moment of fun I'm sure the advertising will have spoiled for you by now. (But just in case it hasn't, I will refrain from telling you the premise.)

I should add that I still haven't seen the pilot. Sometimes life does horrible things to scripts, and audiences who were promised ice cream parfaits are confused by the scoop of rice and dirt they were just given. It'll break my heart if that turns out to be the case with KINGS.

Must get back to work now. Damn, I just tried to tell the dog he could go out but he couldn't understand the hoarse and strangled sound I made and kept looking at me funny: "Is this a trick? Am I supposed to stay in? Do these weird sounds mean something new I'm supposed to learn?"

I'll post again when I'm past my crisis.

This is just a short one, for people who saw last night's episode. I've been asked which "Lexington" House's parents were living in.

That would be the great Bluegrass State of Kentucky. And let me tell you, you haven't had fun until you've driven all over Los Angeles County (and part of Ventura County) looking for rural roads that could pass muster as vaguely Kentuckian. All glory to our location scouts.

House delayed the trip as much as possible, whenever he could, so the journey out took a bit longer than it might have. (In fact, if you'd like to believe House tried other tricks when they were off-screen, I would encourage you.) Wilson was arrested close to sunset, and they spent a few hours of the night waiting in the sheriff's office. Then they drove straight through the rest of the trip so as to arrive in time for a morning funeral service. (In my opinion, House only stopped thwarting Wilson's efforts toward the end there because he believed they'd reach the funeral too late.) The meal at the diner afterwards was a kind of late brunch, since they missed breakfast that day. (You know those roadtrip diner stops where you're sleepless and haven't washed and it's still a glorious adventure? I feel sure the skies outside that diner were the essence of blue.)

When House called the interpreter, he interrupted him at home because it was night in China. We originally set the scene outdoors, and had his wife bring the phone out to him, but night scenes outdoors require acres of lighting, and I eventually realized I should get over myself and we moved it inside. These are the kinds of considerations I never had to think about back when I stuck with novels.

Spoiler for "House's Head."

Tonight's the episode David Foster and I co-wrote, called "Birthmarks." I include no spoilers here for that; but I will talk about spoilers for a minute.

I'm a spoilerphile. I've picked up spoilers for years, brought them home, had wild sexual congress with them, and cooked them a wholesome breakfast the next day. It never bothered me, knowing what was going to happen in a story. Stephen King once referred (condemningly) to such audience members as "PEOPLE WHO TURN TO THE END TO SEE HOW IT COMES OUT." Ah, we have been misunderstood, we spoilerphiles. "I'm not looking for what," I'd explain to my spoilerphobe friends, "I'm looking for how and why."

As a television writer, I've been asked a few times how I feel about the problem of spoilers wandering over the Internet. My take has always been, first, the vast majority of the audience is not online discussing story points; second, of those that are, most fan communities are considerate enough to restrict spoiler information to people who enjoy it and seek it out. Why therefore see it as a "problem" at all?

But over the years I've modified my views on the harmlessness of spoiler-hunting. First, I've come to recognize there are two types of spoilers: the innocent, everyday sort, and the sort that really do spoil. By which I mean, I wish I hadn't known the secret of The Crying Game; not only was that spoiled for me, but a friend had assured me there were other surprises in the movie, so I spent the entire time waiting for those surprises to happen. Then I went home, disappointed. The fault was not in the film; it was in me. The fact is, storytelling is collaborative: the audience fills in and embellishes on an unconscious level even as they watch (or read). And the expectations they bring determine how they'll color the events.

Quite often you can't even warn your friends when a book or movie contains... well, let's say a "Spoiler" to differentiate such things from mundane spoilers. Oh, it's safe enough to warn when it's a movie like The Usual Suspects; the reveal there is of the "whodunit" variety. A secret identity can only be one of the people you've met -- the question is simply which one. For other films, simply warning there is a spoiler is to let the cat out of the bag. I know people who -- realizing there was a story twist coming -- figured out the ending of The Sixth Sense the moment a friend started to tell them the opening of the movie. My experience with that film was more pristine; I went in its opening week, with a group of other writers. We entered the theater assuming it was a quiet story about a boy and his mother with a fantasy element; we had no idea there was to be any surprise about the ending, and -- full disclosure -- not one of us saw it coming. If I'd seen it two weeks later, I don't think I'd have had that treat. And I notice that once people began expecting "surprise" endings from Shyamalan, those endings stopped being surprises.

"House's Head" seemed to me to be a story that had exactly the sort of Spoiler I'm talking about. So I was a bit sad when certain photos appeared on the Internet just before the episode aired. I wished there were a way to tell people, "This one you might really not want to know about." But even to offer warning is to risk giving the game away and ruining people's pleasure; given that clue, there was a reasonable chance a regular viewer would catch on too early.

And you know, the deeper I get into the spoiler question, the more I wonder about it. Perhaps my 'phile days were wrong. I used to be cavalier because I thought I didn't need to feel the pleasure of surprise over story events; but the process of being an audience is much more layered than that. I was thinking about it lately because I see a similar pattern playing out in the U.S. election. Whichever side you're on, whichever candidate you support, you construct a narrative for; and every new piece of information that comes in gets filtered through that narrative. If an apparently damaging piece of information is revealed about the opposition candidate, it is damning. If it's revealed about your own guy, then there's a simple explanation for it and the other side is blowing it up out of all proportion.

This is human. It's the way we're built. And we do the same with overtly fictional narratives and characters who don't exist. Ideally the story starts on the first page of the third Harry Potter book, or when the first frame of a show appears on the TV screen, but when spoilers are introduced, the story begins in that person's mind weeks ahead of time. We could hear things out of context, hate them in advance, and then watch them unfold through the lens of our dissatisfaction. Or we could spend an hour or two waiting for something to happen that was only in the trailer. Or we could ferret out every tiny bit of information about something, watch those bits unfold, and then leave thinking, "Is that all there is?"

Of course, even when the story begins ahead of time on the movie screen inside our heads, that doesn't mean it's all pre-determined; that's not my argument. Quite often I've heard spoilers, then watched or read the actual work, and was able to go with the story as it was presented. I've heard people say, "I worried about X, but when I saw it play out, it wasn't what I'd expected." I'm simply arguing that things are not always that clear-cut, and when there are shades of meaning, we bring some of the crayons with us.

One of the few movies I truly regret being Spoiled for was Cinema Paradiso. It's not a film known for its Shocking! Twist! Ending! -- but there is an amazing scene in it that represents the emotional culmination of the story as a whole. I loved it. But I suspect if I hadn't known it was coming, it would have knocked me out of my chair and left me a sodden lump of tears on the floor, and what more can one ask? (At the same time, honesty compels me to add that had I not been told about that scene, I might not have been so motivated to watch the movie -- and therein lies the temptation to wickedness that promos will sometimes bow to.) For me, Cinema Paradiso was missing a few of its rightful emotional colors. I brought too much to it. I did not approach it with my metaphorical hat in hand (as one should a film like that), saying, "Tell me in your own words." I sat down, hooked my feet over the arm of the chair, and said, "I know what you're about. Go ahead then!" And the loss was mine.

Anyway. Those are my feelings about spoilers. Can you tell I'm ambivalent?

As for my own writing, my feelings are pretty much the opposite of promo-people and the folks who write blurbs on the backs of books. I want to follow customers out of bookstores and say, "Don't believe it! Keep your expectations low! If you don't, you'll only be disappointed."

That's why nobody with any sense would ever let me near a promo. So, hey, enjoy the show, and keep those expectations down, okay?

Letting you guys know I will be the "ORAC Special Guest" at Fencon V, a science fiction convention in Dallas/Fort Worth, October 3-5.

First of all, gotta love that title. As an old Blake's 7 fan, I think my favorite line of Orac's came when one character -- a sociopath of whom I was quite fond -- was searching for ballast to throw overboard to get their shuttle up to escape velocity, and Orac helpfully volunteered how much another character weighed.

Among other subjects, my panels will include "Fanfic to Profic to Profit," "C.S. Lewis," "Non-Genre Shows We're Watching," and my GoH speech/interview/Q&A. I'll also be doing a live, informal commentary on "House vs. God," just because.

I rarely seem able to get away from work long enough to go anywhere, so I've assumed any conventions I attended would either be in LA, or post-retirement. But the Fencon organizers cleverly...just kept asking. "Oh, it sounds lovely, but I don't think I can make it." "That's okay, perhaps next year." "Yes, perhaps. Though I never know -- " "We'll just put you down on the list then, shall we?" "Um, well, I suppose -- " "You'll let us know if you can't." "Um. Okay. Right." Their cheerful efficiency has me fantasizing what it would be like to have them running our government. Wall Street would be under control, universal healthcare would not even be a problem, and we would all have access to a consuite stocked with the granola bars of our choice.

I will add that the folks I've been corresponding with seem like lovely people, and I'm looking forward to going. Now if I can only get this next outline done before I leave on Thursday...

