Drew Marquardt

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello, and welcome to Scriptnotes. This is Episode 4, a podcast about screenwriting and things interesting to screenwriters. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: I am Craig Mazin.

John: How are you doing today, Craig?

Craig: You know, John, I’m not bad. I’m a little busy, little headache-y today. One of these podcasts should just be on the physical ailments of the screenwriter.

John: You’ve actually had problems with headaches before. I know you used to have migraine problems, and you’re past the worst of that, is that correct?

Craig: I am, yes. I used to have terrible migraines and I’ve gotten much, much better. The truth is all headaches are migraines, as my migraine doctor told me. I was shocked. I always thought there was just headaches and then violent other things called migraines.

They’re all the same, it’s just levels. Now I can just take a couple of Advil and I’m like a regular human being, but it used to be terrible, terrible.

John: How bad did it get? Were you physically incapacitated, where you couldn’t —

Craig: Yes, sometimes. I mean, it would get pretty bad where you would have to just lie in bed and wait. I had a kidney stone once. That was the worst.

John: Kidney stones are the worst. We’ve both had kidney stones. Kidney stones are literally — if someone had just said, “Here’s a gun.” “Thank you very much. I will kill myself now.”

Craig: Yes — sort of famously, pregnant women who have had natural childbirth and then had kidney stones pronounce kidney stones worse.

John: After my first kidney stone incident, it didn’t pass that first time. I was at the emergency room. The doctor gave me a prescription for a very heavy-duty painkiller and I didn’t have insurance at that point, so I’m not going to fill this prescription because this is really expensive stuff. So I thought, “Oh, if it comes back, I’ll deal with it if it comes back.”

So it came back really, really bad. So I have this prescription for this heavy-strength painkiller. It’s like five in the morning, I’m going to the 24-hour drug store trying to get this prescription filled.

I looked just like every junkie you could possibly imagine, desperate to get this thing filled. Of course, by then it was too late, I had to go back to the emergency room. Because when it recurs, it’s just awful.

Craig: It’s hard to imagine it until it happens to you. It’s the only time in my life I’ve actually writhed in agony. I finally knew what writhing was.

John: Or you try to lay back on the gurney or on the table, and you actually have to keep moving, because that’s the only way you can distract yourself from the awfulness.

Craig: I’m not a big medicine guy, but they gave me the heavy-duty Oxycontin — and I’m basically inviting people to now break into my house and steal it — but I still have this big thing of it, because you pass the stone, you don’t need it anymore.

But I save it, because I just feel like one day it’s going to happen again, and I need that there.

John: If you were watching Torchwood, Craig, you would know that because no one dies in the Torchwood: Miracle Day plot line, heavy-duty painkillers become very, very important, because people who are mortally wounded don’t die, and they’re in agony, and so something like your Oxycontin pills would be incredibly valuable.

Craig: I don’t watch that, but I do know just from the existence of drug addicts that they are valuable.

John: The other, of course, good idea for keeping Oxycontin on hand is a zombie apocalypse, because situations are going to occur beyond your basic survival needs of an axe and something else to dismember zombies that are coming after you. You are going to want some pain pills to through some other incidents that happen. Not zombie bite related things that are going to infect you, but just the other wear and tear that’s going to happen, because the medical system has collapsed.

Craig: You know, I have to say, I’ve been thinking more and more about this zombie thing, and if it goes down, if it really goes down, I’m just going to blow my own face off. You know what, I don’t even want to live in that world. I’m gonna blow my brains out, that way I’m out. I’m checked out, I can’t be a zombie, I can’t be running all the time. I just don’t care that much.

John: Yes, Thomas Jane it. You can do the thing that Thomas Jane does at the end of The Mist and kill you whole family. That’s always a good alternative.

Craig: Yes, because once the zombie apocalypse comes, your life isn’t going to have to score in the top two boxes. I don’t care if the audience doesn’t like it.

John: That’s well said.

Craig: Thank you.

John: But you know who does care if their story…

Craig: Segue! Segue!

John: …scores the top two boxes? Did you hear that segue?

By the way, my whole life, of course, I’ve used the word “segue,” but when I’ve seen it written down, I assumed it was spelt a different way. Segue is spelt S-E-G-U-E.

Craig: Yes, it’s spelled like “seg.”

John: Like “seg.” Whenever I would see that written out, I would say, “seg to.”€ I would say, “That’s shortened version of segue.” It’s actually how you spell segue. We’re doing the Big Fish musical, musicals are a lot about segues. Rather than “cut to,” it’s “segue to” a new thing that happens.

So I had to write the word “segue” a lot, and it still just looks so wrong to me.

Craig: There’s a whole group of words — and I promise we’ll get around to talking about screenplays in a second — but there’s a group of words that read differently than they’re pronounced, and for a long, long time, I thought “misled” was “mizzled.”€ And then “awry” I thought was “or-ry.”€ I think that makes more sense.

John: Don’t know that. Let’s get to the topic at hand. Today we want to talk about directors and how screenwriters deal with directors, and what that relationship is like. Some templates for thinking about how you would work with a director on a project.

And you’ve had many movies shot and have all of your director experiences been fantastic?

Craig: No.

[laughing]

John: That’s weird.

Craig: No. I mean I think I’ve had more good ones than…I really only had one weird one. Mostly though they’ve been good, I would say. Mostly good.

John: Yeah. I’d say most of mine have been pretty good, and some of the good ones were ones where I wasn’t all that involved with the project from the beginning. I just came in and did some work and helped them out. They went off and shot the movie and good luck and Godspeed.

