Inside the Room

by Linda Venis

  From Beat Sheet to Outline

  Because a picture is worth a thousand frustrated expletives, I’ve screened the pilot to NBC’s Grimm and created both a beat sheet and an outline of the first ten pages. These samples show you how each is constructed, particularly in the relative use of detail, and provide templates for you to use both tools. Do note that the outline below doesn’t contain dialogue and its usage is optional, not required; the choice is yours.

  Also observe several formatting conventions for writing beat sheets and outlines (as well as scripts) in evidence here. First, when characters are introduced for the first time, their names are always capitalized (e.g., NICK); once introduced, the names are no longer required to be in caps. Second, the slug line, which is the heading for a particular scene and/or plot point that indicates the scene’s interior or exterior location, specific physical location, and time of day (for example, INT. C’EST LA VIE BAKERY—DAY), is always capitalized.

  Joel Anderson Thompson’s Beat Sheet of NBC’s Grimm Pilot

  A young female jogger is attacked in a forest by something unseen.

  NICK talks with his girlfriend, JULIETTE, at her job. Tonight’s a big night because she’ll be moving in with him.

  HANK, Nick’s partner—they’re detectives—picks him up and takes him to a homicide they’re assigned to investigate. En route, Nick’s confused when he sees a beautiful girl passing by, who momentarily turns into a demon and reverts back to being human.

  A sick woman, MARIE, drives defensively, as if she thinks she’s being followed. A middle-aged man, HULDA, is following her from a distance in his car.

  A FOREST SERVICE OFFICER shows Nick and Hank the crime scene in the woods where we saw the jogger attacked. As they gather clues, they see that the mutilation appears to have been done by an animal, but there are no signs of an animal attack, just a boot print.

  At the police station, Nick and Hank check the databases. Nick sees a cuffed thug morph into a demonic owl and quickly revert back to human.

  Marie takes medicine, enters a small Victorian house, and dons a scarf to cover her bald head.

  While at the station, Nick and Hank get a call informing them that a university student never returned from jogging.

  Nick and Hank interview the roommate of SYLVIE, the missing student. Via clues, they quickly deduce that Sylvie is the murder victim.

  Juliette lets herself into her new home and is startled to discover Marie is already inside.

  END OF TEASER

  Joel Anderson Thompson’s Outline of NBC’s Grimm Pilot

  TEASER

  1. EXT. MCIVER PARK FOREST—DAY

  A young woman, who’s a student at the university, jogs in the beautiful lush forest while listening to her iPod and wearing a red hooded sweatshirt. Think Little Red Riding Hood. She’s attacked and knocked into a ravine by something that moves so fast we can’t see it. Amid the vicious snarling of her attacker, we hear her screams.

  2. INT. C’EST LA VIE BAKERY—DAY

  NICK BURKHARDT, 28, talks with his girlfriend, JULIETTE SILVERTON, 26, as she serves pastries to the patrons. He happily picks up bags that she had packed and has waiting for him. He can’t wait to see her later tonight.

  3. EXT. STREET—DAY

  Outside the bakery, Nick meets with HANK GRIFFIN, late 40s. Pretty ladies pass by. Hank teases Nick about not being able to look anymore because of his new girlfriend, Juliette. Nick looks at the ladies anyway. One stares back and appears to morph into a demon, scowls at Nick, and reverts to normal. Nick shakes his head in disbelief. Hank informs him that they have to report to a call. A mutilated body was found in McIver Park. They get into the car and speed off with the siren blasting. They’re detectives. Hank is his partner.

  4. INT. SUV—DAY

  A sickly and bald MARIE KESSLER, 49, drives an SUV and tows an Airstream. She continues checking her side-view mirrors as if she fears being followed.

  5. INT. CORVETTE—DAY

  Several cars behind Marie’s SUV there’s a Corvette following her. An overweight, balding, and middle-aged man named HULDA drives. He’s following Marie.

  6. EXT. FOREST/CRIME SCENE—DAY

  Nick and Hank, wearing badges, follow the winding trail guided by a FOREST SERVICE OFFICER. He explains how the victim’s severed arm, with a piece of the red hooded sweatshirt still on it, was discovered by other hikers. The large amount of blood spatter conveys that this was a violent attack. The remains are so unrecognizable that a discarded women’s running shoe is the only evidence that reveals the gender of the victim. Forest Service Officer also explains that instead of the expected animal tracks, there is only a boot print. No human should have been able to do this. Too many pieces of the body are missing. A particularly happy song is on a continuous loop on the victim’s discarded iPod.

  7. INT. POLICE STATION—ROBBERY/

  HOMICIDE—DAY

  Nick and Hank run leads, check for DNA results, and scan database for violent predators in the area. Nick sees an ANGRY PERP sporting tats, handcuffed to a desk, being interviewed by a detective. Angry Perp stares back at Nick. His face morphs into a demonic owl and quickly reverts back to being human. This shocks Nick into running into SERGEANT WU and causes him to spill his coffee.