I keep saying I want to expand the subject matter of this blog, so now that we've tramped through the wild wood of semicolons, let's move on to the swampy marsh of politics. But don't worry -- I'm not talking about politics from the point of view of left or right, but politics as audience perception. Because that's more the sort of thing this journal is for: what the creator of the message is saying vs. what the audience takes.

I've been thinking about this subject a lot over the past few days, ever since Sarah Palin was chosen as McCain's running mate. Clearly a message; but how would it be deciphered?

(Of course, given the demographics, any choice anyone makes is going to do seven different things; and this one will have positive fallout with some slices of the Republican base. Then, too, just as people prefer entertainment where the characters look like them -- white people tend to watch shows with white people, etc.; boys have historically tended to read "boys' books" but not books with girl protagonists -- these are imperfect generalizations backed by sad statistical fact -- so too will NRA members, hunters, "hockey Moms," and others who fit Palin's self-described demographic react positively. But all these things are getting further into actual politics than I want to go in this journal.)

What does the entertainment industry tell us about audience perception? I keep thinking of a learning experience I had some years ago on an action show, when I was still a relatively new television writer. We were working on an episode in which our protagonist was escaping from some evildoers, along with one of the good folks our heroes were routinely trying to save; they hurried across a large bridge to evade their pursuers. A classic Red Sea moment. When this story was being worked out in the writers' room, the fellow leading the room, an upper-level producer, suggested this would be a good place for our star, already halfway across the bridge, to suddenly swing across the chasm to the opposite side of the river.

Well, I didn't react with the enthusiasm he'd hoped for. I wasn't sure what the point of it was, in story terms; it was just a swing. For no particular reason. "It'll look fantastic," I was assured. But when I imagined it in my head, the picture just didn't make me stand up and cheer. True, years before, I had gotten a kick out of that famous swing in Star Wars, but there didn't seem to be anything new or special about this one. I had to admit to myself, though, that I often found the chase scenes in TV and movies to be pretty much a signal to go get a soda and hope that when I returned the characters would be doing something more interesting. Like talking.

I'd only ever seen two car chases that I liked, in all of cinema: the funny chase at the end of The Pink Panther and the driving-against-traffic chase in Ronin. So I confessed, "I find car chases boring." "Let me ask you something," the producer said. "Have you ever seen a movie called Ronin?"

Okay, fine, I was out-gunned. And I wasn't horrified at the idea, after all; it simply didn't thrill me. Throwing in a swing wouldn't actually damage the story. And I was apparently tone-deaf on the subject of "action"; most of the audience seems to thoroughly enjoy it, and why should I deprive them of that, even if it didn't speak to me personally? After all, the expression "let's cut to the chase" didn't come out of nowhere, right?

So the stunt was filmed. As it turned out, it was filmed in such a way that it was even less clear why our star suddenly decided to swing across the river; still, everyone agreed, speaking the action language I obviously did not understand, that it was a fantastic swing and the audience would love it.

As it happened, this episode was being audience-tested, which means that a random selection of victims -- er, people who happened to be in geographic proximity to the studio that day -- were rounded up and asked to watch. As they watched, they turned dials, either expressing enthusiasm or the lack of it. And those of us on the other side of the one-way mirror got to see the results of those dials expressed as lines on a chart, color-coded for male and female. If there was something they liked, the line would rise, and its steepness would give us an idea as to how strongly they felt about it; if they were displeased, the line would drop. If they weren't reacting much one way or another, it held steady.

I was there that night with another writer and some studio people. We got to the bridge scene, and as the characters hurried across, the lines rose… slightly. "Well," I thought, "they're not that impressed, but at least it'll go up in a second when our star does the stunt."

Our star did the stunt. And every single line in the audience dropped more precipitously than any lines I'd ever seen, or have seen to this day. I'm sure if you took a picture of me in that second, my jaw would have been dropped precipitously, as well. I turned to look at the other writer; it was a WTF? moment.

Later, when the audience was questioned, they said:

Why were they swinging across the river?
What was new and special about a swing across a river?
I thought that if they were going to do a stunt like that, it would be something that would blow me away, y'know? Not the same old stuff.
It's like they thought just because it was a stunt we'd like it.

Which was all utterly true. Not only had they felt pandered to, the style of the pander had told them that the writers must hold them in low regard. That clifflike drop-off happened because they were offended. (Now, to be fair, I must at once add that their suspicions were untrue; what's more, filming action at all in the world of television is extremely hard to pull off, and if that audience were waiting for something that would blow them away, they'd have a long wait. It does happen, but it's wildly rare. The people behind that stunt really believed they were giving the audience the best that could be done under the circumstances, and they meant it as a treat.) The audience had correctly sensed, however, that this was gratuitously done; that the story did not require it, and therefore the only reason it could be there was to dazzle them. And if that were the case, they damn well better be dazzled.

To this day, I'd rather not do a flashy action sequence at all unless it's either clever, moving, or visually arresting -- and two out of three would be preferable. But apparently I also learned something that's more widely relevant. Because whenever I think of Palin, I remember those lines all going down like express elevators. Does this mean the McCain campaign could have evoked the same audience phenomenon? I'm not even going to pretend to answer that; I'm not a political expert. But I thought it might entertain you to hear a point of view from a different but still audience-dependent world.

Eons have passed since I last blogged. Entire generations of bloggers have been born, written, posted pictures of their cats, and died since I came before you. (Blogging generations are very short, after all, like blogging time -- things that happened six months ago feel two years past at least, and it's all a bit like that Dr. Who episode where warriors lived and died in days.)

From time to time I've thought, "I should put that into an essay for my journal" -- that being thoughts about fan fiction, the choices of British television vs. American, how series get chosen and made (so not how you think), graphic novels I'd like to write, women directors in the 1920s, what C.S. Lewis, Robert Heinlein, and Lawrence Durrell have in common, the mistakes writers trying television for the first time most often make, the gulf between the story the writer is telling and the story the audience takes from it, auditions, Los Angeles geography, and my new strategy for how I'm going to store the many books in my house. And a few hundred other things. But all those topics seem to require thought and attention to tackle properly, and I'm forever shoving them away to get through the deadlines of the day.

So to clear my blogging palate, I've decided to post something short and pointless. I've decided to share with you my love for semicolons. Not everyone shares this love (though C.S. Lewis did and so did Jane Austen). There was a time in our history when semicolons were abundant, like passenger pigeons, and people complained there were too many of them. Writers reached for semicolons as though reaching for the doorknob. According to Paul Collins:

When the Times of London reported in 1837 on two University of Paris law profs dueling with swords, the dispute wasn't over the fine points of the Napoleonic Code. It was over the point-virgule: the semicolon. "The one who contended that the passage in question ought to be concluded by a semicolon was wounded in the arm," noted the Times. "His adversary maintained that it should be a colon."

That's when manly men were unafraid of lace and snuffboxes. Errol Flynn, one feels sure, would know what a semicolon was and how to deploy it with panache. Today, sadly, many disdain the semicolon, as architects of the 1950s disdained ornament and the decorative pilasters of history. What does the semicolon do, they ask, that cannot be done with the swift intervention of a period? The period, which like a quick, clean bullet to the heart, clearly demarcates the end of a thought. Semicolons, on the other hand, allow sentences to run on disgracefully, which makes them, well... girly.

Some avoid the semicolon because they have not yet built up a relationship with it. Others fear ridicule from semicolon-haters. Still others will gingerly accept it in descriptive text, but when it comes to dialogue -- well, as one writer told me, "No one has ever spoken in semicolons." I would only say, "Perhaps you have not heard them. Perhaps the semicolon is, for you, like a dog whistle. But I myself have shamelessly spoken in semicolons, and I am not alone."

To give the anti side its fair due, you'll note I've written everything above without using even one semicolon. It's true; the semicolon is not a load-bearing wall. But its gentle and graceful attachment of one thought to another remains charming to me. The semicolon does not force; it guides with clarity and logic through the thickets of prose -- and in its way it guides the writer, too, for even a semicolon cannot link two entirely disparate points. Coherence comes as a side-effect. By insisting on shorter, quicker sentences with lots of periods, isn't fashion being prized over actual, rigorous thought? Are we not our MTV?

And so for me, reading House scripts was like finding a spiritual home. Semicolons piled up on the pages like driftwood after a storm. One day a director brought up the subject, and asked how writers in general felt about them. I explained that some people would become violent if they saw you putting semicolons in dialogue, and then I smiled with wicked pride: "But not here."

Because, after all, semicolons are safe at any speed. Let's look at Austen for a moment -- she springs her punctuation choices on you at the very beginning of Pride and Prejudice, when Mrs. Bennet pours out her intel on Netherfield Park to her husband:

"Do not you want to know who has taken it?" cried his wife impatiently.

"You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it."

This was invitation enough.

"Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is
taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that
he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was
so much delighted with it that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately;
that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his
servants are to be in the house by the end of next week."

