FDX Reader, our app for reading Final Draft scripts on the iPad and iPhone, came out a year ago today.

Usually, when people say, “I can’t believe it’s been a year!” they mean something like look how time flies or it seems like only yesterday.  

But when I say I can’t believe it’s been a year, I mean that I can’t believe it’s been only a year.  FDX Reader feels like something we did a very, very long time ago.

Why is my internal calendar so wrong in this case?

I have a few theories:

1. Digital things move faster.

We’ve become accustomed to shorter and shorter attention cycles for digital goods. Consider Draw Something:

• Draw Something is a hit!
• Zynga buys Draw Something for $180 million!
• Draw Something is tanking!

The rise and fall of MySpace took years. The cycle for Draw Something has run about eight weeks.

Even though the time span has been incredibly compressed, our brains still try to ascribe a certain amount of time for a rise-and-fall cycle, so we subconsciously back-date events.

It’s not just apps that move faster. Many memes are essentially digital, and experience the same time-shift phenomenon.

Quick: When did KONY2012 happen? Was it before or after the Mel Gibson/Joe Ezsterhas fracas? And what about the Sandra Fluke/Rush Limbaugh controversy?

All of these memes burned bright and died out quick, leaving the embers to float in a sea of the recent past. ¹

2. My clock started when we began working on the app.

Here’s what I wrote to Nima Yousefi on December 10, 2010:

I think there’s an opening for an FDX Reader (called, perhaps, FDX Reader) that would simply register itself to iOS as able to open .fdx extension files. Then, when someone taps a file with that extension in Dropbox or Mail (or whatever) it can launch. That way, you don’t really have to worry about getting files to into it.

What matters is the reading experience. Make it look nice, like the Instapaper app. Perhaps give the ability to add notes, but don’t try to become a screenwriting app.

If that’s interesting to you, happy to go halfsies with you. Lemme know.

FDX Reader was our very first app. Not only did we need to figure out how to build it — the design, the coding, the testing — we had to learn how to get an app approved and released in Apple’s odd ecosystem. (Just getting an account set up is surprisingly convoluted.)

That process took a little over six months, so it’s reasonable that the app feels older to me.

3. So much has come after it.

In the past year, we’ve released the iPhone version of FDX Reader, several installments of Bronson Watermarker for the Mac, the spec for the Fountain markup language, and successive betas of Highland. (Come back tomorrow for major news on that one.)

All that activity seems like too much to have occurred in just a year, so I’m mentally stretching the time period.

4. The less attention you pay to something, the further back in time you push it.

We don’t really do much with FDX Reader now. Our last update simply upgraded the graphics for the new iPad. If as rumored the new iPhone has a larger screen, we’ll make whatever changes we need to make. But the app itself is basically done.

We built the app because Final Draft hadn’t come out with its own reader. Now they have. Ours still sells remarkably well — probably because we’re the only one that works on the iPhone.

You never forget your first time, and FDX Reader really has been a remarkable experience bringing an idea to life. In celebrating FDX Reader’s first birthday, I’ll invite you to try it out if you haven’t.

(Or leave us a nice review if you’re so inclined.)

1. Kony: February 20, 2012. Gibson: April 11, 2012. Fluke: February 29, 2012. ↩

On the podcast, Craig and I have discussed how much the career of screenwriting has changed over the past few years, and how it’s gotten harder for many feature writers to actually make a living at it.

In episode 35, a veteran screenwriter named Biff wrote in to vent about how grim studio development had become:

I had a president of production ask for a free rewrite before he gave it to his chairman. Not a polish. He had notes. True multi-week notes. That doesn’t strike me as a producer’s polish. That strikes me as flat-out abusive.

Has the landscape changed that much? Has the douchiness pervaded every level of the business? Have I turned into Clint Eastwood shouting get off my lawn?

A reader named Cordy wrote in to share his experience.

I’m a fairly new working writer. Screenwriting is paying my bills. I have a big-three agent, a name manager, many meetings, all the things I used to think would make it possible, if not easy, for me to have a career.

When I heard John reading Biff’s letter, my heart sank. I have to admit that I was secretly hoping you guys would be more like “Quit yer whinin’!” because then I could be stern with myself and like “Craig Mazin thinks my intensity is for shit. Win, Andrew, win!” but… this is pretty grim stuff.

I’ve seen Craig speak at the Guild, and he really inspired me to stop seeing myself as a victim of the capriciousness of people who control the pursestrings, and to try to be more upbeat and proactive about my career. So that’s cool. Not so cool is that even with my new attitude, I still run into some pretty tough roadblocks.