  8. EXT. SMALL VICTORIAN HOUSE—DAY

  Marie pulls the SUV and Airstream quickly up the long drive into the backyard of a run-down house. Now she’s hidden from the street. Before getting out, Marie takes what looks like potent medicine and covers her bald head with a scarf. She exits the SUV with a cane. She finds a hidden key to enter the house. Finally, she has a smile born from relief.

  9. INT. POLICE DEPARTMENT—ROBBERY/

  HOMICIDE—DAY

  Nick and Hank are at their desks, hunched over their computer screens. They discuss elimination of the usual suspects. A call comes in informing them that a university student went out jogging and never returned. Nick and Hank push back from their desks and head for the door.

  10. INT. SYLVIE THE JOGGER’S DORM ROOM—NIGHT

  Hank and Nick interview the possible victim’s ROOMMATE, 18, who is worried sick. The roommate’s description of the running shoes that SYLVIE, the missing jogger, wore is similar to the style found at the crime scene. The two detectives see photos of Sylvie and her roommate during happier times in their lives. Both of them wear the red hooded university sweatshirts. Nick and Hank conclude the murder victim is indeed Sylvie.

  11. INT. SMALL VICTORIAN HOUSE—NIGHT

  Juliette lets herself into the house. It’s completely dark. She turns on the lights. GASP! Juliette gets the shock of her life when she discovers Marie standing before her.

  END OF TEASER

  Their Structure Should Become Your Structure

  Be mindful that your outline should directly reflect the structure of the show you’re specing. Count the number of scenes per act in a minimum of three episodes, and approximate this scene distribution within your outline. Follow this process within the teaser (again, a show’s first sequence of scenes, which leads into a commercial or opening credits). Its purpose is to set a clear tone for the rest of the episode as well as to entice viewers to remain with the show and not change channels. While not all shows use teasers, the ones that do may have certain rules.

  For instance, while most shows proceed linearly from the teaser into the story events, Southland does not. Its teaser is nonlinear and is used as a foreshadowing that plays out later in the episode. Some shows feature the protagonist in the teaser, some never do this, and others allow for both. In this respect, the teaser in your outline should emulate the show.

  As with teasers, acts can have some variation as well. The easiest way to determine the separation of acts is to look for the commercial breaks. For premium cable, keep an eye on the clock. The rise and fall of the drama will convey a pattern revealing the act breaks. Some shows use a five-act structure and others have a sixth act. Your outline should reflect the same number.

  Write
That Outline!

  Now it’s your turn: Once you complete the beat sheet for your story, flesh out each plot point with light scene description, external and internal location, period of the day, and minimal choice dialogue. Voilà! You now have the first draft of your outline.

  Welcome to the Team

  Congratulations! By creating a story and outline for an on-air show, you have moved from sitting in the stands as a fan to joining that elite team of people who actually write.

  Okay, stop high-fiving. That’s only the first draft. Do a second draft. Let someone read it to offer notes on whether it seems logical and feels like the show. Implement the ones that sound sane. This will be your third draft.

  Now that you have both a strong story and an outline, it’s time to write the script. You will discover your outline needs changes. Don’t panic. Revamping your outline in accordance with script demands is a part of the process for even the most experienced and gifted writers, and that’s why the next chapter will guide you carefully through this new terrain. As you rework your outline and begin writing, you’ll learn more about the truth of your story and acquire all the essential tools you need for a solid first draft. Trust the process, trust yourself, and most importantly, have fun.

  CHAPTER 2

  Writing the On-Air One-Hour Drama Spec: The Script

  by Charlie Craig

  Welcome and congratulations! Before we talk about what lies ahead on your quest to write a spec hour-long script, let’s gloat a bit about what you’ve done so far: You’ve chosen an appropriate show, studied countless episodes, and spent days developing a story with a great teaser, gripping act outs, and tremendous forward momentum that builds to a satisfying climax. And better than that, it’s all written down! There it is, right next to you: a well-crafted outline, clean and organized, seemingly begging you to type FADE IN and start writing.

  Well, I’ve got some advice for you: Don’t. There’s still some work to do before you’re ready to begin “generating pages” (a favorite euphemism picked up during my twenty-five-plus years in the business). You’ve already done the hardest part—compared to breaking a story and outlining it, writing a script is actually fun—but it’s a process. A journey. And, like any journey, it can benefit from some last-minute preparation and planning.

  In the first section of this chapter, “Before You Start Writing Your First Draft,” we’ll fine-tune elements like conflict, clock, and stakes, and go over your outline’s structure to make sure your story flows and that the act outs are effective. You wouldn’t want it any other way, right?

  Our second section, “Writing Your First Draft,” will provide a template to guide you through each scene of your script. Just as importantly, it will prepare you for the fact that your story will change as you dig into it; as your characters and plot come alive, it’s inevitable that certain scenes or motivations won’t make sense anymore. The good news is that the fixes you come up with will be better than what you originally had.

  In “Writing Your Second Draft,” you’ll read your script for the first time, practicing techniques to help you gain perspective on the material, giving you the opportunity to make adjustments to the elements of the story that didn’t end up working as well as you’d hoped.

  Our final section, “Write—Write—Keep Writing!,” addresses what to do when you’re satisfied that your script is finished. How do you kick it out of the nest, and in what direction? And what do you do next? A scary proposition, but I hope this section makes it less so.