That's the semicolon as a series of arched bridges, all very civilized; but even in the rat-tat-tat of modern TV dialogue, where a clump of exposition like the one above would choke in the throat like a hairball -- you try to leap from speaker to speaker much more quickly if you can -- the semicolon works.

I declare my prosperous love; reader, I married it.

I still have some comments to get to from my last, but I've been asked to let people know that mysterious things are happening in Vegas.

The divine Jane Espenson of Buffy and Tru Calling and the charming and debonair Mark Verheiden of Smallville and Battlestar Galactica will both be there. One could not be in better company.

Anyone in the area who's interested in joining some strike-related activity, please write to fans4writers@gmail.com, and ask them to pass your e-mail to Striker Ace as someone who'd like to help.

I hope you've been enjoying the holidays. My Christmas presents to myself were Umberto Eco's On Ugliness -- I passed it in a bookstore and the pictures yanked me right over; and you know what? Most of them aren't ugly, just images from a richer and stranger universe -- A Medieval Miscellany -- did you know people actually bathed a lot in the middle ages? And apparently they found the tub a good spot for dining and hanky-panky, too. It wasn't till the Renaissance that they decided all that water had to be unhealthy -- and Naomi Novik's Black Powder War. Because dragons and history go together.

Eventually I'll have time to finish reading these things; but now that we're all here, I should update you on the revolution. First, striking is work. Who knew? Back in the days of our innocence, writers -- and directors, producers, and crew -- would turn to each other and say, "Strike? I could really use the break. If it's a three-week strike, that would be perfect. Hahahahaha!"

(Though we knew in our hearts that if it came, it would probably be long and harrowing. It was just difficult to look up from the all-consuming job long enough to worry about it too much.)

But many people reading this already know it's work, because you've been working right along with us, on the picket lines and at sites like wga_supporters and ffwga_house and fans4writers. And none of us are getting paid. Which brings us to creativity, effort, and what it means to be a "fan" or a "pro." I've long thought the wall between those two categories was largely artificial, and certainly far less relevant than the wall between "talented" and "untalented," or "ready" and "not ready." With a long wait before television returns to anything like a normal schedule, I've heard loose talk of fan fiction, virtual seasons, fan-shot videos, and god knows what else. To that loose talk I say: Go! (So long as you keep the House fan fiction away from me, for legal reasons. Someday I'll do my post on fan fiction; this is not that post. But for the moment I will confine myself to "No, please don't send me any writing whatsoever -- scripts, fan fiction, or your 800-page novel. Even if I had time to read it, I can't.")

But there's nothing to stop you from making participatory entertainment a lot more participatory. I read a suggestion about shooting a parody of the studio trying to film House without actors or writers. I say, go for it. (That's something I could probably watch, too.) Or you could write an entire AU season in WWII, with Wilson as a doctor in France, House the cynical flyer who crashed in the countryside and is being nursed back to health in his cellar, Cuddy as the jaded resistance leader who supplies the Nazis with couture for their girlfriends by day, Chase as the morally torn German lieutenant -- okay, I'm stopping myself, because I could go on this way for a while. And so could you! (Just don't forget the part where House is dying after making a sacrifice he would never admit to, and Wilson passes him his cigarette. Because that scene? Always plays.)

Or you could take the time you would have spent on watching television, and work on that novel.

Or you could create a video and submit it to fairdeal4writers.com:

UnitedHollywood is asking you to shoot a video showing us how you would get the AMPTP to make a fair deal. Videos can be up to four minutes long and any genre from comedy, drama, mockumentary or even commercial-like, and must contain the phrase “fighting for the future.” The only other stipulation is the last line of the video must be “We’re all on the same page.”

Paul Haggis will be one of the judges. Need I say Due South? Crash? I didn't think so. I heard that a writer/producer I once worked with, upon learning of this contest, asked, "Aren't we just teaching people to come and take our jobs?" To which I would say, "If they're good enough to take our jobs, they should have 'em."

In other news, you may have read about the "skytyping" at the Rose Parade. United Hollywood covered the story:

Back in November, the Battlestar Galactica fans had an idea about maybe skywriting in support of the writers' strike. One of the companies they spoke to was Skytypers. The prices were all too cost prohibitive, but Skytypers remembered those fans when a movie promo scheduled for the Rose Parade pulled out at the last minute. Skytypers also went one step further; they reduced the price from the normal fee, about $20,000, down to $6250.

With about an hour to decide, a fan stepped forward and generously offered the use of her credit card, with the caveat that she get paid back, hopefully before the bill came, and the silent auction was born.

Now, that's taking a chance. A fan, someone who loves good television writing as we do, faced with a risky choice, went ahead and leaped. It is time, as Bertie Wooster would say, to rally round. If you go here you can bid on:

--A HOUSE T-SHIRT with a signed thank-you note.

--LUNCH WITH LIZ FRIEDMAN: "Liz Friedman, of House, Hack, The O.C., Numb3rs, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, and Xena, Warrior Princess will have lunch with the winning bidder. Liz has been, at various and sometimes overlapping times, a writer, producer, Hollywood executive, and gay rights activist. She was played (as a badass, of course) by Hudson Leick on two episodes of Hercules -- 'Yes, Virginia, There Is a Hercules' and 'For Those of You Just Joining Us,' and was described in Doris Egan's blog as 'the most dangerous writer among us.' You'll need to be in the LA area."

--LUNCH AND/OR A SCRIPT CRITIQUE WITH ME: "Doris… is happy to talk of just about anything writing-related with the least bit of encouragement, or even with none at all. You needn't have a script to critique and needn't even want to talk about writing. Doris will talk about the weather and show you pictures of her dog; whatever you prefer. You will need to be in the LA area if you want to do lunch. If you live out-of-area but still want a script critique, we can do it by phone and e-mail."

This offer is one of the few exceptions I can make to reading scripts by people I don't know. Any funds raised over the cost of the skytyping will be donated to the Industry Support Fund, created by members of the WGA to help non-writers during the strike.

In other words -- please go bid, my friends. So far the t-shirt is outshining me in a big way.

The AMPTP has announced it will return to the table. Since walking off, they had maintained they would not come back unless the Guild ended the strike (how do strikes end if people don't talk?).

On the one hand, this is but a baby step. Remember, the AMPTP started negotiations by taking away what residuals we had -- rather like someone who begins by punching their opponent in the face, then backpedals to simply slapping them. Both sides were pretty far apart, and negotiations had been ongoing for a while, without noticeable success. Talks will re-start on November 26, but they could continue for months; the congloms could walk away again; and with sharp-eyed correspondents pointing out the advantages to the corporations in keeping this going (using their force majeure clause, they can fire a great many people, basically), any celebration would be premature.

But I'm going to celebrate a little anyway. In the first couple of days of the strike, I took a call at HQ from someone at fans4writers.com. At the time, I wasn't familiar with that site, but as soon as the caller explained what it was, I asked, "Are you originally from Whedonesque?" When she said yes, I was delighted. "You people really are taking over the world, aren't you," I said.

I was probably the only person taking phone calls that day who would have asked that question. I'm one of the most fannish writers I know; I may be one of the only people in the world who can point out that the public-domain image of the fist holding the pen that's on some of the strike t-shirts matches the icon used on winning stories in an X-Files fan fiction awards event about ten years ago. (Slash awards, by the way. You see, it's not just Hollywood history that I appreciate.)

But even I was caught by surprise at the level of fan awareness and support of the WGA strike. Since the first day of the strike two weeks ago, the fan sites have been brought front and center into the consciousness of a lot of writers, and I have to say, we have been blown away. I knew that fans can organize; I knew they had opinions; I knew many of them were well-read and believed in a world with good writing. But I was still thinking in terms of the 1988 writers' strike. When the writers were alone. When nobody really seemed to care or understand -- when writers were just funny people doing things for crazy Hollywood reasons that didn't have much to do with actual life, or so it seemed from the news coverage.

You work in Hollywood, especially behind the scenes, and you just don't think anybody's going to ever hear about you or take you seriously. I am… really, I'm gobsmacked. I cannot tell you how wildly impressed I am with the fan response. And I always knew you could do stuff like this! Imagine how blown away the people at the Guild are who don't know fannish history. They're still vibrating with shock and awe.

In fact, I think the AMPTP are, too. I seriously believe that the fans are the x-factor in this negotiation; that there are now three sides, not two, and the viewers are being heard. How great an effect that will have, I don't know; but I also don't know that the conglomerates would have agreed to return to the table without things like this:

http://fans4writers.com/

and this:

http://community.livejournal.com/wga_supporters

and good lord, this:

http://criminalmindsfanatic.blogspot.com/2007/11/criminal-minds-partial-advertisers-list.html

Not to mention http://thefanunion.com/, and the many pockets of support threaded into individual show sites.

I was in a strike meeting last week, when all these things were coming to the boil, and the level of Big Fan Love in that room would make trees grow and rocky soil fertile. We are enormously grateful, and were you here in my dining room right now (where my laptop is on the table) I would hug every one of you in an embarrassing display and then take you all out for margaritas.