One example: At a pitch meeting at the studio I previously sold something to, I pitched out literally every scene, every arc, every relationship, specific jokes and set pieces, acting out whole chunks of dialog. This was for a remake of a movie that would cost the studio peanuts to make. I am not a business guy, but I think the risk level here was relatively low. When I was finished pitching, the executive frowned at me and said “But why would people go see this movie instead of staying home? What makes this movie a big hit? You have to understand, that’s what my boss will ask me if I pitch this to him.”

So that project just died on the vine. I didn’t lose the job to anyone, they just killed it. I have struggled to frame this kind of thing for myself as an opportunity.

But I keep bumping against that executive’s question: how can I guarantee that what I’m pitching will be a big hit? I don’t think that I can, but that seems to be what people want. If I can’t magically say, “Yes, here is my crystal ball, it outperforms THE HUNGER GAMES, don’t worry about it,” they just shut me down.

It reminds me of that apocryphal story of the early days of Sony, when the Japanese executives were like, “Your problem is that you keep making bombs. From now on, we’re only going to make the hit movies.”

As a screenwriter, it feels like I am being asked to perform an impossible feat, and it’s easy to slip into bitterness.

But I don’t want to be bitter. I do want to do decent work and do okay financially and be able to support my family. Is there still a way for young screenwriters to build semi-steady careers, or is that paradigm gone forever? I know a lot of young writers in my general boat, and to be honest I think all of us are trying to get out of features and into TV.

There’s also a lot of dazed talk about how screenwriting as a job is just dead, Jim.

I don’t want to believe that. I want to believe that this thing I’ve spent my young adult life getting good at — and I am good at it — can still be made to pay a modest living if I work hard and make smart choices.

Should I act more as a “producer” of my own career? I write specs, and recently optioned some material. I am trying to get into TV.

Should I try to get involved with directors, and write him or her a project for free, in hopes that having a filmmaker attached will help? I have explored this a bit and found that there’s a roadblock here, too: directors who mean something as attachments can get brand-name writers to work for them. I know several writers, more established than I am, who are doing free work for A/B list directors right now.

There must be a way to break in to that. (I can’t believe I am scheming to do free fauxssignment work, but here I am.)

I do discuss all these things with my reps, who are smart people I trust. But I don’t think they have the answers. They just encourage me to write specs.

It seems like this seismic shift has happened so quickly and has left so many people behind that we’re all paddling frantically against the undertow.

John and Craig open the listener mailbag and sprint through twenty questions in just under an hour.

➤ When John sets a timer for himself, what is his work/break interval sweet spot? (1:12)

➤ How do you break up with your manager? (2:16)

➤ Are there any tricks for organizing files when writing out of order? (3:42)

➤ Why join the WGA? (5:35)

➤ What “lingo” do Craig and John use in story meetings? (13:48)

➤ Will a writer be held back by English being her second language? (17:33)

➤ Is it better to release a short through festivals or by putting it online in parts? (19:37)

➤ Do John and Craig have tips for juggling multiple writing jobs? (21:17)

➤ What is a safe LA neighborhood with good schools for a writer/father who is making the move? (25:56)

➤ Do Craig and John’s finished movies look like they imagined while they were writing them? (30:23)

➤ Is it a smart idea for a 23-year-old aspiring screenwriter to pick up and move to LA? (34:05)

➤ If a character’s race is not specifically mentioned, why is he or she assumed white? (34:57)

➤ Is it okay to refer to specific actors while pitching? What about in the script itself? (39:12)

➤ How did John and Craig meet and decided to collaborate on Scriptnotes? (41:18)

➤ Are screenwriting contests or studio writers’ programs the right step for a 30-year-old mother of one living in Ohio? (42:34)

➤ Why would anyone would want to become a screenwriter in today’s studio climate? (46:38)

➤ If your spec pilot begs to be a premise pilot, is it better to use a non-pilot episode as your sample? (49:15)

➤ Why does page length change when converting files from Movie Magic to Final Draft? Which page count is correct? (51:29)

➤ If your historical epic has a lot of required backstory, is it okay to meet the protagonist on page 30? (53:41)

➤ Is there shame in running with an idea someone else freely posted online? (55:23)

All this and just slightly more on episode 38 of Scriptnotes.

Podcast: Download

LINKS:

• The Pomodoro Technique
• Craig’s Done Deal Pro forums post that prompted the question about “lingo”
• INTRO: Skyhawks intro (via Monte Ferraro)
• OUTRO: Bach’s Prelude & Fugue No. 1 in C Major by The Original Swingle Singers, 1963

You can download the episode here: AAC | mp3.

