John August

Search Results for: outline

Heroes: Origins: Gone

Follow Up, Projects, Television

I can confirm that the plug got pulled on the six Heroes: Origins episodes, one of which I was slated to write and direct. The possiblity of a WGA strike ((I’m bucking convention by not saying “looming” in reference to the strike.)) made NBC hesitant to prep a series they might never be able to shoot.

I had literally just hit “Print” on my revised outline when I got the call from Tim Kring. So, yeah. I’m bummed. But I get it: It was a lot of money to spend in a very uncertain time. And if the labor situation resolves in an orderly fashion, the series could find itself out of the deep freeze for next season. ((One favorite topic of conversation is what will happen to this TV season if there is a prolonged break. It’s not unlikely we’ll get a second, shorter season to finish up the year.))

In case we never get to shoot it, my episode is/was called “Rehab.” Not everyone is good with their powers. Not everyone is good, period.

The Challenge of Writing in a Digital Age

General

Last week, I blogged about [my upcoming speech](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/writing-the-future) at Drake University (my alma mater), which was entitled “The Challenge of Writing in a Digital Age.” I posted my basic thesis statements, and invited comments. As expected, the hive mind was very helpful in reshaping (and renaming) many of my thoughts, so I’m very grateful to those who wrote in.

The speech went well. It was a nearly-full house, with a lot of first-year students in the crowd, and they seemed to keep pretty engaged.

In terms of content, I don’t think the talk was the equal of the [speech on professionalism](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2006/professional-writing-and-the-rise-of-the-amateur) I gave at Trinity University last year, which covered some of the same ground and used one of the same anecdotes. This one wasn’t as organized or persuasive. I think there’s a much better speech to be written on a single one of these topics (such as Authority), but I’d already committed to the sampler platter.

I promised several professors I’d hold off posting the text of the speech until after extra-credit assignments were turned in. Those deadlines should have now passed.

If you’d prefer a .pdf version (it’s 19 pages), you can find it [here](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/writing_in_digital_age.pdf).

It’s an honor–a pleasure–to be back on campus, standing on this stage where just a couple of weeks ago, actual presidential candidates were trying to seem electable.

I feel I should stress: I have absolutely no political ambitions. But I do have a bit of a platform tonight, a list of observations about the things I see looming on the horizon, and what’s to be done about it. I’m not going to ask for your vote, but I am going to ask for your attention. And most importantly, I’m going to ask you to turn off that part of your brain that automatically goes, “Yeah, well, but that doesn’t apply to me.”

(Actually, you don’t have to turn that part of your brain off. Just put it on vibrate. Let your objections go to voicemail.)
What I’m going to try to convince you tonight is that writing matters. That seems like a pretty easy sell at a university. After all, most of you are students. You’re getting grades. Of course writing matters.

But I’m going to be a little more ambitious tonight. I’m not talking about just academic writing. I’m talking about all writing. I’m talking about email. Memos. Your blog. I’m talking about what you wrote on your friend’s Facebook wall. All that writing you don’t think you’re getting graded on–well, you are.

Whether you want to or not, you’re being judged on it. And you’re being judged differently because of the era you’re living in.

So if I do my job right tonight, I’m going to send you out of here a little bit rattled, a little bit paranoid, but hopefully better prepared. [Read more…] about The Challenge of Writing in a Digital Age

Linear writing for non-linear films

QandA, Story and Plot

When writing a narrative that jumps back and forth throughout
time and events (ie. PULP FICTION, THE KILLING) is it standard operating procedure
to write the story in a more traditional straight ahead format then re-arrange
the script;
or is the script written in a non-linear format as we see it in the movie?

–Matt Higgins

While there have been cases where a film’s timeline was juggled after-the-fact
(HEAVEN AND EARTH was one), the vast majority of scripts are written with the
non-linear elements in place. It’s
a cliché, but screenplays are
really
blueprints for making a movie, so the two forms should match up scene-by-scene.

If you’re planning to write a story that will ultimately unfold in a non-linear
way, such as GO or MEMENTO, it’s a good idea to make a second outline of the
story as it happens in "real time," to make sure the logic tracks.
In fact, this kind of outline is helpful with any kind of story, because even
if a script moves forward scene by scene, inevitably characters will refer
to things that happened "earlier," and it’s important to make sure
all these events could have happened in the sequence you propose.

Personally, I find that non-linear structure is often just a flashy trick
to disguise bad storytelling, or worse, a boring plot. It demands that the
audience pay closer attention in order to figure out what’s going on, but rarely
rewards the effort.

An analogy: When laser printers first arrived, they gave people access to
calligraphy fonts like Zapf Chancery Italic, a typeface designed for wedding
invitations. Suddenly, people printed entire newsletters in 9-point Zapf Chancery
Italic, without any consideration of whether it was the right tool for the
job. (It’s not. It’s almost unreadable.) Now I cringe whenever I see the font.
It’s been ruined for me.

What these novice designers – and many novice screenwriters – failed to recognize
is that just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. I wrote
GO with three overlapping chunks because that’s the only way it made sense;
to intercut between the plotlines would have slowed everything down too much
and made it confusing. In short, I used a strange timeline because that’s what
the story required.

Always ask yourself why you’re choosing a particular way of telling the story.
Used well, and with the right material, non-linear structure can be a very
powerful technique. Used poorly, it just makes a crappy movie harder to follow.

(Originally posted in 2003.)

Her least favorite mistake

Film Industry, Genres, QandA, Rights and Copyright, Television

questionmarkLast year I wrote a spec episode of Grey’s Anatomy entitled “My Favorite Mistake” wherein platonic best friends, Izzie and George, hook up. I registered my script with the WGA and sent it in to be considered for the ABC writing fellowship. I never heard back from the fellowship (their loss, no biggie) but I was surprised to see that last Thursday’s episode shared a title (exactly the same) and a subplot as my spec.