Now, I began this post by being realistic and saying that the fact the other side has chosen to show up at the table is not enough. The truth is, I worry that it could even boomerang against us if it's in the nature of a PR stunt; you know, "Here we are at the table, see what nice guys we are?" "But you're not actually offering anything." "But we're at the table -- that's taken the heat off us."

Our dream is to have a short strike, but the only way to achieve that is to keep the heat on. Please don't stop. And I'd ask for something else: it's been pushed off the headlines by the announcement negotiations will start again, but United Hollywood has put up a pencil campaign page to make it easier for fans to send pencils to the CEOs of the conglomerates:

http://unitedhollywood.blogspot.com/2007/11/pencils2mediamoguls.html

Fans began the pencil campaign, but this makes it simpler: no need to do anything but push a button. And the poor guys in the mail room don't have to go through a sea of envelopes with pencils in them; instead, when a truck is full, it'll pull up to GE or Viacom (or whichever CEO is first on the list), hopefully making a greater impact. What happens if they refuse delivery (or even if they don't)? The WGA is ready with suggestions on where to donate the pencils to teach kids to write. The point isn't that the moguls use the pencils, obviously; it's the message.

The WGA has been asking for two things from the AMPTP: Please return to the table. And please make a fair deal. They've agreed to the first one, but without the second, it will be meaningless. That's the message of the pencils: Make a fair deal. It's not going to happen unless they know people are watching.

The pencils are from a sustainable source, and anything left over from the costs will go into the Union Solidarity Fund, which was created to help non-WGA members (other unions, office assistants, etc.) affected by the strike.

The fannish universe is a scattered place these days, with a lot of isolated planets; there aren't that many central gathering spots any more. If you have a journal or blog, and you want to help, I'd ask you to treat this like a meme and put up the pencil link in your journal, along with a suggestion that other people do the same. (If you want to include an explanation of the strike, you could link to my last post, or to United Hollywood.) Potentially, this could be a historic moment; fans have gotten together to support a show, but so far as I know, there's never been a pan-fandom movement to support writers. I'm hopeful, and I'm excited, and boy do I want to see how this turns out.

If enough pencils arrive, then maybe, by the time November 26 comes around and the AMPTP sits down at the table, they'll be serious about negotiating. And everyone can go back to work.

ETA: The Criminal Minds link no longer works; it originally went to a page of advertiser addresses. But for a similar illustration, you could go to community.livejournal.com/consumers4wga/.

Link at will.

There was a time in this world when it seemed that anyone with literary talent could make a living, if they were willing to take the risk. Louisa May Alcott supported herself and her family writing thrillers. A woman could be widowed with children, and rather than throw herself on the mercy of unpleasant relatives, she could say, "I will make my living by my pen!" -- and proceed to do so, maybe with a little sewing on the side. These writers were fulfilling a deep and endless need; the appetite for story is written into our genetic code.

As late as the 1960s and 1970s, this was all still true. Here's one of my favorite photographs, by Berenice Abbott: a newsstand in 1935.

http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/art/photo/abbottex/cny0198.html

You can't see it on your screen, but the actual photograph is so sharp that you can read the titles of the magazines. (A digital reproduction hangs in my dining room, and allow me to recommend the New York Public Library's archive.) This is the glorious landscape of pulp fiction, all the guilty and not-so-guilty pleasures of story laid out for the hedonist to wander through. Not just one or two magazines of detective stories, oh no -- here are Master Detective, Official Detective, True Detective, Famous Detective, Detective Tales. Here are Colliers and The Saturday Evening Post. Here are Argosy, Doc Savage, Weird Tales. Here is Battle and Flying Aces; Railroad Stories; Western Stories, West, Cowboy Stories, Cowboy Life, Triple-X Western. An endless array of love stories, horror stories, sports stories, all to be devoured and enjoyed by a story-hungry public who would only be back next month for more.

Ah, Thrilling Wonder and Planet Stories, that gave us Leigh Brackett -- a woman who, incidentally, also wrote the screenplays for The Empire Strikes Back, The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, and The Long Goodbye. And here we come to the issue at hand, for by the time The Empire Strikes Back came out, the pulps were mostly a memory.

What happened to them? In my opinion, television happened. That voracious appetite for story could be satisfied by clicking on a button. Movies helped, but television could give you a fix every single day. The box couldn't come near to the full world-immersion of a novel -- a reason I think the novel has held on -- but over the years, the novel audience has eroded, too. There've been plenty of theories about this: a decline in literacy, audience fragmentation, too many book choices for a particular market. People unfamiliar with publishing realities will point to Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, as though somehow every writer with a book must be sharing the pie. Well, they aren't. The vast majority can't make a living at all, and have to stuff their writing into the spare hours they divert from their families and their day jobs -- and we all know how much time that comes down to.

They do it for love. But you know what? There's nothing wrong with getting paid. Back when FDR started the WPA and wanted to pay writers to work for the agency, people objected. They were writers, for godsake. That's not real work, like farming or laboring. "They're writers, but they still have to eat," was the reply.

There is one place left in the world where some writers can make a decent living, some of the time. That place is Hollywood, California, and the Hollywoodesque enclaves of film and TV around the world.

( history, in every sense )

What are the Emmys like? First, you wait in a hot, hot lobby in a huge crush of people at the Shrine Auditorium, longing for the doors to open. Unless you think you are being terribly clever this year and avoiding the wait, only to find yourself stuck in an endless procession of traffic inching Emmy-wards at a pace slower than geologic time, and have to leap out of the car and sprint to your aisle in fancy shoes at five minutes to the hour. Where you are told that the aisle is closed until the first commercial. (Not that this happened to me or anything.)

Because, yes, they don't want to show images of people dribbling up and down the aisles during the event. In fact, there exists a special class of people called "seat-fillers" -- men and women of all ages, but mostly young, pretty women in lovely gowns -- who will rush to your seat as soon as you rise to go to the restroom, lest the gaze of a camera lens brush over your row and find an empty place. And after you make your way over acres of land to reach the restroom and acres of land to return, cheerful ushers will forbid you from entering again until the next commercial. This means you have to time your breaks, lest you become trapped in the lobby while your category is being called and have to explain to your mother later why you weren't on stage with the others. ("Let's see... it's only twenty after, but if I go now, there'll be two commercial breaks to get through, and if I mis-time this... --But dammit, The Sopranos is going to win anyway, and I need to pee. --But my Mom's ninety years old! How many of these things is she gonna see? --Sopranos had a great last season. --Yeah, you explain that to her, after it all goes wrong.")

This year the House people were in the rear of the newfangled theater-in-the-round, where you can see the backs of most of the presenters, and many rows beyond them, the enormous teleprompter screen. Or, to give you a better idea, THE ENORMOUS TELEPROMPTER SCREEN. You can read every joke a few seconds before someone says it -- which means you also have the joy of knowing Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were totally off the prompter when they offered the Emmy to Steve Carell. (The screen simply read, "...could not be here tonight, so we are accepting this in his place.")

Afterwards, you go next door to the Governor's Ball, where table after table fills a fairy-tale cavern (with a bar entirely sculpted of ice, down to the old-time advertising logos and the "hammered" edges of the "metal" top), and you eat lovely food and talk with your friends and everybody tells everybody how wonderful they look all decked out in finery. These are the people you work beside in t-shirts day in and day out, so it's a Cinderella moment. Formal occasions probably didn't have that same effect of magical transformation in, say, Georgian times, when they put as much effort into dressing for a canter in the park as we do for our one night a year; but that's why I'm glad to be living now. Twice the fun, and no powdered wigs to worry about. Not to mention anesthesia.

Also, everyone should get dressed to kill after a year of work, and celebrate while a jazz band plays.

By this time it's around 11:00, and the crowd is thinning out to go to other parties. At least, the socially plugged-in, popular kids are -- the ones who function creatively on four hours of sleep. My manager called me a week beforehand, to say he couldn't make the Emmys but he wanted to wish me luck. "I assume you're going to the Spago party afterwards," he remarked. I said, "After the Governor's Ball? I'm going to be home in my jammies, with my dog."

So you pick up your box of chocolates, and head outside. (When you sit down at the table, you find a box of chocolates beside your plate, with an embossed picture of the Emmy statue on front. They're Dove chocolates, and they're excellent. I forgot to take mine home last year, and one of the producers at work, a gentleman and a scholar, left a box tucked into my mail slot. This year another writer cautioned me not to forget again, and handed me the box beside her. It happened to be Hugh's, which he'd left behind. So, yeah, I've got Hugh's chocolates. Don't tell him.)

Once outside, you see one of the most interesting phenomena of the entire ritual: the calling of the limousines. This is like the running of the bulls, and only slightly less lethal. A police line is set up out front, and the exiting crowd starts to accumulate there like water in a tub. Unseen voices in the distance call: "1531!" and "663!" If you poke and prod your way to the front, you'll see limos crawling slowly down the street on both sides of the median, all moving in one direction; and a person walks beside each of the nearest ones holding a sign with that car's number. Another person with a bullhorn repeats the called numbers, though not loudly enough to be heard over the sound of the crowd.

