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04/12/2006: Cutting Bone


Hey, it's Wednesday night. Wednesday night is when a new America's Next Top Model episode suddenly appears on my Tivo. Whee! Isn't that, increasingly, the way television seems to occur? With Tivo, and with DVDs, and with episodes available for download onto one's microwave oven or whatever, we're finally getting that programming on demand thing that I've been demanding since I was thirteen and couldn't get home from dance class before Soap was half-over.

When a broadcast schedule becomes irrelevant enough, it will disappear. And when it does, it will take with it the most common problem with television scripts, both of the spec and professional variety. Namely: they come in too long.

When shows don't have to fit into a neat little grid, they won't have to be tucked into their little Procrustean beds at night. But until then, the page count of your spec script is very important. Look at the produced scripts of the show you're writing. You can get away with a spec script that's a few pages longer than these, but I wouldn't recommend anything more than that. It will start feeling long to the reader, and atypical of the show. And that's the last thing you want.

You've probably been startled at how much your story has expanded. This is almost certainly your problem, not the reverse. So you have to cut.

You've probably got good instincts about the first things that have to go. Beginnings of scenes, the middle of long speeches, trivial greetings between characters, jokes that are funny but that don't move the story forward. They may be hard to cut, but it's clear they have to go. And there are the little things, too. Streamlining the wording just a little bit might pull up a page; nudging a compound word onto one line with a slight margin adjustment might get rid of that orphan on page 50.

But sometimes you do all that stuff, and it's still too long. Too often, writers look at the choice: cut story or cut character, and they choose to cut character. Story is the skeleton of the episode, they reason. It can't be removed because it holds it up, gives it a shape. Character stuff is flesh. Reducible in many ways and not strictly necessary. Hmm. If you follow this reasoning, you're going to end up with the spec script equivalent of a top model. Skin and bones with no meat. A lightweight of a script.

Look at your story. Is there a chunk that can go? Can you lose one whole misdiagnosis from your House spec? Can someone have one little piece of information earlier that moves the story ahead faster? After all, what do you remember from your favorite episode? The time House thought it was syphilis? Or the time he kissed Sela Ward?

Story is important, but it's only important because it's the stuff that happens to your characters. A ticking clock is meaningless in a room with no one in it.

Lunch: In 'N' Out burger. My God.