In the last few days, in places like in the comments on Emily's Bamboo Killers, the [tvwriters] Yahoo group, and some other random places, I've noticed several people express the same sentiment with regards toward writing partners. It usually goes along the lines of "a writing partner keeps me motivated."
I'm not anti-partner. I know people who've had them and the experience was really nothing to write about and I know a set of writing partners now and it seems to work out well for them.
I think it generally comes down to the dynamic and an equality of contribution. I've occasionally found myself in collaborative situations where most of the heavy lifting rested on me...and it's not even my idea or concept. In those cases, I generally wind up not doing the heavy lifting and nothing gets done. And I can't say I feel especially bad about it. If the collaborator is so keen to get the project written, why isn't he writing it?
And I don't want to hear about lacking the skills. If the idea's that good, you write it anyway...and maybe you learn to write along the way.
I prefer not to have a partner. It is, as I've said elsewhere, it's just me and the page - to the death, but I do really enjoy working out stuff with other writers, breaking the story, bouncing ideas. It's a vital skill if you're going to be in a writer's room for more than just delivering lunch.
In fact, one of my favorite things in a meeting of my writer's group is either pitching fixes for other people's scripts or when my synapses start running with some idea that one of the others pitched for one of mine.
Hell, just the ability to incorporate notes is a like a subtle level of partnership, isn't it?
It's the partner as motivation thing that concerns me. I don't know if I've ever read anything written by a team where this is a consideration. I don't think I have, as I've read very few specs by teams. But I kinda have to wonder about the quality of something that a team like that might produce. And this is why.
If the story alone doesn't motivate you to write it, why should I be motivated to read it?
I can see the point in being pushed to action by a writing partner. It creates deadlines where, really, there isn't. It invokes the let-down factor in that if you fail to do your part, then you've let own your writing partner. No. I get it.
Especially since our lives our hectic, either by design or circumstance, but no one ever said that writing is easy. Certainly I have periods where I just can't get adequate time or rest or be in the right mental state to sit down and write. Sometimes I let my social life (or attempts thereof) eat up that time, but sometimes it goes the other way around. However, I find that the more effort I have to make to write, the less likely that whatever I'm writing is going to be worth the trouble. When an idea is firing, you really can't keep me from my keys, even if it means falling asleep on them (or, really near them).
This is how I know (most of the time) what to write and what to move past. The story is the motivation. Nothing else.
Sometimes I come across some competition or other opportunity where a certain kind of writing is called for. Like a short script or a particular genre and its something I don't really have "in stock" as it were, so I try to work something up to fit the criteria. Sometimes I come up with something that I really like and want to write and other times my motivation is that goal. When that is the case, it generally turns out as less than. I was probably better off not even writing it.
Sure, a lot of my writing is motivated by a goal. I want to be a full-time professional writer, but isn't that goal fueled by my need to write. Even if I'm overloaded with work commitments and plans with friends, or advising third world coups, if I've got a good story, then it's breaking in the back of my mind whenever there's a free moment and of there's any measure of consciousness when I get home, and that story is really working, then I'm getting something down before I pass out...even if it's just a couple of lines.
If you need an outside motivator, like a partner, in order to get the work done, I have to wonder how bad you want it. How bad you want the story. How bad you want to be a writer. How bad the need is to write.
Like I said, though. This is scarcely an accusation about all writing teams. There are certainly all sorts. I know of one writer who likened his partnership to the post-modern Batman and Robin concept. Robin keeps Batman from going over the edge into vengeance and his partner keeps him from going over the edge into crap. There's another partnership I know where (and this is purely my application of analogy) it's The Doctor and his companion dynamic in that each partner improves the other and their respective strengths are both brought out and magnified by the collaboration.
In both of those cases, though, I'm reasonably sure that if they didn't have partners, they'd still be writing something whenever they could, despite whatever dangers they perceive from not having the partner. They're writers and they have to write.
Some things are just so good, right out of the gate that it completely fouls the gauges. Up is down. Left is right. And being bad is just fucking good.
I'm going primarily, mostly spoiler free here, so be not terribly afraid.
The concept is pretty basic. It's modern-era Ocean's Eleven for TV, so not eleven. Bad people doing good things to even worse people. Or if you're down with Hu$tle, you're down with this.
Nate Ford (Timothy Hutton) is an ex-insurance investigator who finds himself put with a bunch of skilled ne'er do wells to put the screws to some people who really deserve it because they stole Saul Rubinek's airplane designs.
We get keen little flashbacks with the intro of each of the Leverage crew, and each one is priceless. Beth Riesgraf's (formerly better known as the mother of something called Pilot Inspektor) Parker (a.k.a the girl) has, without a doubt, the best one. The tone setter. And she comes after geektastic Alec Hardison (Aldis Hodge) who's flashback involves Slave Leias.