Alex Morris looks at how Happy Endings found its footing:

Rather than improve ratings by noticeably changing course (as Parks and Recreation had done after its first season), the cast and crew leaned into the weirdness of their comedy.

Coupe and Wayans, who play married couple Jane and Brad turned their characters’ initial overachieving-bobo quirks into a full-blown orgy of neuroses—the second season finds Brad wearing a shirtdress because “Daddy likes a deep tuck,” and Jane stalking a kid she thinks might be her egg-donor baby (in fact the parents didn’t use her egg because they thought she seemed just the kind of crazy who would stalk her egg-donor baby). Wilson gave her singleton an ability to rebound that verges on masochism. And Pally’s gay character, Max, so brilliantly overhauls TV’s go-to flamboyant stereotype that in one episode he slovenly hibernates for the winter, like a bear.

For me, Happy Endings can be hit-or-miss (the bear hibernation was a miss), but I admire the way it has morphed from another sorta-like-Friends show to its own weird beast. I wouldn’t want to hang out with any of these narcissistic self-defeating chatterboxes, but I like them hanging out together.

One of the amazing things about writing television is that unlike a feature, you can actually change course — provided you started with the good elements. You cast the roles you’ve written in the pilot, but you’re also looking at what the actors themselves bring. Writers and actors have a shared responsibility for the characters that’s unique.

Happy Endings is coming back for a third season in the fall.

Screenwriters can learn story and structure, but the ability to create real, tangible characters is more elusive — and ultimately more important.

The best gauge of good writing is whether a screenplay’s characters feel distinct and alive. A lot of that comes from how the characters speak: what they say and how they say it.

John and Craig offer some tests to see if your screenplay’s dialogue works:

• Could you take one character’s words and have another say them?
• Can you picture a specific actor speaking each character’s lines? Or, even better, are there actors you can’t picture saying them?
• Do the characters all sound like you, the writer? Or do they have distinct voices?

This week’s listener questions include recycling material, writing large-group action scenes, and possible novels. Craig then rants about the evils of Zynga and the wonder of 1Password.

How do you do an imitation of Denzel Washington? Find out on episode 37 of Scriptnotes.

Podcast: Download

LINKS:

• Jay Mohr’s Mohr Stories
• Jane Espenson (and Douglas Petrie) on the Nerdist Writers Panel
• Derek Haas’s Popcorn Fiction
• Lightning in a Bottle by Craig Mazin, on Popcorn Fiction
• Snake People by John August, on Popcorn Fiction
• 1Password
• Ski Safari
• INTRO: Misfits of Science stereo remix by Stiks1969
• OUTRO: No Frills Love (Extended Dance Remix) by Jennifer Holiday

You can download the episode here: AAC | mp3.

UPDATE 5-18-12: The transcript of this episode can be found here.

Last year, Jay Faerber wrote a First Person post on his experience in the Warner Bros TV Writers Workshop. At that time, he was just finishing up the workshop and staffing season was underway. I asked him for an update.

The great thing about the Warner Bros workshop (in addition to what I learned in the program itself) is that it creates a strong incentive for any Warner Bros show that wants to hire a workshopper: the workshop will pay your salary for about the first 13 episodes. So it really gives workshop people a leg up when going out on meetings and competing against other lower-level writers.

Despite that, as any writer will tell you, staffing season is enormously stressful.

While I had that great Warner Bros backing, I was still competing with the seven other drama writers from my workshop. I ended up going on meetings for two bubble shows, plus another pilot. Then upfronts happened, and the two bubble shows were cancelled and the pilot didn’t get picked up.

At this point, I think most of my workshop colleagues had already been staffed, so I was starting to sweat a little. Then Ringer, which had been developed for CBS, got picked up by The CW, which made it a Warner Bros show and therefore a viable option for workshop graduates. I got a meeting on Ringer and was able to get a meeting on another Warner Bros pilot that had been picked up, and if I remember correctly, I got an offer to join the Ringer staff the evening after I had my meeting.

I accepted the offer and started work the Wednesday after Memorial Day.

Getting down to work

That first day at Ringer had a kind of first-day-of-school feeling, as all the writers got to know each other. It became apparent pretty quickly that I had lucked out — everyone on the writing staff was really cool.

One of the things that really stuck with me from the workshop was the importance of determining what’s expected of the staff writer. Some writers’ rooms adhere to a strict hierarchy and the staff writer is expected to only speak when spoken to (if that!). Others take an all-writers-are-created-equal approach, and everyone’s encouraged to chime in.

