A personal blogging mandate of mine is not to offer advice. Yes, I get paid to write things and to consult on other writers’ work as an “expert.”  My writing has been produced in almost-professional ways.  Still, I keep myself in the “wannabe” category until words of mine are spoken on a non-internet screen.  No advice from me till then. However, my current task is lending me some insight.  I felt I should record some of the mistakes entrants have made, so I can refer back next time I’m submitting something myself, and I’ll share in case it’s of help to anyone else:

• SPELLING. Every book you read and every panel you attend, they emphasize this.  “Yeah, yeah,” I always think.  Who’s going to go to the trouble of submitting their work without checking spelling and punctuation?  Turns out… lots of people.  So I’m really just repeating here, but evidently it bears repeating: I WANT to eliminate you from consideration.  The twenty applicants I promised myself I’d get through before I allow myself to watch tonight’s episode of Big Bang Theory will go by faster if each gets three strikes upon a glance.  Every lame joke is a strike.  Overly dense opening description is a strike.  Each individual spelling error is a strike.  That means I allow you two misspellings, and I’m probably more generous than a real reader.  Meanwhile, a spelling error in the e-mail subject header?  Delete!

• COVER LETTER. Maybe you think my little organization doesn’t rate more than a message like “What up? Take a look!”  But my little organization demands 20-60 hours a week of my time.  It matters to me, and I want to staff it with people who care about it like I do.  So casual tone is great, but failure to make an effort?  You’re done.  Meanwhile, in a past life I hired people to work as summer camp teachers, and sorted thousands of applicants annually.  From them, I would forgive a boilerplate listing of qualifications.  From a writer, however, I expect something a little more inspired, with some personality. The good covers prove the writer visited our site, maybe mention a favorite sketch.  It goes miles to making me like you if you start with making me believe you like me.

• REGISTRATION. Yep, you’re meeting me over the internet.  There are creeps out there who might steal your work.  I’m not one. Now, my own approach has always been that until I have an agent or lawyer putting my stuff out to the power players, I need to take the risk that something might get stolen.  I can always write more, after all.  Most people are more protective than me, and that’s fine.  Register your work with the WGA and/or Library of Congress, and then you’ll have proof you wrote it, and you can sue any internet strangers who steal from you.  BUT… Don’t beat me over the head with your registration number or go out of your way to tell me that your sample registered.  Put the registration number somewhere like the file name of the attachment, or as a P.S. at the end of your letter, or put it on your sample’s cover page.  If the number is in bold at the top of your letter or your e-mail’s subject field, it tells me you’re not the trusting kind.  It makes me suspect  you consider your work precious, which means you won’t  translate to a member of a writing TEAM.  Similarly, a blatant refusal to send samples is as good a reason as any to drop you in the reject pile.  Meanwhile, of course the best sample would be something that’s already published.  Then there are no worries.

• TRYING TOO HARD. By all means write a cover letter that stands out, that seems friendly, and that demonstrates you have a personality.  A sly joke or two will go a long way.  However, a long string of wacky just makes you look desperate, and the overall effect is probably opposite that desired.  Relax, and let your actual writing do most of the work on impressing the reader.

• MAKING EXCUSES. Don’t have experience?  I don’t care.  Your writing sample will get the same 30-60 seconds, 1-2 pages to make me laugh that everyone else’s will.  Why set me up going into those pages EXPECTING you to disappoint?  If you can’t think of anything to say about your background, tell me about some of your favorite entertainment, or what inspired you to take up writing.  Either of those things might help us connect.  Telling me how you don’t really have any background but you thought you’d take a crack, fingers crossed, makes you sound… well, amateur.  And if your writing is good, I don’t care one lick if you’ve done this before, as long as you can do it again.

• CLICHE SAMPLE. The point is to stand out from the crowd.  As someone who has spent far more time around sketch comedy and sketch comedians than most, I’ve seen all I can take of commercial parodies.  (In my old troupe, we had a rule: no commercials, first dates, job interviews, or game shows.)  Naturally, some of the funniest sketches ever made fit these categories.  But a million boring knock-offs also do.  And when I’m wading through a couple hundred applicants, the one thing I want is a ray of originality.  Even if your fake commercial is brilliant, it’s still not going to stand out.  By the time your announcer character says, “Has this ever happened to you?” I’m already bored with you.

• FLIMSY SUBMISSION. My ad invited you to send a resume or summary of your background, and (a) writing sample(s.) What does it tell me if you only send one sample? Either you’re afraid I’m stealing from you (see above) or you don’t have samples sitting around.  I want to work with the kind of person who has so many samples that s/he is quickly able to shoot a message to me with two or three pieces attached, chosen from your array of samples based on length and tone.  This is not to say I’ll necessarily read three things from you, but if your first piece is borderline and shows promise, I’ll look at the next thing. If there is no next thing, then it’s the “no” pile for you.

So what to take away from all this?  Pick one or two or three of your best samples that are least like the rest of the pack.  Rewrite and rewrite again until what you’re sending is as sharp as it can be.  Then check for errors one last time.  Make an effort on a cover letter that makes me want to meet you.  Then relax, send it in, and let your writing do the job of introducing you.

But I just watched the first episode of the BBC miniseries Jekyll, and I’m thinking that Steven Moffat’s name belongs on the short list.