With this show, Timothy Hutton reestablishes his coolness, because, honestly, it's been a while since I've thought "hey, Tim Hutton. Cool." That Nero Wolfe stuff a few years ago might be a contender, but otherwise, I'm probably reaching back as far as the early 90s.
Christian Kane is fantastically Euro-trashy as Eliot Spencer, which is saying something as his character isn't even European. Must be the hair. Then he's fantastically geeky, then he's...well, he's the faceman.
And Gina Bellman. Don't need to say anything there. Just...Gina Bellman.
But, really, the star of this...yo, Rogers...you and Downey hit this out of the muthafuckin' park.
There's a scene where the principals meet up in a big empty warehouse after things have gone a little sideways (which isn't really a spoiler, because things always go sideways in those situations). There's suspicion, there's gun's getting drawn and there's a fierce desire to get paid. It was during this scene that it really hit me. This show stands to be everything that Smith wasn't.
Smith was my favorite show of a the new season a couple of years ago, but it was really a show about bad guys. Not good bad guys, really unpleasant people. And being on CBS, it failed to find its audience in its three weeks on the air.
Leverage doesn't have the irredeemable bad guy thing, but it's nailing enough of that wrong side of the law thing that this is a worthy, of not superior successor.
Technologically scamtastic with a biting sense of humor...a drawing blood biting. I can learn from this show, in good and bad ways.
I believe Amy Berg who's (mid-level on the show), at the recent Scriptwriter's Network Event that E and I attended (and so did apparently everyone I know in the state, yet we all saw naught of each other while there (except Josh) that the show is scheduled to bow in December (or maybe January). That is too damn long.
I'd put off watching this because I had high hopes for it and I wanted to be in an optimal state of mind, with optimal snacking options and optimal whatever else. That's why I'm just getting to this now, despite it having been..."set free" some little bit ago.
It lived up to and then some.
I'm watching this again. Probably several more times.
Shooting it back in the homeland (Chicago) was nice too.
If I were to have a complaint, and I really don't, it's that the music evokes the Ocean's Eleventhing a little too directly. I'd have liked to hear something with its own unique identity.
So the writing kind of ground to a halt, for a variety of reasons. Chief among them being that nothing was quite firing right. I hate getting a block like that. It keeps me from wanting to consume new materials. Like the flood of preairs that hit the illicit distribution systems of late.
This is no longer the case, also for a variety of reasons.
Hellcat has been indefinitely shelved. Still brainstorming on one-act play ideas. Have had several that are perfectly viable, but for one reason or another just don't quite feel like what I want to write...at least right now. And the shooting of another episode of Area Five has been delayed. One I'm especially looking forward to, but it's also a break for the brain.
Then, I came across a challenging opportunity. Something in the realm of horror, which is not something I usually do. I'd like to come up with something classically gothic in nature but with some aspect of modern weirdness. It's a small thing so it's kinda backburnered for now.
In the meantime, I've been giving some thought toward a project I wanted to work on later. After Hellcat. I didn't think it was gonna quite fill the need I have write now for a fresh pilot, but some ideas began coming to me.
So on Saturday, the idea was sit down with some chili and get cracking on something, like a once over of the Dexter spec, making sure I hit the notes the astounding writer's group gave me when they covered it last month, and working on NBC/Universal program application materials. And that was done.
I decided to warm up by doing something uselessly creative, so I grabbed Steiny and fired up Garageband. The result, "Wiresnip" is not safe for human consumption, but then so are cigarettes and thiose make you look cool and all.
Then some more ideas for the next pilot just started showing up, and then...and this is when I knew that the next pilot was going to be the this pilot, more characters started talking to me. Ben Franklin had already been whispering to me. (Yes, thatBen Franklin). Then Sayf started talking to me. Then, the weirdest thing, Danny from Hellcat showed up with a case and a movie (Be Kind, Rewind, I liked it). Before I knew it, she had joined the cast of what I'm calling Black Ops.
It satisfies all my needs: Weirdness, violence, political maneuvering, outright lies, and a really nice house on the east coast.
I'm going to be writing two versions of it, for reasons I'll describe another time.
And somewhere in all that, my Pushing Daisies, I've decided, needs a massive overhaul.
Oh, and maybe some (p)reviews of some of those preairs later on, now that I've burned through them.
OK, totally misleading title, because I am by no means telling you that this is it. It's an impossible proposition. Whatever you say is automatically wrong, no matter what it is.
