For posterity’s sake, as well as sharing this amazing soundtrack with any passerby here, I am sharing a link to my favorite video game score here. Total Annihilation was just a great strategy game, simple and perfectly balanced. Also a pretty cool sci-fi backstory built into it. I spent many, many hours playing it during middle school and early high school (I think?). Part of the beauty of the soundtrack was that it would reactively play different tracks based on what was happening in the game. Brutal Battle played when you started an attack, March to War when you were in the midst of supply gathering, another riveting one just after you had been ambushed. The result was riveting. And now, over a decade later, these songs have such fun energy layered into them. It’s great for writing, honestly. Though I’m not sure how it plays to the unsuspecting listener, the soundtrack did launch Jeremy Soule’s career - he went on to score all the Elder Scroll games and much else. Hope you give it a listen!
Assistants Panel
Just noting here that I am in the midst of organizing an afternoon of industry panels intended for entertainment assistants who are looking to learn about working in, and writing, television:
Navigating Your Writing Career (aka hearing from agents, managers, and production companies)
Writers’ Room Support Staff (folks like myself, writers’ assistants, and also showrunners’ assistants, script coordinators, and writers’ PA — basically learning about the nuts and bolts of the inside of a TV show)
TBA panel (of perhaps some staff writers or showrunners…)
There will be a small charge to cover costs, with any profits being donated to a former fellow assistant’s family - he recently passed away from cancer. If you’re interested in attending the event please don’t hesitate to reach out (contact on home page).
Story/Character Patterns - S1
One of the writers observed that on multiple show’s she’s worked on, the first season - as its being broken - tends to repeat itself in a way. Specifically, certain story patterns and story structures within particular settings repeat. As she theorizes, it’s because the writers are still learning to talk to each other in the room and figure out what the show wants to be generally. As you find things that everyone is comfortable talking about, or find ideas that tend to resonate with everyone, they repeat. And they’ll continue to repeat until you become aware of it and move away, knowing how much of it to use and how much to cut. As she put it, you’re learning what the show wants to be. Then you have to build on it.
The Overlap Principle
One thing that seems to just organically come up in the room again and again are observations in the moment regarding overlaps of meaning. The writers get really excited when they realize they’ve accidentally (or subconsciously, rather) created intersections between many layers of the show. Sometimes it is intentional, on a structural level - like trying to get one character’s story to mirror or foil another’s within one episode. But honestly most of the time it has to do with abstractly different aspects. Like, action and visuals/motifs, themes and character arcs, character deaths and new settings. Any of these things can become commentaries or “partners” with others. It’s sort of like the writers point out the English student analyses of the moment for the greater story. What I’ve realized is there is an Overlap Principle. Always look to create (and always stay aware as you are creating) as many levels of overlap of meaning as possible. You don’t even need to know what the grand conclusion is, there doesn’t need to be a unified thesis statement. But if the story is kept compelling and the characters consistent and dramatic then organic meanings will come out of it. Just make sure you are overlapping and connecting the meanings in as many ways as possible at any given moment.
Escape at Dannemora
I have to say, this show is awesome. I’m only two episodes into the limited series and there’s so much enjoy already: Stiller’s smooth yet spartan directing style… gritty, rich, yet never indulgent cinematography by Jessica Lee Gagne… Dano and Del Toro straight up at the top of their game (Dano is somehow sensitive, bottled up, and furious all at the same time while Del Toro plays his villainous machinations a little more toned down than usual, like in Sicario, but also adds a sort wild desperation that I’m not I’ve ever seen before in this particular tone). It’s a cool show, short and simple.
But what I’ve also realized is that it’s a show I’ve completely (and actively) protected myself from reviews, discussion, and any sort of expectations. All I knew going in was that no one I knew had seen it, it had actors I loved, and a director (Ben Still) I am always intrigued by but not have never hyped up. If you are reading this right now and have not seen the show, I apologize for inherently ruining this situation for you. It’s a plight I share in, with almost every other show I want to watch. The reviews come in, I can’t help but read or hear about them via social media/in-person regurgitation, and then I either feel like I know the show well enough to no longer be excited about it — or I’ve puffed it up in mind to the point where once I’m done with the pilot I feel like I can move on.
It’s an art, in this day and age, to restrict the information you receive. And what’s more, to allot private time for thought. Just thought, that allows you to remember what you enjoy and what you’re passionate about or excited for without anyone else’s expectations, supposed expertise, or passion of their own to get in the way. It pays to be occasionally meditative about what you have enjoyed, or been enriched by, and what you want to be enriched by next. Escape at Dannemora has taught me to escape from expectations, from a thoroughly researched life in advance. Go find your own, Escape, is what I say.