Turn to peer down the long street, and you'll find an awesome sight: there, all the way to the end of eternity, are limo after limo after limo after limo, column after column, all rolling slowly toward you. It's like something out of Triumph of the Will -- the scale and symmetry alone are a little frightening. Frankly, attending the Emmys is worth it for this alone.

Last year the shortest and most dangerous writer among us took control of the chaos and led us all down the median, single-file, while she remained in cell contact with the driver whose phone number she'd prudently gotten ahead of time: "We're on the median. Which lane are you in? I'm waving a hand over my head. Can you see me yet?"

At last you and your car find each other. If you're with the cool kids, you go on now to one of the media parties. If you're with me, you'll go home to a dog-sitter who'll tell you your dog and his Chihuahua puppy got along like gangbusters; and when said Chihuahua puppy leaves you'll hear your dog whine plaintively, off and on, for the next three hours, not including the occasional abortive whimper as you lie in bed wondering just how far off track your life has gotten from the days when you lived in Jersey.

This is the Emmy ritual as I have known it, and you know what? I prize it, because it's just not that damned often that a writer is fortunate enough to be on a nominated show. It means that your work is noticed and respected, and I'm never going to be cavalier about that.

I meant to go on and tell you about pilots I've seen for new fall shows, and then to wend around to other posts on other topics. Like: Torchwood! Finally! And what about the unnamed pilot I couldn't sit through for more than five minutes, because the pain of the dialogue was not to be borne by the human frame?

But I've just been pulled in to help on an upcoming episode, and any minute now I'll be dropping down the manhole again, not to be seen for weeks. So I will simply say that Journeyman got my attention. This particular sub-genre is not new; but damn, it's intelligently done. I love that they leave the audience to connect the dots, and don't assume we need special-ed classes for every plot point. Because, trust me, try writing science fiction in this town -- nine places out of ten, if it's not a cliché, they think you're doing it wrong. And the Journeyman narrative violates one of the main things people expect of television relationships (though I won't tell you what). I'll be watching this one and hoping.

I should just accept that I'll make ambitious statements and then disappear. Sorry about that; I was shanghai'd by episode two of season four, which I co-wrote with Leonard Dick (best collaborator ever). I've neglected many things, and haven't even seen my dog in three weeks -- but I've blocked the weekend for my usual end-of-shoot nervous breakdown, and should be approaching sanity by next Wednesday.

In my last post, I said I had plans to build a new website at dorisegan.com. You may have noted problems with the site; the short version is, I no longer own the URL, but I'm working on getting it back. And I'll be working on getting content together as soon as a moment presents itself. More on this as events unfold...

A couple of people have asked about novels; bless your hearts. It is a truth universally acknowledged that you will not see the sequel to City of Diamond any time soon. The heart is willing, but it's hard to return to the state of mind that gave me such a complex universe now that so many years have passed. And such a huge undertaking would require a good year or two of concentrated effort, with no other writing projects to compete, and that's not a state of affairs likely to happen in the next few years.

Meanwhile, if the person who keeps inquiring about that long-promised Stephen Price novel is reading this, well, I still believe the day will come, for I love him and his identity issues far too much to let him go forever. As for the Ivory books, there are no present plans to continue them, but you never know -- they were very much the books of my youth, but sometimes writers circle 'round and return to the place they started, in a different way. (I find myself tempted to sprinkle a few spoilers for the fourth Ivory book; does it count as spoilers if the book is hypothetical? No? Then I can tell you that it would open several years later; that Ran and Theodora have two children, one adopted and one biological -- I know! -- and that Stereth is ready to initiate his coup and take over the throne. Which neither of our heroes wants to be involved with, and probably wouldn't be involved with, if only Kylla hadn't -- okay, that part I probably should keep to myself. You never know.)

The plain fact is, I have about a dozen books stacked up in my inner airport, waiting for takeoff -- and I long to write them. The trouble is, I also long to write more scripts for House, and to create my own television shows, if anyone is fool enough to let me, and to maybe throw in a couple of film scripts along the way. I keep shoving some of these plates back along the table, trying to make space for novels -- not to mention a life of any kind -- but television has a way of sucking up every scrap of time, plus extra hours taken from sleep. If you visit Los Angeles and see the occasional group of zombies blinking at the light and shuffling blankly toward a parking lot? Those are television writers. Don't be put off; simply give them dark glasses and a soft place to nap for an hour, and they will be as newborn kittens in your hands.

But if the Writers Guild goes on strike, as many think it will, one of those unwritten books will likely jump to the top of the queue. And dammit, I know which one.

It seems response is all over the map. Meanwhile, I went back to check a couple of my scriptwriting posts, and found they were already out of date. Er, if you read the one I wrote on format? Ignore the software references. And if you read the one on specs? Ignore my examples of shows. And if… oh, never mind. Here's what I'm doing: I've gotten a brand spanking new website, dorisegan.com. There's nothing there yet, but I'm in the process of taking all the posts here that I'd call "nuts and bolts" (about format, story structure, outlining, how an episode is created), pulling them off the journal, and updating and expanding. These will go into an online book at the website, in such an order that it'll be easy to go from one to another. I'll probably do the script examples in PDF, so instead of writing things like "Imagine this line 40 spaces to the right," you can actually look at what a proper format is. I may put up a spec script as well.

The "discussion" posts I'll do here. They may eventually move over to the website too, but since the point is discussion, they seem better suited to Live Journal form in their first incarnation. Basically, I'll be splitting things in two, with the "how things work" stuff at the site, and the journal reserved for the less process-oriented stuff. (I'll let you know when things appear at the site, and in any case I'll leave the two POV posts here till I do the third, as promised. I'll be referring back to them.)

Anyway, this is why posts are disappearing. They're not dead, they're just pining for the fjords.

Dorisegan-dot-com. It's got a ring to it.

Looking at my upcoming schedule, things are only going to get more busy for me -- for at least a year -- and my posting time is going to be extremely limited. I've been thinking about it, and while I love talking with House fans, I don't want to lead you on; as I've said before, this is mainly a journal about writing in general (and possibly other subjects, if I ever get the chance). One reason blogging is a treat for me is because it satisfies my jones to do other sorts of writing; I don't have time for a novel, so the occasional nonfiction has to keep me going.

I did make a post about story construction for House, but that's pretty much going to be my only word on that; I don't want to repeat the same subject matter. I realize there are probably people just tuning in for the House stuff -- so, to be fair, I'm explicitly letting you know that I won't be analyzing my story process with future scripts. Not for this show, anyway -- I might examine things I've written in other media, if I think it illustrates anything interesting. (Lately I've been looking into scripts for graphic novels; that could be fun to talk about. It's a startlingly different process from TV and film writing, and the idea of using muscles you've never used is pretty exciting.) So my question is, are there areas the readers of this journal are more drawn to? I still owe part-three of the POV essay, of course. What else?

There are plenty of nuts-and-bolts aspects to scriptwriting -- format, story, when it's okay to put things in that the camera won't see, what the words "do what we can't" mean when a producer says them to a novelist (and how that affects your choices in a spec script), trends, what to think of when writing a spec, when to listen to feedback, etc.

And then there's the novel process -- chapter length, subject matter, structure, what to fear and what not to fear… when to listen to feedback.

And there are the less nuts-and-bolts things, areas for discussion; it might be interesting to talk about "difficult" authors you nonetheless love, and so have to come to terms with whatever disturbs you about their writing (C.S. Lewis and Lawrence Durrell fit that bill for me, among others).

Or the story tension between comedy and drama, and whether it really exists; and if it does exist, where? (I've never felt the same about that since I saw what Joss Whedon did at the top of an act in "Hush.")

Or what long fantasy books mean to you.

Or why I've read so little science fiction in the last ten years.

Or what makes some characters have what I call "sticking power." (In the movie Time After Time, H.G. Wells is transported to the future. At one point he makes a call to the police and, needing to give them a name, says "Sherlock Holmes." The police, of course, think he's nuts or it's a prank. Wells assumed he could safely use the name of a character that had appeared a few times in a magazine many years before… but Holmes had sticking power.)

Or what heroism means in Jane Austen (and why this still matters so much to us that nearly any woman I know who likes Austen can tell you which of her heroes she would marry).

Or where I think the action is going to be in terms of genre, and how to get back the shock of the new.

Or what's going to happen as media entertainment becomes more participatory. (I heard an interesting speech about this at the Producers Guild awards, and I'm not sure how many producers had any idea what the man was talking about.)

Or why Harry Potter matters.

(Or why the caged bird sings. Or why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings.)

So… who's out there? What would you like to talk about? I can't promise to post anything soon or often, but if I have an idea of readership, I can stick a thought in the back of my mind and dash off an essay when I have a spare hour along the way. Which should happen… someday.