Other times I’ve been on board the project from the very beginning, and a director comes on board. You’re trying to get them up to speed with where you’re at. So let’s aim more towards that from-inception kind of relationship because I think that’s more what our audience is listening for.

Also, we’re talking about movies. That relationship between a writer and a director in television is very, very different. The writer in television has more power but also has responsibility to the overall continuity of the show. The director is there to get what needs to be shot on the page, onto film, and into the episode.

Craig: Yeah, in television the director doesn’t have to determine who is going to be playing these roles, what they’re dressing like, what the sets should look like, what the tone of the product is. All those things have been determined already. I mean that’s the massive gulf between feature directing and television directing.

John: Well, all those things we talk about are the crucial things that a director is doing while the director is getting up to speed with the script and thinking about making the movie. So let’s just start talking about all the stuff that a director needs to do because it’s tempting to think about, “Oh, the director is responsible for the story and for getting the story told.”

And yes, that’s one of his or her jobs, but so much of a director’s time as you’re approaching making a move is really dealing with completely different things that have nothing to do with the script itself. So recognizing that you as a screenwriter are essentially a department when it comes to making a movie.

And you are going to be one of his meetings over the course of the day, but he’s also talking to the costume designer, the production designer, the cinematographer, the editors, the producers, the casting directors. As a giant village who’s come together to make this movie, he’s the village chief and you’re one of the villagers. Recognizing that difference is a hard thing to sometimes to get up to speed with.

Craig: Yeah, we are very focused in on what we are responsible for. Like you said, that’s the story. As it turns out, that is the most important part of this whole thing. The story is more important than the costumes, the locations, where the lights are going to go, and what the makeup should look like. But all those things flow from the story and are mission-critical to making a good movie.

You have to look at every department as necessary. The story is the thing that’s driving everything. It’s just a question of time. Throughout the day he still has to sit there and figure out what the cars should be in the scene where, okay, and then she pulls up in her car. What car? Here, I got pictures of cars for you. That’s where you want to blow your brains out as a director.

Or we have a scene where there’s a party, and he’s going to crash the party and deliver a speech to the girl. Okay, well, how many people are at the party? What ages are they? Are they different races? How are they dressed? Is it upscale? Is it downscale? The billions of questions that start to bury the director in quicksand soak up so much time, and they all have to be answered. They’re all theoretically part of some cohesive vision.

John: A crucial thing that a smart screenwriter pointed out to me once is that as a screenwriter, you’re the only person who’s already seen the movie. So when you approach your first meeting as the director you have to remember that you already made the movie in your head. You can see the whole thing.

The director, he or she, hasn’t seen the whole thing yet and is still trying to figure out what the movie looks like and is starting to answer those thousands of questions ahead of time. If they want to go through every page of the script with you, it’s not necessarily because they have a problem with it. They’re just trying to figure it out.

Your job a lot of times is to almost be like an interpreter as if the script was written in some other language, and you have to help talk it through with them so that it can be understandable in their language and they understand what your intention was, who are these characters in the scene, what is important, and how they’re going to get through that.

Because ultimately the smart directors realize that they’re going to be on the set at four in the morning after very long days of shooting. They have two hours until the sun rises, and that actor is going to come to him and be saying like, “What am I supposed to be doing in this scene?” They have to be able to have an answer.

So the times where I’ve been most exhausted with a director, I’ve always tried to remember that, “Okay, that’s right. They’re trying to figure this all out, too.”

Craig: Yeah, and you’re smart because you’re putting the movie first. It’s tempting to put your own ego and what you’ve invested in the screenplay first, but the point of the screenplay is the movie. What you’re talking about is helping the director do the best job they can do in realizing their vision and your vision and your intention. So obviously, part of that is explaining your intention and defending your intention.

Another part of it is recognizing that they have to do it for real. The movie that you saw in your head? That can’t ever be a movie because in your movie people move like they do in dreams. They’re on one end of the room. Now they’re on the other end of the room. Time speeds up and slows down in accordance with the importance of the moment.

But in a movie, time moves at one second per second. [laughs] You can’t speed it up, really, or slow it down. I mean, you can a little bit here and there, but there are demands of production that force the director to, frankly, make a less amazing, wonderful, kind of translucent thing than you have in your brain, which is this kind of shimmering dream of whatever your movie was.

That said, the more specific you are in your head about the movie — Like I wrote a blog piece once that says, “You can’t just walk into a building.” You should know if your character walks into a building, see the building. You may not want to waste a bunch of space on the page describing the building, but sooner or later someone’s going to say, “What building did you have in mind?” It’s good to know.

If you drop your jaw and go, “Uh, I don’t know. A building,” you’re expressing a different philosophy than everybody else in the movie. Because they have a job to actually shoot something. If you start saying, “Ah, who cares, it doesn’t matter,” or implying, “Who cares, it doesn’t matter,” you’ve put this thing between you and them.

John: You should be able to have an answer for any question that comes up. So rather than having generic type of like, “This is a police station.” Well, what kind of police station is this like? Where are we at in the police station?

The very first movie I was involved with, the first movie of mine that got produced, was Go. On that movie, fortunately Doug Liman had me super-involved. I was not only on set every moment, but every moment of pre-production I was there, too.