The Rain
Today the writers are off writing so I get to work from home, which I feel like I haven’t done in a very long time (even though I’ve only been on the show for about a month). It’s a good day to be home because it is a true downpour in Los Angeles, there’s flooding along the PCH and other areas near where the Woolsey Fire struck — which is another way of saying that traffic would’ve been godawful and the writers coming from faraway would’ve struggled to get in at all.
Anyways, in terms of being at home on a writing day — the rain really is magnificent. Quadruply so in Los Angeles where rain like this is a once a year event, at best.
It made me realize how much I use the rain to help me write - the sound of it. It’s why I use this A Soft Murmur when I write a lot of the time. But now that it is raining for real, I can’t help be realize that the slight coldness, the air coming in from the small slats of the windows — the absolute variety of sounds of different sizes of water droplets hitting surfaces at different heights — you can’t beat the real thing. I don’t know how I’ve been conditioned to want to write to this atmosphere, but there it is!
In One Day in the Room...
I heard so many cultural references/recommendations that I now need to read/watch - it’s hard to keep track! Baskhi’s Lord of the Rings, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, John Irving’s A Prayer For Owen Meany, countless Sam Peckinpah films I’ve never seen, the list goes on… I was extremely fortunate to have seen Aguirre: Wrath of God for the amount of times that’s been a character/tonal reference. What I’ve come to realize is that in many cases cultural references like these are just the most concise and efficient way to transmit your idea for a part of the show to the group. Having the reference shows that the idea can be done well, can be drawn upon, and also elicits any inherent enthusiasm for the source material in regards to your idea. It’s a nice bit of transference. What is also means is the most TV, film, books and comic books you’ve read and can call upon - the better you will be in the room.
On Secret Identities
There’s some questions swirling around on how to handle some secret identity subplots that have been set up on our show — during a debate about it, one of the writers said this: “Secret identity crap can be like cat nip for a writer, you keep wanting to go back to it but it doesn’t deliver new drama, it doesn’t progress but instead distracts from other new drama – and there’s always too many iterations to always consider.” It’s moments like this that remind me that TV writing (and any specific form of writing) is a profession that must be cultivated with years of work. So many people think that because they watch TV and love TV and know how to formulate dialogue on some level - that they are prepared to switch careers and delve into TV writing as a profession. I’m not saying you shouldn’t pursue your dreams, but you shouldn’t think it’s readily deserved or easy to achieve either. Little blips of wisdom like this, that the writer threw out, came from years of writing her own work - and moving up the ladder on shows in various positions. You have to do the work again and again and again to realize the little intellectual pitfalls that are unique to your profession - and be able to articulate them to a different room in a totally different context. Another writer said, “writing is just averting accidents all the time” - so like any good navigator, with intuition, training, and experience you learn to avoid the accidents.
When to Work Backwards
We got about halfway through breaking EP107 on the show before the overall strategy needed to change. At that point we vaguely knew where we were going, and there were certain huge finale moments that we knew would not change.
So, we’ve paused breaking specifics in 107 and have returned to this big grid/board that has squares going horizontally across for every episode (1-10) with a row for each major character. Each square is for the major plot movement & arc of that character for each episode. What I didn’t realize, even as the writers’ assistant, is how much of the previous arcs that we’d already established had changed. It seems that as you plow ahead with plot, it can really revise how you look at characters retroactively.
The first thing we had to do was reconfigure the previous episodes on that grid so that they really reflected where each character was “coming from” heading into the terra incognita of EP107-110. Or really, 109 since enough of 110 had been figured out by the showrunner in advance of the room ever meeting.
After we went back to the beginning, we had to skip to the end and work backwards from where we wanted each character to end up in the finale. Essentially, we were (and are) just trying to fill in three squares (109, 108, 107). But to me it felt like working backwards meant absolutely anything is possible (in a dire sense). It’s like a Rubik’s cube where you can take the pieces out of the square rather than just shuffle them around. We began the process last week, without the showrunner in the room — today, with him back, we’ll see if we can get past the questions and create enough of a road map to return to 107 and continue trucking forward.
Mayhem
I had no idea that the word was actually a medieval legal term for intentionally damaging or destroying the limb of another person, basically a form of “maiming” - check out the definition below and please accept this as a second cop-out post for the week as I have to rush to complete a short screenplay for a 2 day competition this weekend, as well as catch up on story materials for the show I’m working on, and complete episode two of a podcast series. Ya yoy.
Legally speaking, mayhem refers to the gruesome crime of deliberately causing an injury that permanently disfigures another. The name derives via Middle English from the Anglo-French verb maheimer ("to maim") and is probably of Germanic origin; the English verb maim comes from the same ancestor. The disfigurement sense of mayhem first appeared in English in the 15th century. By the 19th century the word had come to mean any kind of violent behavior; nowadays, mayhem can be used to suggest any kind of chaos or disorder, as in "there was mayhem in the streets during the citywide blackout."