We were about to jump into the cold, deceptively clear waters of the omniscient viewpoint.

The great and powerful illix writes:

How do you reconcile scene description with a first-person narrative, i.e. how can a single person describe something that is by its nature much, much bigger than any individual? Large dramatic scenes almost seem to require an omniscient perspective to establish scale. (I have in mind here the Lord of the Rings movies, which jump between individual narratives but still convey a sense of epic conflict.)

Let's think about how many questions that raises. Are we talking about a narrative where one single person goes from place to place? Or a narrative where we jump from one person to a different person? (Because then you're not in first any more.) And when it comes to a movie, how can you be in first at all? Leap into the whirlpool with me, my friends, and appreciate the real complexity of what we're getting involved with.

You'll recall that first person and third-person limited were similar in being confined within someone's skull. In third-person omniscient, you can dip into the head of anyone you like, skipping from one character to another like a stone across a pond. "So, tightropegirl, that's the real difference between limited third and omniscient? I can head-hop?" Actually -- no. There are many novels where the viewpoint moves among, say, five different characters -- but each time it does, we see, hear, and know only what that character sees, hears, and knows. That's really taking your "limited third" ticket and moving from compartment to compartment on the train; it's not flying above, seeing the train as a whole, the way an omniscient viewpoint does.

In omniscient viewpoint, as in first-person, there is a single voice telling the story to the audience. That voice is the author's (or, to be careful about this, it's the voice being presented as the author's). That voice will invite you in to share the thoughts of various characters as the story is told; or it may stand aside for a moment and talk about politics or war or the weather; or it may come right out and address the reader, or comment on the reader's perceptions. "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times." Who's saying that, and to whom? The god of that universe is speaking, and he's speaking to us.

Here are two classic examples of first person and third-person omniscient:

Reader, I married him.

The anxiety which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, will not extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them that we are all hastening together toward perfect felicity.

The first are the famous words of Jane Eyre, fictional character, telling you about an important event in her story. The second, which occurs three pages before the end of the book, and which I often quote for sheer love, is Jane Austen sharing with the reader her gently humorous awareness that structure gives away plot.

(As, of course, it does; especially when you're dealing with any kind of sub-genre the audience knows, from Law and Order to the latest romance novel. "The blond prep school kid can't be the killer -- we're only ten minutes into the show." "It can't be pancreatitis; that's the first guess." "Her wedding can't possibly go this smoothly -- the movie's barely begun, and I know it's a comedy, so hijinks are probably gonna ensue any second now…" Of course, every now and then the prep-school kid will turn out to be the killer, just to keep the audience from becoming too complacent; but Jane Austen is never going to think, "Hmm, since everyone expects Catherine to marry Henry, I think I'll have her mowed down and killed by a runaway carriage instead." Because that would be a betrayal of the audience. Well, she's also not going to think it because Jane Austen is dead, but as a writer I have to think the former reason is more important. --Hmm, I suppose I should write about structure at some point, shouldn't I, and that noble tension between wanting to surprise and satisfy the audience but also wanting to be true to the story and characters you've set up? I love seeing how other writers handle this; it's one challenge that's never going to go away no matter how many years of experience you have.)

( omniscient voyeur or engaged participant? )

Warning: this is going to be nuts-and-bolts technical, and probably only of interest to writers. And maybe not even them. (Spoilers: Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice.)

I promised that we'd talk about point of view in literature, film, and television. That covers a lot of ground; so before we parasail off into the stars, we're going to have to walk over the foundations together and make sure we're all speaking the same language. Let's start with the basics, and that means literature. The word.

Years ago, in one of the first writing classes I ever took, I handed in a short story about a young woman who was one of the only survivors of a car crash that took out the other people she'd been living with. It was a problematic story, because to really get the sense of what had happened, you needed to know something about those other people and what they meant to her -- and yet, it was just a short story, without really time to deliver seven character sketches of people who were dead. I gave it my best shot, but I was most worried about the lack of time I spent on the narrator herself -- I told the reader nothing about her.

"Oh, no," said the instructor, when I expressed my worry during class discussion; "we get her perfectly." And the other students nodded. He saw my wariness and explained, "In first person, the prose becomes the character." In other words, nobody needed to know where she went to school or whether she liked vanilla pudding; you were already intimately inside her head, knowing her by every reaction she had to what was happening.

A few years later I was on a panel of young writers at a science fiction convention, where the topic was first vs. third person. I spoke last, which meant I got to hear what everybody else on the panel had to say before my turn came. I said, "Okay, I'm going to be the odd man out here, because what I've prepared is pretty much the opposite of everything you've heard." They'd all gone on about how difficult first person was -- what a strain it was to use, how complicated it made telling a story. I'd recently published my first book -- essentially, the first-person story of an English major who's stranded and can't find a job. On another planet.

First person had been as simple as falling off a log. And the grounding it gave the story had, to some degree, kept me honest; I wasn't tempted to suddenly have my character pick up a gun and rob a convenient bank. She had to be a real person, and her thoughts had to reflect that -- we were right in there among them, and no hocus-pocus tricks would serve. (I was delighted to read recently that Joss Whedon spoke of liking to put real people in larger-than-life situations; as a writer, that's pretty much the street where I live. If I'd had my way, young Clark Kent would've been more vulnerable to the powers of Krypto-mutants, too. My characters never have easy lives.)

Of course, there was good reason for the other panelists to call first person "difficult" -- they were telling a different sort of story from mine. If you want to lay out a tale of galactic sprawl -- or of the American Civil War -- or of the complex political situations that drive an 800-page fantasy novel -- it's damned hard to confine yourself to the pov of one character. Because that character would have to be everywhere. (The recent HBO series Rome had the charming conceit of placing their viewpoint characters, Vorenus and Pullo, on the scene of nearly every major happening during the fall of the Republic. But even they couldn't be at every dinner table and in every bedroom.)

( for we are all storytellers )

illix writes:

If the work is so chaotic, how do people handle it? I can think of a few other crazy high-stress environments off the top of my head -- trauma wards and high-stakes politics leap immediately to mind -- but all those places have some sort of reward in proportion to the sacrifice they require: doctors get to save lives; politicians either get power or the knowledge that they've made a change in the world, depending on the type. Here at MIT we know better than most that you can't ask for that sort of effort without proportionate reward; otherwise you get burnout and all sorts of very nasty psychological effects upon which I could wax lyrical for quite some time.

So this begs the question: what do TV folk get out of it? What is there in writing, acting, directing, scripting, lighting, teching that makes people get up before dawn and go to bed after dusk and work a crunch schedule day after day after day? What, in short, keeps you going?

I've heard the pace of TV production compared with the beginning of The Jetsons -- "Jane! Stop this crazy thing!" -- and I've wondered myself what keeps people coming back. Sometimes I think it's like joining a group of WWII bomb-disposal experts. That job had a high fatality rate, yet nobody ever asked to be transferred -- once they were in they were hooked on camaraderie and adrenaline. I've known people who picked up their marbles, left LA, moved to some other part of the country... they always end up back in Vegas with a handle in their hand.

That's all true, but cynical. What else is true? Well, you could just as easily ask, why get a dog? Why have a child? You're letting yourself in for untold grief and effort, but the highs are so high, you know you'd be poorer if you let the lows scare you off.

And there are plenty of highs. Interestingly, I was relating one of them to a friend recently, and she said, "I see why you like this job." Sit in front of the monitors during a scene you were worried about being too soft, and watch and listen as the lines get more and more pointed, more deep, more subtle, till they're thrown like rocks at the other actor, and each time it happens you can see the director get happy as a kid all over again. And so do you. Or as a DP I know once said, "If this were a Western, we'd be shooting our guns into the air."

I've wanted to write for television since I was in high school. (Which made it a Johnny-come-lately compared to novels, which I've wanted to write since the fourth grade.) I was talking with an actor today about the consolations of our respective professions, and said, "The truth is, deep down inside, I don't know why everyone doesn't want to be a writer. I know it would be a boring world if they did, but I really don't see why they wouldn't want to."

When I was looking for my first few industry jobs, I met with scores of network and studio executives. "I came out here to work in television," I'd say, and the executive in question would often reply, "Oh, how refreshing! Everyone I talk with came here to work in film." Film is splendid, but how can you not love television? Film is short story! Television is novel! Television is the long, leisurely Victorian novel, with a chapter of biting suspense followed by one of black despair followed by one of effervescent farce; where "The Trouble With Tribbles" co-exists with "City On the Edge of Forever." Where three years into a series you can pull one of your heroes aside onto a road not taken and hear things from him you've never heard before. Television, for the love of god! Does not the blood run more quickly with the very word?

In my last post I spoke of the enormous time and budget pressure of television. That's true, but every form of entertainment has its own way of going wrong. The danger in film comes from the very thing TV lacks: time. Time for several billion people to give conflicting notes. Time to hire and fire a dozen writers, and see the script re-written forty times. Time to squeeze everything non-generic out of the product. Time to create beautifully produced and gorgeously filmed crap.