It was a great experience for us to get in the same brain space about what was important, what kinds of things we were going to see. But I always had an answer. It wasn’t always going to be the same answer as Doug’s, but when asked, or occasionally when not asked, but when I saw something going in the opposite direction, I could volunteer my opinion of like, “This is what the intention of this was.” Always couched in terms of like, “These are the other options I could see being out there, but this is what the actual intention of this thing was.”

From casting, from what locations we’re picking to, just the style of the world. Like how rundown of a grocery store are we at, and where are we at in this grocery store. The script reflected a lot of those things, but you’re not ever going to be able to have all those details on the page. They were in my head, though, like I had filmed it well enough in my head that I could at least give them my answer for how things were supposed to be.

Craig: Yeah. That’s important. By the way, that is a help for a director.

Look, I’ve worked primarily with two directors, David Zucker and Todd Phillips — both incredibly different guys, very different filmmakers, different kinds of movies. But they’ve both been very generous with me, and they’ve included me as a partner. One of the parts of that contract that I honor is if they don’t get it — let’s say I express my intention as best I can, and they just don’t get it — it’s important for me to stop and go, “Here’s the deal.”

It doesn’t really matter if I get it. If they don’t get it, I have to figure out something else that they do get that satisfies whatever this intention is, because they have to do it. They’re the ones that actually have to relay it. Just as I think when you are directing, and your actor looks at you and says, “I just don’t get this,” you got to think about how to either make them see so that they can internalize and perform it, or find another way in.

The director has to be an adult enough to sublimate his own desires and ego to make the moment with the actors work, and the writer has to do the same for the director. Everybody ultimately has to be subordinate to the movie.

So when I work with those guys, they’re kind enough to let me on their set — and it’s their set — and they want me there, and I am respectful enough to help them. By help them, I mean help the movie, not the script.

John: Let’s talk about being on the set, and let’s talk set etiquette. I found a range of experiences on being the writer on the set. With Go, I was at the monitor for every shot. I had the contacts on, the little ear pieces on. We had a little hand-held monitor so if I needed to walk away from the camera, I could see what they were setting up and run back if something was not going to work right.

With those, I could always talk directly to Doug, and I had to talk directly to Doug because the camera was on his shoulder. So there really were no private conversations. Like I had to come up to him and say like, “What Sarah did was great. It’s going to be a problem when we cut to this next thing here, because we’re setting the expectation…” I would try to give a note that both validated what just happened, but also explain why I was coming up and talking to him. So that he could then turn to Sarah and say like, “Yeah, what he just said,” and shoot the next take.

Other cases, like on Big Fish, first day of shooting we’re in Montgomery, Alabama. Tim picked a really easy day of stuff to shoot, which is a smart choice. A really simple thing where Billy Crudup is coming to talk with Jessica Lange.

So I’m watching on the monitor, and I see one little thing, “Oh, I should tell Tim that, that there’s a little moment, opportunity there.” I go up, I pull him aside, it’s like, “Tim, that was great what she just did. But there’s also the chance here when he’s there, and there might be a little moment here.” And I could see like these garage doors go down in front of his eyes.

Craig: [laughs]

John: I realized, this is not going to be the kind of set relationship we have. He doesn’t want me to be chumming with those notes, and it’s a very good idea for me to go back to Los Angeles.

Craig: [laughs]

John: There wasn’t a problem. There wasn’t a disagreement, there wasn’t anything like that. But that wasn’t the way he wanted to work, and I wasn’t going to be able to have a lot of input on the choices made on the set.

Craig: Well, surprise surprise, the directors are as different to each other as we are to each other. I mean, David Zucker and I essentially would co-direct. We sat together at the monitor — I don’t think we would ever move on unless we both agreed to move on. Occasionally, he wouldn’t even care if I gave notes to the actors. We walked through the setups together in the morning. We set the blocking together. We very much worked hand-in-hand.

Not at all the case with Todd Phillips, who is a very different kind of director, and certainly a more traditional one. Todd is the captain of the set 100 percent. As he’s pointed out, I think the way he’s put it is, “I don’t need you to be here.” [laughs] “I’ve made plenty of movies without you. That said, if you’d like to be here, it could be helpful.”

So I take that to heart. I mean, I don’t think I maybe…With that relationship, it’s really just about picking those moments where you think I’m going to just say, “Okay, this is something that matters to me that’s really important, and I’m going to share that with him.” Either he’s going to go, “Shut up, stupid,” or, “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” But I pick those moments carefully and few and far between. Frankly, he’s pretty good at what he does, and he’s the sort of very independent director.

One thing that I want to make clear about directing: so much of it has to do with confidence. You need to feel confident in your own vision. Some directors, their confidence goes up the more direct and obvious help they get. Other directors, their confidence goes down.

I understand that. I’m kind of that way myself. You and I write on our own. We don’t have writing partners. I always feel like I should be able to move this boulder myself. So you have to learn which kind of director you’re dealing with. If it’s a director that likes moving the boulder himself, just pick your moments carefully, and don’t be a nudge.

John: One of the luxuries of being a writer on the set is if you’re watching the monitor and you see something that you can fix and you have a good idea, you can speak up and have a good idea. If you see something that’s not working and you don’t know how to fix it, you can just sit there and shut up.

Craig: [laughs] Yeah, exactly.

John: Versus the director, who every time he calls, “Cut,” there’s 20 eyes looking at him saying, “Okay, what are we going to do next?” And the director has to figure out who he needs to talk with, about what needs to change, has to figure out what wasn’t working about that moment.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So giving that person the space to be able to do that and hopefully help where you can help him or her make that next thing happen.