This is part of a little mini-meme Emily and I cooked up the other day after we went to see the likes of Jane Espenson and Amy Berg being awesome. We were talking about what the boredom-disc is for each of us. The movie that gets thrown in the player when something needs to be thrown in the player. You know the one. The one you can watch and watch and watch and never get tired of. The one you can have on all the damn time, as background or in paying full rapt attention.
To be perfectly honest, I'm more likely to go for a TV disc at any given time, but there are a couple of flicks that do get that dubious honor. One above all.
In her post, you'll see the laundry list of things that she just loves in a movie. Sort of an equation, if you will. And you get her answer. And we find that those things are reflective of the things you find in her writing and that which she likes most to write about.
I find the same reflection in my equation.
mindfucks + violence + social breakdown + delusional goals + a little out-of-the-box terrorism + random weird, but actual facts= Fight Club
THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS BATTLESTAR SPOILERS ONLY INSOFAR AS IT DISCUSSES SOMETHING THAT DID NOT HAPPEN IN "REVELATIONS"
There was a moment, while I was watching the finale that I thought that the Fifth Cylon was actually in this scene.
What's that you say? There are only three people in this scene? Tyrol, Saul and Anders? All of whom are already known as the Frakked Up Four? Yes. That's correct. There are only three people in this scene. And in this screencap. Yet, there was another Cylon there (to my mind). Plain as day.
Then I remembered that scenes in "Rapture," where D'Anna meets the Final Five in relig-o-rama vision (like the one below) render such as assumption as unlikely.
I have long been a fan of Katherine Heigl for, honestly, superficial reasons. I see no reason for that not to continue. I liked her in Roswell, however, as an astute observer may notice from its absence of mention on this website, I'm not a fan of Grey's Anatomy, despite several attempts to watch it. I just don't like it.
I do like Allan Heinbergthough. He of Gilmore Girls, The O.C., Young Avengers and Wonder Woman. It was a few weeks back at the Breaking Into The Box event at the Writer's Guild Foundation that he spoke candidly about some of the behind-the scenes actor/writer struggles on the show. He mentioned, for instance, how ridiculously close Meredith was to actually dying in that episode where she should have died. There was another Grey on hand at the time, so the title would still be fine.
He also expressed frustration with Patrick Dempsey's recent expression of frustration with the writers. I, in my uncalled-for opinion, find that such actorial whinging is unprofessional, especially when you're on a top rated series that has served as a springboard to relaunch your previously unremarkable film career.
Thus, I find Heigl's recent statement to be -- I don't even know what.
"I did not feel that I was given the material this season to warrant an Emmy nomination, and in an effort to maintain the integrity of the academy organization, I withdrew my name from contention."
Is there anyone she didn't insult in making this statement. Obviously, it's meant as a swipe at the writers, though I think that releasing the statement was just form. I think it would have been classier and the same message would have gotten out just by not putting forth her name. It would have been noticed and questioned and speculated about in the entertainment press and on the blogs and you know damn well that the same reasoning would have had out.
However, in her statement, she also, intentionally or unintentionally, slammed the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. This bothers me less. In suggesting that she has to "maintain the integrity" of the Academy by withdrawing from contention, she's basically saying that there is a real danger that she could win, despite the lackluster material she'd be FYC'ing. She's essentially saying that the award she already won once is worthless because it's a popularity contest and has nothing to do with talent.
That as may be. I'm happy when someone I like wins something, but for the most part I see the whole process as broken on the conceptual level. It basically asks everyone to compare apples and firetrucks and assumes that they have the knowledge to do so.
Not so much. And for this reason, these are the members of the Academy, people who are ostensibly involved in the making of TV shows and, as JossWhedon once said to me* "you can either watch TV or you can make TV." Really, do these people have the time to be aware and have watched everything worth watching?
Also, she didn't withdraw anything. You have to put your name into contention. So...there's that.
So, given that the writers have diminished her part in the last season and she's got a good movie career underway (no small thanks to the show she just dissed), I wouldn't think the writer's would have any problem continuing to not give her good material until her contract runs out or she quits. Additionally, even if she reversed herself and put something forward and had no competition to speak of (which she does), she's ensured she won't win anyway (because she's right, it is a political thing).
So what has she achieved, other than insulting a bunch of people for no good reason? *No, he really did . I love a good name-drop.
I'm fascinated by the many and varied dynamics of various writer's rooms and this piece runs down a few of them, in particular (for me) the unique facility of the House writer's room.
And if a writer's room actually looked like this one, there'd be work, wouldn't there?
In the last few days, in places like in the comments on Emily's Bamboo Killers, the [tvwriters] Yahoo group, and some other random places, I've noticed several people express the same sentiment with regards toward writing partners. It usually goes along the lines of "a writing partner keeps me motivated."
I have long been a fan of 
Here's a fun thing that was in the NY Times.