  If all this seems like a lot of work—if you feel like you put all of this time into an outline, it reads perfectly, and you just want to write—I hear you. You’re excited, you like your story, what’s the holdup? I’ll answer that with another question: Why are you writing a spec? The answer I get most often from my students at UCLA Extension is to get an agent and a job. That’s a good one, but it’s not the only reason you’re devoting this much time to an episode of Dexter or Breaking Bad or The Mentalist.

  You’re also writing to prove that you have the tenacity and follow-through to actually finish a script. You’re writing to prove that you understand what makes a good story and can come up with one on your own. You’re writing to demonstrate your ability to capture the voice of a particular show and put it back on the page so it seems indistinguishable from the best episodes of that show.

  This script is your first calling card; if you don’t do everything you can to make it as good as you can, you’re wasting your time. If, on the other hand, you give this script everything you’ve got, those who read it will be able to tell.

  And they might just be interested in reading the next script you write.

  Before You Start Writing Your First Draft

  What I’m about to describe for you is a process I’ve gone through on every show I’ve written for (from The X-Files to Invasion to Pretty Little Liars) and every show I’ve run (from Brimstone on Fox to Traveler on ABC to Eureka on Syfy). Between finishing an episode’s outline and starting to write the script, I review a series of questions I’ve been honing since…well, since forever. I share this process with my UCLA Extension class, and now I’m going to share it with you. I hope it causes you to come up with answers to some questions you never knew you had. If you can honestly say you already went over everything I’m about to discuss back when you were writing your outline, that’s great. I’ll bet your outline is better because of it.

  Now let’s do it one more time to make your script better. And let’s start with something that should be obvious.

  Turn on the TV

  I’m sure you watched episodes of the show you’ve chosen to spec before you started on your outline. Well, guess what: You need to keep watching. If ever there was a time to become a student of your show, this is it. It’s of crucial importance if your show is serialized, but even if you’ve chosen a stand-alone episodic it’s really something you have to do. Why? Because things change.

  Even your average closed-ended show has some low-level serialization: Will the leads of Castle or Bones finally sleep together? What have been the latest developments in The Mentalist’s quest to find Red John? What have we learned about the backgrounds of the characters in Revenge that might help us figure out what’s going on? And if your show is truly serialized, you really need to stay on your toes: Boardwalk Empire ended its second season with the death of one of its two most important characters!

  And it’s not just the lives of the characters than can change overnight; regular sets and locations can change as well. Between the first and second season of Eureka, we tore down an entire soundstage of sets and started over again. The result was a whole new collection of labs and offices and meeting rooms that became our standing sets—the locations where most of our scenes took place. This change gave our show a dramatically different look than it had in season one; the observant writer would note this and set his scenes in the new locations, avoiding the ones that are no longer part of the show.

  Lastly, the entire structure of a series can change. Partway through our second season, ABC Family decided to change Pretty Little Liars from a show with a teaser (the situation that compels the character to action and sets the episode’s stakes) and five acts to a show with a teaser and six. Just like that. One day we finished cracking a T+5 episode; the next day we put an act 6 card up on the board and started a new story. Another opportunity for a shrewd writer to pick up on a change and adjust her outline accordingly.

  So what’s the bottom line? Things change—maybe a little, maybe a lot—and you need to be on top of those changes as you start writing your script. So keep the TV on, or fire up Hulu or one of the networks’ own sites, and stay up-to-date with your show. You can always tweak your script as you write it, or even after. That proves you’re paying attention. A failure to do so is an indication of a writer who’s not hungry enough to be taken seriously.

  Think Inside the Box

  Now that you’re up-to-date with any recent changes or
developments to the flow of your show’s season, it’s time to take a final, closer look at the particular aspects of a single episode. I like to tell my students that although thinking outside the box is a good approach in many areas of life—none of us would be writing on Macs or standing in line to buy the latest iPhone if Steve Jobs hadn’t decided to “think different”—when it comes to writing a spec, one needs to think inside the box. This is not the time to conceive of “a very special episode” of your show. There should be no major new characters introduced, it should not be Christmas, there should not be a wedding, and no one should ever wake up in bed and say, “It was just a dream.”

  Developments like those only occur on shows after lengthy discussions between the writers and the network and are, by definition, atypical. You’re trying to write the exact opposite: a “typical” episode that will stand out not for its differences from its series but for its similarities, for how well it mimics the series while at the same time presenting a great and involving story.

  So how do you go about giving yourself the best shot at achieving this goal? The answer, once again, is to compare your outline to a typical episode of your show. Actually, to as many episodes as possible. In as many ways as possible.

  Franchise and Stakes

  Let’s start with the series franchise. I define that as “what happens in the show every week.” If it’s a police procedural, there’s probably a criminal who needs to be stopped or captured. If it’s a medical procedural, there’s a life that needs to be saved. In a legal drama, there’s a case that needs to be won. It may sound obvious, but your episode needs to have the same franchise as your series…and, going off of what I said above, your story should not be one where the killer gets away, the patient dies, or an innocent person goes to jail.