Craig: That’s a good point. I will say — I don’t care who the director is — give them a little bit of time to find it. No director is going to get it on take one. Well, occasionally magic happens. But the point is, if you watch a take and you go, “Oh, no,” after watching that take, it’s for the same reason people would say, “Oh, no,” if they read the first thing you typed in the morning.

It’s beginning. The process is beginning. Don’t overreact. Don’t jump in there and say, “It’s not working. It’s not working.” Believe me, they know. Everybody knows. [laughs] It’s fine. You have all day to shoot two and a half pages, let the director do what they do.

The only times I ever discuss things with Todd, for instance, is if I thought, “Okay, here’s just another way of approaching this.” Someone once said, “Don’t ever show up with problems, just show up with solutions.” Give them an alternative. If they like it, they’ll do it.

John: Another director who I’ve worked with twice is McG. I love McG. McG can be frustrating at times, but I do love McG. What I love about McG is his energy and his passion. It’s hard to connect with McG on a story level often, but it’s easy to connect with him on a, “This is what it’s going to feel like,” level.

I think no matter who you’re talking with as a director, early on in those conversations, have conversations about tone and feeling, and what this is like to you. A lot of times you end up watching other movies with directors or talking about references. With Tim Burton I could just go into his office, and he’ll have water-color painted a lot of scenes from the script. It says, “Okay, I get what this world is like as he sees it.”

Like for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I was very specific about a lot of the stuff in it, but like the Oompa-Loompas, how is he going to do the Oompa-Loompas? Then you go into his office, and you see he has this scale drawing of what the Oompa-Loompas are like standing next to all the different characters. You can just see everybody in their wardrobe, it’s like, “Oh, okay. I get what this movie is like to Tim.” Then every other conversation I have can be about supporting that vision of how he sees the world of Willy Wonka versus what I might have had in my head originally.

Craig: That’s a good way in with directors who aren’t also prominently screenwriters. In working with David and Todd, I’m working with writers, because they’re screenwriters in their own right. That, actually, also dramatically changes the way you approach that relationship. Because with both of those guys, I’ve been writing partners.

So I don’t have to do quite as much ambassadorship with the script to them because we all wrote it together. That also takes an enormous burden off of me — or I guess not even a burden, because there’s no burden on me, it’s just a worry that I don’t have to have. Because the truth is I know that they actually sat here and worked through this scene with me. We made it together. They’ve seen it in their heads. It makes sense to them. That’s a big relief.

John: It’s great when you have that opportunity to work with a writer-director who actually can generally understand the writing process on that. I think there’s a misconception that because of the perils of auteur theory is that all directors really come from a place of story, and understand story, and have a great grasp of what the narrative of something is. A lot of them don’t.

Some of the best directors, I think, are the ones who are very upfront about that’s not their strongest suit. Just like we don’t expect every director to be a master of cinematography, we don’t expect every director to be a master of visual effects. There are some who are great at figuring out all the pieces of a story and how to move from the beginning to the end, and there’s others who are really good at getting that story up onto the screen. Recognizing which kind of director you are working with early on is crucial with that.

One of the places where I feel like I think I’m good at, which I think a lot of screenwriters will tend to be good at once they have some experience with it, is editing. We’re often the right people to come into the editing room after there’s a director’s first cut to help talk through, “This is what’s not working, and this is what we may want to talk about changing.”

We talked about that first test screening, which is just incredibly nerve-wracking. Especially if you’re the director, of course, because you’ve been staring at this thing on an Avid screen for eight weeks, 12 weeks, trying to get things to work, and you have no idea if it actually works.

As a screenwriter, you’re watching it a lot of times blind. You just don’t know what movie it is that they ended up making. Where I’ve been most helpful to directors, I think, honestly, is being that first set of notes after the test screening and saying like, “These are the things that were awesome. These are the things that worked great. These are the things we had challenges with, and here are some ways we might want to talk about changing them.” Being that first person with the best notes is a helpful role for a screenwriter, I think.

Craig: I totally agree. To that end, here’s just a bit of practical advice. If you want to be a screenwriter that collaborates with filmmakers beyond just, “Congrats, we’re making your movie. See you at the premier,” you need to understand the process of editing. You can’t approach it like you’re just sitting there watching a show going, “I don’t know. I didn’t get this part,” or, “Why…it’s just boring here.”

You have to understand how editing works, and you have to be able to speak the language of editing. Because ultimately, you need to — if you’re going to give advice, and it’s going to be a solution-oriented advice — you need to be able to say, “In this scene, how about just cutting the head” “How about taking this much off, and just keeping that line there?” “I know that you might have a problem with that because let’s say they’ve been talking up to that line and it’s all one shot, but do you have any coverage where you can establish them quietly and then just go in for that line?”

If you can talk like that, then your advice is usable, and it’s also clinical. Because remember, the director is going to be about as fragile as a human can be when they’re showing that cut for the first time. It’s truly nerve-wracking. So try and get some kind of handle on how editing actually works.

The other thing I was going to add was just when you were talking about directors who write and don’t write, comedy, it’s very rare — I don’t know why, it’s just the way it is — I don’t know any successful comedy, or repeatedly successful comedy directors, that don’t write. I don’t know if you can direct comedy if you don’t write. I’m not sure you can.