I do not believe that Shonda and team copied my idea… but i do think it is possible that they could have inadvertently copied my title. They had the means, etc. So my question is a two parter: 1) should I do anything about this? and 2) where is the line drawn? Would my script have to be identical to the one broadcast to possibly be plagiarized?

— Jackie Honikman

I don’t watch Grey’s Anatomy, so I looked up an [episode guide](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Greys_Anatomy_episodes) online. One of the first things I noticed was that every episode is named after a song — that’s their thing, just like the title of every episode of Friends begins “The One With…”.

Being a good spec script writer, you followed their style and picked a song title. You chose a Sheryl Crow song. So did they. What are the odds?

Huge. So absurdly huge that you’re going to feel foolish in about three paragraphs.

I know you didn’t write in expecting to be ridiculed, so I want to give you a few sentences to prepare yourself. It’s not that I dislike you, Jackie, or disbelieve you. I’m sure when you first saw the episode title, you were surprised, hurt, disappointed and angry. These are natural emotions. But then the dark engines of your brain kicked in. You convinced yourself that through some byzantine process, your idea had been appropriated. But it hadn’t. It wasn’t.

You wrote your email at the end of March.People ask how long it takes me to answer a reader-submitted question. Generally, I read them all within the week they’re sent in, and flag the ones I think will be interesting and applicable to the readership. But it’s not a first-in-first-out process. Sometimes, a question will land in my inbox that I’ll answer within the hour. There’s a big element of serendipity. But that’s not an invitation to submit the same question multiple times. That will almost guarantee that I won’t answer, since I’ll think, “Didn’t someone else just ask that?” So I’m hoping you’ve moved on, written other scripts, and laughed about how prescient you were. But in case you haven’t, I’m going to rip off the band-aid.

Let me restate your question:

I recently wrote a spec episode of Grey’s Anatomy. I worked very hard on making it exactly like the show, right down to the title. I was subsequently shocked — shocked! — to see that the writers of the show had the audacity to write an episode exactly like their own show. Who can I sue?

Put this way, your fallacy is clear — you’re confusing cause and effect. You think their “Favorite Mistake” is similar to yours because they somehow read and stole your idea, when in fact it’s similar because it’s frickin’ Grey’s Anatomy. You followed their conventions. You included their characters. You emulated their show as closely as you could.

You copied them, not vice-versa. Got it?

In terms of the title, given the show’s adult-contemporary demographics, it was pretty likely they were going to have a Sheryl Crow track sooner or later.In fact, the second episode was titled “The First Cut is the Deepest.” Sheryl Crow’s cover had topped the charts the year before. As far as I can tell from the promos (and parodies) I’ve seen, the show is about young doctors hooking up and breaking up. “My Favorite Mistake” sounds like a good fit. They didn’t need your script to come up with that idea.A while back, a screenwriting colleague was dealing with a guy who was claiming on messageboards that a certain blockbuster was stolen from his script. The “proof?” One of the characters had the same name. Basically, the guy was arguing that the screenwriter had changed the plot, the setting, the character’s motivations — pretty much everything but this one character’s name. It’s hard to claim that a conspiracy is both thorough and lazy.

In addition to the cause and effect problem, I think there’s also a fallacy of limited sampling. You’re looking at your script and the episode you saw. But if an independent reader had your script and 10 other spec scripts of the show to compare to the produced episode, would they really think yours was all that similar? I doubt it.I’m sure this “fallacy of limited sampling” has a more official name, but I couldn’t find it. (It’s not the fallacy of generalization, which infers about a large population based on a too-small sample.) If anyone can link to the proper term, I’ll be much obliged.

Or as another test, a reader could compare your script to 10 produced episodes of the show. Would he be able to tell which one your script “influenced?” Again, doubtful.

Unfortunately, this misguided conflation of “similarity” and “plagiarism” is not confined to spec episodes of TV shows. One woman claimed that both [The Matrix](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/) and [The Terminator](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103064/) franchises were stolen from her work. She managed to attract a fair amount of media attention before her case was [finally thrown out](http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/matrix.asp).

By targeting both The Terminator and The Matrix, this case helps point out what really underlies a lot of similarities between literary works: genre conventions. It’s one thing to put a killer robot in your script, but don’t claim you invented robots.The same goes for any variation of robot: friendly robot, suicidal robot, kleptomaniac robot, fatherly robot, existentially-angst-ridden robot. We can all think of other examples. Having a divorced cop who likes doughnuts is not original — and neither is having him hate doughnuts, or having him be psychic, or dead. Having two doctors hook up on a show about doctors hooking up doesn’t strike me as particularly original.

Again, Jackie, I’m not trying to belittle your feelings. It’s frustrating to spend weeks working on something, only to find a similar project already out there.

In my early days, I outlined a series that would chart the last years of Earth — a meteor was coming, and everyone knew it. So I was understandably disappointed when not [one](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120591/), but [two](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120647/) movies with essentially the same plot hit theaters. It forced me to look back and remember where the idea really came from: a bunch of popular-science articles at the time which mapped out what had likely killed off the dinosaurs, and what would happen if another such asteroid hit Earth.

I soon realized that my having the same idea as giant blockbusters was actually a good thing. It meant I had commercial taste. A writer isn’t one script. A writer is someone who can write. Forty scripts later, my meteor idea isn’t even a footnote in my career. Don’t let your Grey’s Anatomy spec be anything more than something you wrote.