Television has everything stacked against it everywhere you turn, but this is still an art form. I say that unapologetically. I do sometimes run into people in the industry who say, "Oh, it's just television." Remove that "just," my good sir, or I will be forced to meet you with pistols at dawn.

( because you make things )

ETA: Spoilers in Comments. Drive carefully.

We just finished shooting Episode 20, "Housetraining." (It's listed as "House Training," but I always meant it to be one word -- I just didn't have the heart to put our script supervisor through the ream of corrections he'd have to do to change it. This is my blog, though, so within these sacred precincts I decree it one word. Also, I would like towel boys to bring me peeled grapes.)

One of my respondents has drawn my attention to the "St. Doris" thing. I am touched, but must disclose that there's not as much room for chocolaty House-Wilson goodness in this episode as some might wish. The story went elsewhere, and it's always best to follow where the story wants to go. Still, if viewers who like that sort of thing can't watch an episode through rose-colored slash glasses, I can only say that fandom has gone downhill since the days of the Mulder/Krycek kiss. (And I don't believe that for a second.)

Shooting a television episode is an exercise in survival. I'm speaking generally here; that's why you may have heard the metaphor of working in TV as throwing steaks down the maw of an endlessly hungry beast. I can't tell you how hard a crew works. I've occasionally seen people wonder why the same director doesn't shoot all episodes -- trust me when I say that wouldn't be physically possible. The director begins prep over a week before shooting begins, while the cast and crew are still working on the previous episode; they walk the sets, work with the locations people, meet with props, meet with the art department, meet with production in general, meet with the executive producers, meet with the writer... basically, everybody meets with everybody. They have to; it's like planning the invasion of Normandy. Everyone sits down and goes through the script scene by scene, more than once. The writer, having already been through the rewrite process, is still juggling notes -- on House this would include notes from five different medical advisers, who invariably disagree firmly with each other -- and collecting more notes from the director and the assistant director ("Lovely script! Too bad it's unproducible. Could you lose six scenes?"), and hearing from Locations that Changes Must Be Made.

This is all happening at top speed, because shooting will begin at a certain day and time, ready or not. It's not unusual to see a writer/producer running through the halls during prep, hurrying to casting meetings, tone meetings, production meetings; rushing back to put out new pages; rushing off again before somebody drives somewhere without them -- because nothing can wait. And once shooting does begin, the train only goes faster. There's no time to do anything but field each potential disaster as it comes, and if something goes wrong while shooting a scene -- well, that's it, that's what the world's going to see. There's no budget and no time to re-do anything. (A director once kidded me, after things had indeed gone wrong in a big way, "Good thing this was the out-of-town tryout. We'll fix that before we actually open." Television is a different world from plays and films; once it's shot, it's like history: immutable. "Moving on," as the director will say, and the tide pulls us all to the next scene. Goodbye, scene that didn't quite work out; I loved you in theory.)

I remember watching an episode of Smallville where an actress said the word "ancestors" instead of "descendants." People made fun of the writer, but not for a second did I think that was what was in the script -- if it were, about fifty people would have commented on it before shooting. I can well believe it happened while shooting the scene, however. Actors are not machines, though they're expected to perform as if they were; and the wrong words will come out way more often than you think. Consider: they're only given about fifteen minutes to rehearse, a little bit of time while lighting's being set up, and then they're tossed into the lion's den. And then there's the pressure of filming -- and it is pressure; if someone were to point a camera at me I'd forget my name. And it's not as if we were asking them to simply perform a task; no, we're saying, "And by the way, could you be wonderfully talented and entertaining while you do that? Starting… now." I'm continually in awe of how consistently actors take all this straw and hand you gold back.

By the way, the director won't catch that sort of mistake either, at least not unless the problem is egregious, and often not even then. They're keeping track of a hundred other things -- where the actor is, where the camera is, was that a shadow down the hall, did the emotional tenor of the performance feel right, did he cross over in the same place he did in the master shot, was that a plane I heard messing with the sound -- on and on and on. The script supervisor tries their damnedest, but they've got their own list of problems to catch, and dialogue is only one thing among many. Or maybe they caught it, but the one time everything was perfect was the time the lighting blew a fuse or the film ran out and needed to be reloaded.

And the train speeds on. Thirteen, fourteen, sometimes fifteen hours a day. You've got enough time to drive home, wind down, get your six hours of sleep, and hurry back. The AD will schedule things so that people who don't have to be there for any particular set of scenes can be released; but while actors may be sent home, the director stays through it all. I talked with a director once who said he'd made the mistake of shooting two episodes back-to-back -- he finished shooting an episode of one show and the next day began prep on another show. "Never again," he said. "It nearly killed me." Contact with spouses and children is non-existent till the weekend, and even then a director may take Saturday to collapse and Sunday to work out the next week's scenes.

As you can tell from this, I hope, my respect for television directors, crews, and actors is enormous, and whenever I hear rumbles from the heartland that suggest those Hollywood folks are lollin' around by their pools getting stoned, I think, if only you knew. The Puritan work ethic is alive here more than anyplace I've ever seen, and I worked on Wall Street during the 90s, when they assumed associates were there to put in endless hours. Try going to a party where television people are gathered; by 11:00 pm they're on their way home, because it's going to be a long day tomorrow. The usual end of the workday, for a writer, is about 7:00-8:00 pm; and we're spoiled and cosseted children of privilege compared with the production crew. Whenever we're filming an episode of mine, I look at the people around me and think how remarkable they are, and how fortunate I am to be in their company.

What are the odds so many writers would be wrestling with self-doubts just as I posted my last? I think the lesson we can take away is, there's no day of the year you can't throw a rock and hit a writer who's torturing themselves over something. Although you could just end that sentence at the word "writer"; the rest is redundant.

ducks_in_a_row writes:

...I'm curious as to whether you feel being published/produced is a necessary and/or desirable part of the creative process? Writing purely for the joy of it seems to me to be its own reward (especially for those of us who don't want/need/expect to make a living at writing). But then I wonder if a story unshared, like any love unshared, is somehow diminished? In other words, if a story is written in the woods and no one is there to read it, does it still bring as much joy?

If by "published" you mean something like "bought by an editor and available in bookstores nationwide," then, no, I don't feel it's at all necessary to the creative process, and someday I should post an essay about why the world is better off because of fan fiction. But if by "published" you include "published on the Net," i.e., available for perfect strangers to read if they click on a link, then... I tend toward "yes." I do think a story that's unshared is a sad little match girl of a story, standing in the rain, miserable and alone.

Mind you, the first requirement of any story you write is that you, the author, love it. But is that sufficient for its artistic fulfillment? It's like that old Whitney Houston song, "The Greatest Love of All." "Learning to love yourself is the greeeeeeeaaatest love of all..." Irritating song; moving, but irritating. Because, as I once argued to a good friend and lust-object back in the day, the fact that something has to come first does not make it the greatest.

I should warn you, however, that I tend to regard stories as though they're some sort of cloudlike, living entities. When I'm structuring out a script on the whiteboard, for instance, I know there are places the story wants and needs to go. (I should add, in case this is too weird and esoteric, it's really a way of looking at an instinct you too will develop over time, if you haven't already. When I first moved to LA, story structure was my weakest point; how did everyone around me know so much about it? But a couple of years went by; script after script went through my hands; and one day, on Smallville, we had a consulting producer visit, a man who'd written a pilot I worship to this day. He suggested a radical change to Act One. As I was the person at the board, I stood looking at it for a moment; and he said, "It'll work." I said, "I know. I was just..." And, lacking a way, to explain it, I picked up an index card from Act Two and moved it to the bottom of Act Three. Because if what he was saying were true, the shape of the story just seemed to call for that scene to be there. I looked at him, and he nodded: "Yes.")

Metaphorically -- though it's a metaphor I live and work by -- it's as if there's some perfect, platonic ideal of this story, somewhere in the ether, and we need to get as close to that as possible if the physical, here-and-now story's going to live a healthy and uncrippled life.

And once you've got it as close as possible to what it's meant to be, it should be sent out into the world to seek its fortune in the minds and hearts of others. Some hearts will be closed to it; accept that, and do not repine because every single person in the entire universe does not love it. But be happy that it connects and finds friends and family out there in the storm.

There are people -- especially in Hollywood -- who are not motivated, as most writers would put it, "to serve the story." The worst director I was ever associated with destroyed everything because, as he said, "I need to put my mark on it!" I thought (but did not say), "Do you know what contempt any real writer would have for those words? Do you know what you're revealing about yourself?" I've never met a good writer who didn't leap joyfully upon an idea, whether offered by another writer on staff, a director, or the person emptying the wastebaskets, if it would serve the story. Because the story is why we're here. It's not about imprinting yourself over things like a logo.