John: I’m sure if we spent a few minutes on that we’d find some really good directors who aren’t writers, but all of my favorite comedies I can think of have writer-directors behind them.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, if you look at the guys doing it now, Phillips, Apatow…I think Dobkin writes. Dobkin may be an example, actually. Because Wedding Crashers is awesome. I don’t know if he writes.

John: I don’t perceive him as being a writer.

Craig: Yeah, well, then maybe I’m wrong.

John: [noises]

Craig: Look at that. There you go. [laughs] Mazin’s wrong again.

John: We’re out about time, but let’s talk through some general advice for screenwriters dealing with directors. First off, the question of when a director becomes involved. Like, I may come on board this project which it’s the director’s idea. So I would be coming in, working very closely in collaboration with him, which can be really great and exciting, but can also be exhausting, because you feel him trying to shoot the movie while it’s still being —

Craig: Yeah, yeah.

John: — while it’s still at a very raw state. It can be great because it can be a really good collaboration. It could just take a lot of time. More often, you will have written something, and now a director comes on board. Your responsibility is to have a meeting of the minds where you can instill what was going on in your head to him or her, and she can communicate back to you like what she sees for the project.

That’s where I’m at right now with Susan Stroman on Big Fish, where I’ve had now 12 years to work with Big Fish in various forms, and she has to process what I’ve done and pull out of me what she needs to make it on the stage.

Craig: Yeah. If the director isn’t writing with you, I think it’s best to give yourself a little distance. Just like they need to get takes one through three in before anybody starts yapping in their ear, I feel like the writer needs some space to just write the script.

So if the director’s not writing, as long as everybody is connected on the vision and the rough idea of what the story is, you just…Yeah, it’s not a good idea to have them over your shoulder while you’re doing it. Look, even editors get to do an assembly.

John: Yeah. They give everyone a chance.

Craig: Everybody needs their shot. Yeah.

John: As you get closer to production, you have to accept the fact that you are going to become another department. Whatever close, one-on-one relationship you have with the director, it’s going to be a little bit more distant just because his or her time is going to be divided between a bunch of different people who need answers out of him — line producers, ADs, every department head wants as much time as they can possibly get.

So hopefully most of the big issues have been solved. Hopefully you feel like you really have a movie. If you get a chance to do a table reading, that’s awesome, because it’s the only way you’ll ever know that the actors read the script at least once. [laughs]

Craig: Well, and it’s your chance, too, to kind of…It’s your last shot at rewriting before they start shooting.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Start to hear what works and what doesn’t.

John: And if there’s lines that an actor literally can’t say, you have to change them. You can’t make an actor say a line that he or she doesn’t understand.

Craig: Yeah. They’re human beings. Use your actors to the best of their abilities. They’re all unique, and they’re there because they can do something we can’t, so make the best use of them. You’re right, as you approach production, understand that you’re a department, but be the best department. Be the department that the director turns to at the beginning of the day and the end of the day. Be the safe port in the storm.

You are technically — not technically. If you do it right, you’re really the only person that they can look at and say, “You and I both get this. Everybody else is looking like the blind men at the elephant. They’re feeling the piece of the elephant they feel, you and I can see the movie.” Be that person.

John: Sometimes I’ll have a producer on set who actually has the whole movie in his or her head, but more often, you’re going to be the only person around who has a understanding of what the whole story is, and how this little piece fits into the whole bigger piece.

Craig: That’s right.

John: The classic stories are always like the director decides to, “Oh, I really like that actress. Let’s throw her into this scene, just in the background.” The screenwriter says, “No, no, you don’t remember! She’s already dead!” A lot of times you are that person who remembers that. There’s a script supervisor who’s there, and his or her job is to check for some things like that, but you’re the person who remembers why everything is the way something is.

Craig: Yeah. I love script supervisors, but they’re not narrative supervisors. That’s the difference. They’re supervising the day’s work on the page and making sure that when you shoot things out of sequence, “Okay. Show me the Polaroid of what they look like in the scene before so I can make sure they match up.”

John: “Coffee cup right hand, coffee cup left hand.”

Craig: Yeah. Exactly. “You should be looking camera left and not camera right.” But we are the ones that technically we should know the narrative better than anybody.

John: We’re the story supervisors.

Craig: So to speak, yeah.

John: Then I would say, whatever your function is on the set, you’ll go away for a while, and the director will do his or her cut. You’ll get a chance to see it, and that’s hopefully a time where you can be a real help and a real ally to the director in getting the best version of this movie done. Because you had your shot at making the movie when you wrote the script, he has his shot shooting it and doing that first cut, and that final product is what you’re pushing to.

You’re always trying to write a movie, you weren’t trying to write a script.

Craig: Exactly, exactly. So just let the document go. Once the cameras are rolling, let it go. Every morning you take that piece of paper, the two and a half or three pieces of paper, look at them, love them, and then say goodbye to them. Because by the end of the day, they’re just paper, and now it’s movie. So service the movie.

John: Definitely.

Craig: Great. Before we go, can we say thank you to everybody for making us the number one film and TV non-music or — no, non-video podcast on iTunes? Is that right?

John: That’s pretty great. I think it’s also great that if you actually divide the categories down small enough, like pretty much everything is the star of its own list.

Craig: Right. We’re the top you and me podcast in the world.

John: That’s pretty amazing.

Craig: And like almost right off the bat.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Almost.

John: So thank you, Craig. A good conversation about directors.

Craig: Thank you, John. I was enlightened.

John: All right. We’ll see everybody next time.

Craig: See you next time, guys.

John: Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello, and welcome to another installment of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Hello, Craig.