I had always very much liked the BBC series Coupling. Then, hearing it was an impressive remake and hoping for something on par with the new Battlestar Galactica, I checked out the updated Dr. Who. It was mediocre sci-fi, with some sparkling moments. (I think Variety’s Brian Lowry described the Dr. Who universe best on September 7th, stating that the spin-off Torchwood dwells “in that existential rift between really good and just OK.”) But then, somewhere in Dr. Who’s season one, I saw an episode about a little boy in a gas mask during the blitzkrieg on London, and it was as good as TV gets. I couldn’t figure out why this particular episode was head and shoulders above the rest of the series, until I realized that Moffat wrote it.

Moffat has a uniquely sophisticated skill in story shape. Coupling (for which he wrote every episode) was Friends, but grown-up. It is clearly a sitcom, but told with intricate structure one might see in a Christopher Nolan movie. His Dr. Who episodes feature a Sorkin-like ability to tease us with half-glimpses of details until finally unveiling the big picture at the best moment possible. And he seems equally adept in comedy or suspense. The man has chops.

So far, Jekyll is very impressive in its tone. I wish I could label what Moffat has done to make the story so compelling. Other than the title, an awareness of the original novella, and a wink in the form of naming the main character’s children “Eddie” and “Harry,” the mini-series seems pretty far abstracted. Setting this piece in modern day, Moffat seems to have mostly abandoned the allegory of struggle between good and evil in man’s soul, and instead explores what a present-day citizen would do if cursed with a morally depraved alter-ego. Moffat has deftly created tension from very little, again revealing tiny pieces at his discretion as the story unfolds. But his script is not without the occasional subtle English smirk, in lines like, “I have to go home and change.”

Does anyone else out there know and love this writer? Am I wrong in putting him among the best? Who else am I missing on my list of great living screenwriters? (Please don’t say Woody Allen…)

Meanwhile, I’m going to go watch episode two of Jekyll!

Friday was the weekly writers’ meeting. We have been planning to hit the ground running at this first all-group meeting, and to present a handful of good sketches to wow the actors and directors. (We actually have quite a few to choose from after only a few meetings; I’ve been pretty stoked with how the writing team has turned out.) At the meeting, I said I’d be rewriting a couple of the sketches before we present them. They were both great premises with some funny jokes. I just wanted to brainstorm even more jokes together, and then polish everything up. The team came through on the punch-ups. Friday was definitely the day where we solidified not just as a group of writers, but as a writing group.

The thing is, I’ve been working for the last couple of evenings on preparing for the meeting, and these rewrites have been at the top of the stack of things to do. I tackled one of them each night. (And I’m pretty proud of how they turned out.) But both nights, it wasn’t until 3:30 in the morning before the rewrite really found form in my head.

What’s up with that? What is it about the creative process that I can’t possibly get the juices flowing until after cleaning my room, staring at the page, checking my blog stats, watching some episodes of Rome, downing some guacamole, staring at the page, reading Wikipedia articles about neural diseases, staring at the page, and swatting all the flies in the kitchen? Why can’t I skip straight to the part where the productive page-filling happens?

I’m pretty sure when I die, it will be some side effect of a broken circadian rhythm.

“To be a lawyer, you must go to a lawyer school, like my dad, who is a lawyer.”

Clearly, my work is not yet done with this particular student.

Still, even if his diction isn’t up to snuff, he has a future in philosophy. This was another of his sentences:

“Life is a mystery, and girls are complex.”

Amen, kid.

Sure, there are parts that are brilliant.  Every writer loves working through ideas for the first time, and nothing beats the moment when a flash of inspiration hits you, making your story a million times better.  And then I love outlining, wrestling all those ideas into an actual shape that might entertain people.  Similarly, editing one’s draft is immensely satisfying, shaping and wordsmithing the clay you’ve previously put in place until it looks just so, exactly how you want it.  I even love the process where you have to go back and make the deep cuts, because you know that unless you get your script down below 105 pages, it’s not allowed to be a comedy.

But the actual part where it’s you, your outline, a keyboard, and a white screen?  That can be painful and frustrating.  Writing isn’t fun. It’s having written something that’s enjoyable.

To get myself through the rough draft part, killing pages, I will often promise myself a reward when I’ve finished.  Or, more precisely, I will deny myself some reward until I’ve finished.

Creating a My Name Is Earl spec has recently moved to the top of my priority list, after a while on the back burner, partly  because a premise I like came to me while I was recently re-watching every episode of the show, and partly out of Jane Espenson’s urging to generate an entirely new script by the Disney Fellowship’s July 1st deadline.   I’m interested in pushing myself to faster and faster writing, and four weeks certainly qualifies as an aggressive, aggressive target, especially since the premise is about all I have.  Ms. Espenson suggests that a month is plenty.  I think she’s right, but I also think that in her writing she has two advantages I do not:  1.) she has a writers’ room in which to break stories, and 2.) she’s Jane Espenson.  I know that I’m going to be super busy ramping up an online comedy web site and the comedy troupe that supports it this summer, but  given that tutoring work will soon slow to a trickle, I can devote more writing time at the end of this month than I normally would, so it’s worth a shot.

Even if I don’t hit the July 1st deadline, pushing for it should help me achieve some writing that I might otherwise not.  Plus, my next turn to present in my writers’ group comes on July 17th.

In case two deadlines isn’t enough, the next Harry Potter book is out on July 21st.  I’m not going to allow myself to read it until I’ve successfully added an Earl spec script to my stack.  Given that every day one spends not having read the latest Harry is a day one risks someone spoiling parts of it, I should be sufficiently motivated.

Seeing as she doesn’t have the next Harry to drive her through the rough draft phase, I gotta wonder what J.K. Rowling does to motivate her writing…