So with this attitude, you can understand why I want to see a story grow up, move out, and meet people. I suppose if I were in solitary confinement somewhere, with access to paper and pen, I might write stories for my own amusement; but there's always something a little tragic for me about that idea -- like the story's in a terminal ward somewhere, and we can amuse each other for a while, but it's got no future. Whenever I read in a novel that some character's wife or son or friend, obeying their dying wish, throws their last manuscript or their letters that would change the face of literature onto the fire, I think, "No." (Also, while I'm here, that chick who threw the necklace off the Titanic? That was some artisan's loving workmanship, and somebody else's college fund.)

Art is meant to find fulfillment in the eyes of someone else. At least, that's how it works for me. And once you've written it, it's on its own; it's no longer an extension of you. (That's one reason I have no problem with fan fiction.)

And now I have to finish by saying this is probably the last post you'll see for a bit. POV is going to have to wait; my work's accelerated and the next six weeks to two months are going to be intense. I'll hold the table, you bring the cappuccinos, and we'll meet back here when my schedule is slightly less insane.

Okay, I lied about POV. We'll get to it, in all its abstruse and gloriously obscure detail. But that's long and technical, and first I thought I'd say something more important.

If you know me you'll know I've said this before, but it's well worth re-visiting. I figure people reading this probably run the gamut -- professional writers, fan writers, aspiring writers, and readers and viewers who just enjoy thinking about the elements of what they're participating in as an audience (since being an audience is in fact quite a participatory thing; you can't dance when one partner's sitting down).

I've seen some excellent writers back away from trying to enter the professional world because it's just not something that interests them; and that's reasonable enough. Every year the number of books by new authors that are printed and sold goes down; I've heard all the theories -- market fragmentation, illiteracy, leisure hours going to the Internet instead of the page -- but the plain facts can seem unwelcoming. As for scripts, not everyone can move to Hollywood, and geography is still a big part of making a career there. And then, perhaps commercial fiction just doesn't seem your cup of tea.

But I've seen other writers, just as excellent, back away because -- although they're clearly packed taut with talent -- they think there's some bar there, some Berlin Wall of the mind -- basically, a big sign at the end of a nowhere road that says, "Anything you try to write will be lifeless. Boring. A canteen of sand in the desert. Don't even try."

To them I say: potato chips.

When you're growing up you learn that all that deliciously crispy stuff fried in fatty oil is bad for you. Going through a bag of Halloween candy in a day is bad for you. Riding a Harley Davidson? Too dangerous, bad for you. Smoking, which looks cool as anything? Also bad. Iced doughnuts! Impulse sex without condoms! Blowing your paycheck on supremely cool black boots! Bad, bad, bad!

When we write, however, the laws of the universe do a one-eighty, and all these things are good. By which I mean that whatever pleases you, whatever excites you, whatever you obsess about, whatever glittery thing holds your interest, whether it's some complicated and spiky relationship between two characters or the last days of the American Civil War or the possibilities involved in Schrodinger's cat -- this is your lawful subject matter.

Do not complain to me, "But what interests me is an obscure political event from 1899. And it's been made clear to me that nobody else in the world finds it exciting," because I will say, "Congratulations." Do not complain, "I want to write slash professionally, and there's just no market for that," because I will say, "Good for you!" Do not sigh and say that you want to write a romance, and a billion romances have come before, so what is there new to say? For I will pat you on the back and offer you a celebratory drink.

Your own personal joie de vivre, that's what's new. Your take and your words are what's new. The only thing you can do to sabotage yourself is to lose the glimmer and convince yourself that writing must be vitamin-filled and rule-abiding. "Every detective novel I pick up at the bookstore does this, so that's what I should be doing." There is no should, to paraphrase Yoda. That way lies unsugared Cream of Wheat. Do not ask "How can I make my novel like everybody else's?" because that sound you will hear is me gnashing my teeth.

This is what is meant by "write from the heart." I once got into a disagreement with a couple of authors over this very advice, and it took a while to figure out they thought I was talking about writing sentimentally. No, no -- you are the definer of what's in your heart; if it's a line of equations, but you love those equations, bring them out into the open air so we all can see them. And the first thing you have to do is stop worrying about looking like a fool.

I can't tell you the number of times I've hesitated, writing a scene, and thought, "If so-and-so happened, I think that would be incredibly cool. But it's risky; I could fall right on my face. People will read it and think I'm an idiot. I probably am an idiot for even considering this..." And then, pretty often, I'll do it. Not always; sometimes I decide the critical voice by my ear has a point. But other times I squash that voice under a pillow, because I know how often love begets love.

E.F. Benson, humorist and author of the grand Lucia novels, also wrote a book called Secret Lives, about a group of upper-class men and women living on a particular street in London in the early 1930s. One of the main characters is Susan Leg, an incredibly bland woman who was once a typist living in a cheap room in Brighton. She's now wealthy, with a townhouse and a Jeeves-like butler, and it all comes from her secret life as a bestselling author of lurid novels -- joyously over-the-top things chock-full of evil noblemen, beautiful heroines, and princes who are bound and gagged and threatened with red-hot pokers.

She was rescued from the typing pool by Mr. Cartwright, a publisher, who knew a good thing when he found it. Here are his thoughts upon reading her first manuscript:

It was preposterous to the last degree, but there was a sumptuousness about it, and, though nauseatingly moral in its conclusion, there was also fierceness, a sadism running like a scarlet thread through its portentous pages. Above all, it was written con amore; the gusto of Susan Leg blazed in it like some magnificent conflagration, and Cartwright knew very well that gusto in a writer begets gusto in a reader of similar tastes. From a selling point of view, no book can have a more valuable quality.

I'm not saying, go forth and write joyfully atrocious bestsellers. I'm saying, open the door that excites you, not the one you think you have to. When you're writing at your best -- okay, when I'm writing at my best, but I think this is true of most writers -- you're inspired and excited and scenes come to you when you're in the shower or walking or lying in bed at night. Because these characters and their twisted relationships fascinate you, and you're continually asking yourself, "What if?"

When you write that way, it's the pure product, and as Mr. Cartwright knew, when a reader who's at all similar in their tastes reads it, that white-hot love and energy communicates itself to them; they see the story through your eyes. They're as hyped as you are -- more hyped, in fact, because you've been living with it for a while and crafting it, and it's all hitting them with the shock of the new.

So use the thing you love, whether it's a television show or the life of Descartes. As it happens, I love television. After I watched the X-Files episode "3" I thought, "That's not how I'd handle Mulder and a vampire." So I wrote a story about a neurotically focused detective who looked strangely like Duchovny in my head, and his relationship with a woman vampire and how it plays out while he's solving a case. The story appeared in a Datlow & Windling anthology and was a finalist for an International Horror Guild award. And while that and a token will get me a subway ride, I honestly think it succeeded better as a story than the episode that inspired it did as an X-Files episode.

But my work is... too weird, too simple, too unfashionable, too awkward and it doesn't know how to button its coat properly! What if it is? None of those so-called practical concerns matter if you're in love, because in writing, all that matters is that the potato chips taste good. And those impulses to guide your work by what other people are doing? Those voices telling you that it's all wrong, and you should be louder or softer or more fashionable or marketable? Those are the bad voices. The only guide you can afford to listen to is the obsessive, lovestruck thing inside you that keeps insisting it finds some particular subject utterly fascinating. Do not shame this part of yourself. Take it by the hand and lead it to safety.

I mean, that thing inside that fell in love with, say, The Lord of the Rings (or Jane Eyre or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or whatever does it for you) back when you were a teenager -- that's the thing that made you want to write in the first place, isn't it? Please, don't paper over it now with the blah, blah, blah of what the world has convinced you is literary maturity. Because that would be a lie.

Some years ago I read a Bruce Springsteen interview, in which he talked about how he'd changed -- how at one time, music was sacred religious ecstasy to him, and all he really cared about, and now it was just one room in a larger life with a wife and family. And I knew what he meant, and that that time had passed for him, but I still thought, "Bruuuuuuce. No. Bruuuuuuce! Don't walk on by!"

Of course, I'm a bit of a hypocrite, because I work in television. And that gives you moments, episodes, even occasional seasons of being high all wrapped up in a luxury sedan of frustration. This is true of everyone in television and film, to a greater or lesser degree, and I include executive producers and network executives; it's an art form in which so much is out of your control. And under the circumstances, my occasional dips back into prose are a great refreshment. (Agent: "You mean you actually had a few days between projects? Did you rest?" Me: "Uh... I wrote a story." Agent: "A lot of clients I would yell at about that, but for you, I think a short story's as good as a week at the beach.")

Every now and then, you need to go straight to the potato chips.

So write about a galactic empire, with lots of sex and beheadings. Write about the life of a woman living alone on the coast of Cape Breton, and what happened when she learned to drive. Write about a time-traveling insurance salesman. If you're a fannish sort of writer, take whatever characters please you best, melt them down to their archetypes, and then re-fashion them into a version that gives your take on them, in a world of your own creation. Don't force; play. Fall in love. You were not meant to be one of the hollow men.

Or as George Lucas told Mark Hamill when he was worried about taking on a difficult role, "Do what you want. Life's too short."