Craig Mazin: Hello, John.

John: That’s Craig Mazin, my name is John August. This is our third installment of the show. We are now listed on iTunes, which is a feeling of kind of legitimacy.

Craig: Yeah, we are big time now. You know in my day, podcasts were carved into wax disks and sold.

John: And really it was the job of the fastest young man in the village to carry those wax disks from one village to the next village, and all that sort of noble tradition has really gone away since we grew up.

Craig: Yeah, you and I grew up in the 1500s in England.

John: Yeah, talk about the 1500s. My daughter has no sense of history whatsoever because kids aren’t born with that — they don’t realize that the world existed before they were born — and I remember showing her Curious George, one of the stories. Curious George is at the hospital and he climbs on this record player and starts spinning around, it’s like a merry-go-round and he falls off the record player.

Craig: Yeah, I remember that one.

John: And my daughter thought that was great and I am like, “Do you know what that thing is he climbed on?” She had no idea. “It plays music.” She is like “No, it doesn’t play music.”

Craig: Right. Why would it, it seems ridiculous.

John: So that was one of the charming good things about having a kid, but we have a follow-up question from last week and so I thought we would talk about it.

Craig: Yeah.

John: “I wanted to ask you about something that was touched upon by you and Craig during the last podcast on how to find a manager or agent. In the opening, you both mentioned that having children can be difficult for a screenwriter and at one point you even humorously stated that ‘children are the death of all screenwriters.’ You have got me thinking and I was wondering if you could elaborate on your experiences as a screenwriter before and after having your kid.”

He goes on to say that he and his wife are hoping to have children and —

Craig: Oh good, I thought they may be contemplating killing their children.

John: Hopefully yes, so it’s a pre-father wanting to have our experience as a screenwriter with and without kids, so what’s different about having kids than not having kids as a screenwriter?

Craig: Well, I suppose this should sort of go without saying, but having kids is a far more impressive achievement than writing a screenplay, and creating a human being is the most creative thing you can do. That comes first.

I mean, don’t get us wrong. We are not advising you to not have children. You should have children, but certainly when you have a kid, your energies and your tensions are divided. You are now living to support another person and they have their own demands of your time.

And I think we all walk around with a kind of tape playing, especially screenwriters. I mean if you are a screenwriter you have written at some point in your career a movie where the main character is a dad who is not spending enough time with his kids.

So that’s constantly playing in the back of your head as you deal with your own kids. And so you just don’t want to be a bad dad, you want to be a good guy, you want to spend time with your kids and you love them. And it just so happens that when you do all that stuff, sometimes you find yourself tired and kind of creatively exhausted and you don’t want to do it.

John: Screenwriting is inherently kind of a selfish activity because you are going off by yourself and insisting on some form of quiet time to just be staring at your computer and writing these things. And that works really well through a lot of your 20s where you can basically be selfish and you can sort of go off or you can stay up all night working on a draft because you are inspired to work all night. And with a kid, you just can’t do that.

If you pull an all-nighter, you have ruined the next day, and whereas in your pre-child days you could just do a cover and go be a zombie all day, if you actually have to get your kid off to school in the morning that becomes much more challenging.

Craig: Yeah. And there is all these opportunities for procrastination. I mean I love — my son plays baseball — I love going to his baseball practices and his baseball games and getting him ready for baseball and taking him to baseball lessons and I do love all of that. It’s also fantastic procrastination, but I get to procrastinate under the guise of being the best dad ever. Just very seductive.

John: Yeah. We also have the luxury and curse of having very little structured time, so at any given moment we probably could be doing parenting things. So there is no reason why you couldn’t drop off your kid at school every day and pick him up every day and be a room parent and be doing all those things except for the fact that you are supposed to be writing and being creative. So I definitely want to come down on the pro-child side, but it definitely is a huge adjustment.

And I find that I have to be much more rigorous about, this is the time when I’m writing, this is the time when the door is shut. When the door is shut, she is not allowed to come out and bother me because this is the time I’m doing that. And other times during the day where I really can go in and play, I’ll go in and play.

Craig: Yeah, I have an office that’s about 15 minutes from my house. And that’s made a big difference. I used to have, we have a little log cabin on my property that was built there way back in the old days. The guy who used to live there, I guess he wanted to gamble, and his wife wouldn’t let him gamble in the house, so he built a cabin. He’s a cool guy.

And so I used to have my office back there. And my son would just wander in, fling the door open, fling the bathroom door open, sit down, and start using the toilet with the door open while talking to me while I was writing. That was when it occurred to me that — he was young; I don’t want to give the impression that he’s 19, and he does that — and I realized I had to get an office. And I do feel like, if you have kids at home, there’s some kind of physical separation has to — I mean you have like a little, some kind of back house or something, right?

John: Yeah, so we built a room over the garage. And so for the first three-and-a-half years of my daughter’s life, she didn’t understand that when I went off to work, I was actually just going up 20 steps. And so I’d make the big show, like, going off to work. So sometimes she’d realize, oh, he forgot to take his car. But she didn’t put it all together. And then eventually one day she discovered, oh, he’s actually right out there.

And she had constructed some alternate narrative about why my assistant, who at that time was Matt, was working downstairs. He was just like a guy who was there sometimes. She didn’t understand that he worked for me, that he worked for us. He was just a guy who sat at a computer out there sometimes. So she would see him, but not understand that I was right upstairs, because I was being quiet.