But it can get even more complicated than that.

I heard a story of a staff writer who’d been told by a higher level writer to keep his mouth shut and sit back and learn, but then the showrunner declined to pick up the staff writer’s option (after the 13th episode) because the staff writer never contributed. Whether this was a misunderstanding or deliberate sabotage by the higher level writer is up for debate. But I made it a point on that first day to simply ask our showrunner what she expected of me. She made it clear that all of us were expected to contribute.

On Ringer, all the stories were broken collectively by the writers in the room. Once we had the story fully boarded (all of the beats up on the white board), the writer of that episode would go off to write the story arena (or story area — different shows call them different things), then the outline, and then the script.

I’ve been a comic book writer for a long time, so this collaborative way of breaking stories was new to me, but I think I took to it pretty well. And my background helped in other ways. Serialized shows like Ringer have a lot of plot threads to keep track of, as do comics, so my brain was automatically wired for that.

Learning to love the white board

Our writers’ room was lined on three walls with white boards. On the fourth wall was a TV. There were no windows. As the season progressed, two whole walls were taken up with charting the plot developments for each of the main characters in each episode. This helped us keep track of the various plot threads. The remaining third wall was what we used to break the story for each episode.

We’d start out by breaking each character’s story in a linear fashion. Bridget was usually the “A” story, then maybe a Machado or Andrew or Juliet “B” story, then a Siobhan “C” story, then sometimes a Flashback story. Once we had all these stories broken to our satisfaction, we’d start “blending” them — weaving the various stories together and figuring out where they fit into each act.

I quickly became the go-to guy to write on the white board throughout this process. I have good handwriting, and I didn’t mind doing it. It gave me a clear role in the room, and let me feel like I was contributing something even when I wasn’t pitching ideas.

I was also the only writer on staff with an active Twitter account (you can follow me @JayFaerber), so I would sometimes Tweet about the show. It was an interesting experience. I wasn’t the “official” spokesman for the show by any means, but I tried to be accessible to fans. Most of my answers were probably vague and unsatisfying, since so many of them were of the “You’ll find out…” or “That’s not my department” variety. And because I was just a staff writer, I didn’t have the authority to be as forthcoming as Shawn Ryan or Jeff Eastin when they’re tweeting about their shows. But it was still fun (for the most part) to interact with the fans.

As is standard in TV, all the writers had initial contracts for the first thirteen episodes, and after that the showrunner could chose to pick up our option…or not. I was kept on, and over the course of the first season I got three scripts: one solo, and two that I co-wrote.

We shot Ringer in LA, and the writers were on set for the entire production of their episodes, which means I got a chair with my name on it and everything.

Someone once said that being a writer on set is like being a fireman — you sit around for long periods of time, and occasionally someone needs you. And that’s a pretty apt description. Most television directors are basically hired guns — they come in, direct an episode, and move on to the next gig on another show. As talented as these directors can be, they don’t always know the show, so it’s important for one of the writers to be there to make sure what’s being shot captures what we intended.

Not every show sends their writers to set. I have friends who wrote on shows that shot out of town, and they never got to be involved in production. And while these friends have been TV writers longer than I have, I feel like I have a leg up on them when it comes to production.

Back on the market

Ratings on Ringer haven’t been great and as we ended the season we were very much a “bubble show.” We might get renewed, we might not. The powers-that-be at The CW are probably waiting to see how their pilots turn out before they make any decisions.

This means that I’m going out for staffing season again. It’s a different experience now, since I’m not fresh out of the workshop. I’m competing with every other staff writer and story editor out there — not to mention this year’s new workshop graduates. But I’ve also got a year of experience under my belt, including three produced scripts.

I’m discovering staffing season requires you to be in a weird emotional space.

I want Ringer to come back because I love working with the writers and I really enjoy the world we spent the past year building. It’s a good job, and I’d like it to continue.

But in order to go out and meet with the showrunners of other shows, I have to sort of emotionally disconnect from Ringer so that I can allow myself to get excited about the idea of working on something else.

This isn’t a unique situation I’m in — a lot of shows end their season not knowing if they’re going to renewed. This type of emotional disconnect seems to be something worth developing if you’re going to have a career in TV.

I’ve spent the past couple months reading pilots and going on meetings for new shows, but I’m also still in touch with all the writers from Ringer. Hopefully we’ll be back in our writers’ room next season, and if not, I can only hope my next job is as great as my first one.