Jane Espenson Gives Writers Tips
Posted on August 14, 2006
In her new blog, former Buffy the Vampire Slayer screenwriter Jane Espenson gives writers an inside look at how to break into television writing. Jane is well-known in the industry; she's also written for other shows such as Angel, Firefly, Gilmore Girls, Ellen, The O.C., Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Dinosaurs and Jake in Progress. The L.A. Times takes a look at this latest interesting entry into the blogosphere.
"Jane still retains the sense of excitement about writing she had when she started," said Jeff Greenstein, who ran the writing room at "Will & Grace" for seven years and worked with Espenson at "Jake in Progress." "It's very easy in this business to become cynical and jaded, and fear and revile the new people coming up through the ranks. But Jane has really embraced the neophytes."We love Jane's writing and -- as one of her colleagues said -- she really does know how to bring the funny. Her blog is well-worth a read.*****
Last January, as the John Stamos comeback vehicle "Jake in Progress" was winding down for the season, she told Carlson she'd like a place on the page for a blog. Her idea was to write tales from the writers' room and, because of her built-in fan base, it didn't take long before she was getting 40,000 hits a week. Then "Jake" was getting canceled or not getting canceled and was finally placed on a seemingly permanent hiatus. "At this point, I was standing in the middle of the stage and everybody was going, 'Dance, dance, dance,' and I was getting all these hits, and ... I have to do something," said Espenson. So she decided to start blogging about how to write specs. "I thought I would just give little nuggets of writing wisdom until I ran out, and I figured it would probably take at least a month, but I haven't run out yet."
During the past eight months, Espenson has told her readers about the importance of such minutia as using sturdy brads � the metal clips that hold a script together � rather than the cheap ones that indicate a newbie. She's blogged about how to use analogy in stage directions and how to bypass a quirk with the dual dialogue option on Final Draft, the computer program most television writers use to format their scripts. She's given techniques for differentiating silent unnamed characters from each other (thug #1, thug #2), and written three entries just on coming up with titles for a spec.
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Beyond the insider tips, Espenson also gives her readers entr�e to the television writing world, a weird and contradictory place where writers stay at the office until all hours, hard at work trying to be funny, and where a person can get a "written by" credit regardless of whether any of his or her original dialogue made it into the final script. By dropping insider lingo like the "A-story line" or "beats" in a script, and talking about "the room," Espenson is arming fledgling writers with the ability to talk like they know what they are doing.