Craig: Yeah. I tell people, if I meet somebody who’s right out of college, and they want to be a screenwriter, I’ll say, look, here’s the good news and the bad news. The good news is, I’m better at this than you are just because I’ve been doing it longer, even if you’re the greatest screenwriter in the world, still, I’ve just done it so often and I’ve navigated the system so often, I’m just, I have the benefit of that experience. And you just don’t have it yet and it’s going to take you time to get it.

On the plus side, you’re way less tired than I am. You should be able to write three screenplays for every one screenplay I write.

John: Yeah. You have, in your youth, in your 20s, you have, just, energy. You can just keep going. You have that sort of un-killable serial-killer-from-a-movie kind of quality where you can dust yourself off and keep going. And your energy does flag a bit when you’re trying to raise a kid as well.

With time and experience and craft, my first drafts are much better than my first drafts were when I was in my 20s. I really know how to do it now. So I don’t have to pull as many all-nighters because I can just get stuff done the right way the first time more often. But it’s a very different thing.

Craig: Yeah. So, have the kid, but…

John: Have the kid, yeah.

Craig: …But sorry, it’s going to put a crimp in. By the way, there’s a few other things it puts a crimp in. So add screenwriting to a long list.

John: Let’s go on and talk about our main topic today, which is outlining. We’ve been talking about WGA politics. We’ve been talking about career-y kind of stuff. But I want to talk really more, sort of words on the page, and sort of the daily thing of writing that screenwriters are supposed to theoretically be doing. And outlining is an important part of that.

And by outlining I mean it in a very general sense, all the sort of pre-planning you do about what’s going to happen in your script before you actually start, or even while you’re writing your screenplay. So it’s not the scene work, but the other work that doesn’t look like a screenplay but ends up becoming important for figuring out what’s happening in your story, when it’s happening, and what’s going on.

How do you start? Are you a whiteboard person, are you an index card person? How do you start beating out a story?

Craig: Yeah, I’m kind of an index card person. And I say kind of an index card person, because I feel like there’s actually a step before the index card person. I mean really, I’m a shower person. In thinking about it, all the fundamental breakthroughs that occur usually happen because I’m standing in the shower for 20 minutes thinking. And I don’t know why. That’s just where it happens, mostly.

John: That’s exactly where it happens for me, too.

Craig: Yeah. Shower. I don’t know, there’s something about that. And it’s sort of my little sacred place where no one can come in, and I’m alone, and I can just let my mind wander. And ideally I like to try to figure out the biggest things.

Beyond the idea of the movie, what does this main character want? What is the dramatic argument of the movie, the theme, whatever you want to call it, and what would be the most interesting story to kind of get this person from where they are to where they need to be? And I just start thinking there. But yeah, eventually I’d go to note cards.

John: The main ways I see screenwriters breaking stories is either index cards where each index card has one or two, or maybe it’s up to 10 words, that describe an important beat of the story. So, it’s not necessarily a scene, but it’s a thing that happened. So, if you write an action movie, it would be an action set piece. If it were a thriller, it might be a major reversal. So, some way of breaking down the important moments of your screenplay.

And those could be, you might have 30 cards for a movie, you might have 10 cards for a movie, you might have 100 cards for a movie. If you have 100 cards for a movie, you’re probably making too many index cards.

Craig: Too many cards.

John: Too many cards. But cards, here’s what I’ll say that’s good about cards is that it’s very easy to take up a beat and move it someplace else, and sort of lay them all out on a table and figure out how stuff works. A lot of people like to tape them up on the wall, or use Post-It Notes. When I do index cards — and I don’t always do index cards — I really like to have a big, flat table that it’s just much easier to sort of move them around. And, if you’re having to write with somebody, the table is good, because you can both stand there and take a look at this map that you’ve laid out. It’s like, this is how we would go through it. So, that’s index cards.

You can also do different colors for different kinds of beats. So, if you have action beats that are always on red cards…

Craig: Yeah, some people — and they color code them for the characters, so you can see, I haven’t been with this character in a long time.

Lately, what I’ve been doing is kind of short-circuiting the card thing entirely, and actually just recording my voice. I’ll sit with my assistant, and I just start talking through what I want to do. And I record it, and in talking, just as in the act, the physical act of writing, you can start writing.

There’s something about talking it through, where you can arrive at things, it unlocks you a little bit. The enemy of writing is silence, and inactivity. So, talking it out loud seems to be a big help. Now, I’ll take that, she’ll sort of take everything that I’ve recorded, summarize out the crap where you know, I’ll say, “You know what, not that — this,” and then she puts it into Microsoft Word and now I have an actual outline outline.

John: And then 20 years from now it’ll be like The Raiders of Lost Ark sessions, and someone will unearth the original audio and the original transcripts, and say, like, “Wow, that is how the Hangover III got figured out.”

Craig: Right. Except the opposite of that, in terms of its interest to people. Like, “Wow, this is the least interesting recording of notes ever.”

John: And that’s one thing I was using more when I was doing TV shows is the whiteboard. And the whiteboard is sort of ubiquitous in television-land as you’re figuring out your episode. You might be figuring out your season arcs, and you’re really figuring out this given episode, what’s happening in your episode. Generally, if you’re writing as a room, or all the writers in the room are trying to figure out how to do stuff, they’re all staring at one whiteboard, and they have everything marked down in terms of this is what’s happening.

Usually one or two people are empowered with the ability to write stuff on the whiteboard, but others…actual, just simple screenwriters use it too. I know Joss Whedon is a big whiteboard fan. You feel free to sort of erase and make a mess on a whiteboard in ways that you might not if you were doing note cards. Like oh, I have to rip up this note card and do it again. On a whiteboard, everything is sort of possible. And you can sort of scribble and draw arrows, and move stuff around.

Craig: It just seems like it would get so messy. Constantly erasing and doing and erasing and doing. Because I like to — with note cards, I use a bulletin board and thumbtacks, and obviously this is all academic, people should do whatever they want, but I like that I can, with my thing lately, is that I can make two columns. Because actually, I’m like, I don’t know why, I’m one of the few people in the world that makes the columns go columnar instead of rows. I don’t go across, I go up and down. So, as the Act One proceeds, it starts at the top of the board and slowly goes down.

And then — oh, you do that too? Oh, okay. So, that’s … so, I have one column that’s whatever the scenes are, and then to the left of that, I do a column and next to each scene, I have a card that sort of explaining why that scene matters. What is the purpose of the scene, what is the character intention. How is the story actually advanced in a way that has nothing to do with the plot, but the relationship between the characters, or the internal life of the character, and I found that that’s really useful, because it forces me to always think, “What is the point?”

You know, it’s one thing to sort of say, “I have to get from here to here, let’s have a big chase.” Okay. Well now, how could that chase actually be purposeful for advancing the character ball. And I don’t know how you’d fit all that crap onto a whiteboard.

John: It sounds like you’re writing a lot more information on each of those beats right from the very start. Let’s say, you were working on something that’s happening at the end of the first act. So, you have an idea for what the action of that is, and you’re sort of — the idea of the location: there’s going to be a big event at a carnival. So does your card say carnival, and then you have a second card that has all the detailed information about what’s happening there?

Craig: Yeah, no, I would do one card that says “Carnival — Maxwell realizes that the bottle toss game is rigged.” And then next to that I would put a card that says “Maxwell realizes that he should never have trusted So-And-So. He should have been listening to So-And-So all along; she was right.” So this way, I understand, it’s sort of like one column is what, and one column is why.

John: That does make sense. It’s a lot more detail than I ever got, and I would ever get into with cards. I’m always the person with a Sharpie, and I write three words on a card.

Craig: Oh, Okay. I see.

John: So, it’s a very different way of going about it. And I’ve seen whiteboards where they really do kind of get into that kind of detailed information, and so there will be a headline in blue marker, and then detailed stuff below it and you have to really squint to see sort of what’s in there.

Craig: [laughs]

John: And it’ll be one of the assistant’s jobs — like the writers’ assistant’s job — is to take iPhone snapshots of all the boards at the end of the day, and transcribe those as notes.

Craig: What I’ve been doing lately is having my assistant actually write the content of the note card on a little Word template with some sort of Sharpie-ish font. And then we can print them. And then if we want to change something, you know, I can just scribble on the card, or I can just ask her to change it, and then she can change it and print it again. Because, you know, we’ve sort of all caught up.

But, the truth is, whatever — I mean, this is my whole thing about outlining: for everybody who is sort of wondering, “Should I do it?” Listen: however you want to outline, outline. If you want to outline in great detail or less detail, it doesn’t matter. But I do think it’s really important to at least approach writing with more than just, “Okay, I have an image of a woman walking through a forest. Fade in: Forest — Morning.” These are how bad screenplays are written.

John: I will agree with you that many bad screenplays are written with just like, I have this one kind of idea, and no idea how to extrapolate from it. What I will say is that a lot of the screenplays where I’ve had the most detailed outlines, I’ve been most frustrated by the final results, and that I kind of got sandwiched in by the outline. And so some of my very, very favorite stuff I’ve written never had that level of detail or thought. So, some of them feel very organic because literally, it was like, it’s what the movie wanted to do next, versus what I as the author said should happen next.

Craig: Right. And I do agree that, I guess the way I would put it is this: You should always feel free to ignore your outline. But if all you get from your outline process is the beginning, the middle and the end, then I think you’ve already done your job. That’s … you should have some sense that you know roughly where you’re going. And if you want to play discover as you go, absolutely.

John: I’ll usually start writing the first 10 or 15 pages of a script. Then I’ll jump forward and write some stuff in the middle, and I’ll always try to write the last 10 pages of the script pretty early on in the process. Because I find that I have a lot of enthusiasm when I start a project, and part of the reason why I think that people’s first acts of screenplays tend to be so good is they have a lot of enthusiasm, and also they went back and re-wrote those first act of 30 pages a lot.

But, I have a lot of enthusiasm. I have a lot of excitement about this project. And, as I get near the end, I just have a desire to get the damn thing finished.

Craig: Right.

John: And so, I end up just kind of racing through the end, and not this last 10 pages, would otherwise not be written with the detail and care that they might be written with otherwise. So, by really focusing on those last 10 pages quite early on, I get a good sense of … it lets me write towards the middle, and it also makes that ending as rewarding as I think it could be.

A lot of times, I’ll get through this script, ultimately I’ll have to rewrite those last 10 pages.

Craig: Right:

John: But at least I knew where I was headed.

Craig: I don’t do that. I’m definitely a very linear kind of guy. In fact, I really can’t leap ahead. If I arrive in a spot where I feel like something’s wrong, I never just leap past it, I always sort of go back and try and figure out where this went wrong, because I sort of feel like — at least from my experience — whatever the little problem is now, it’s just going to get bigger and bigger and it’s just going to wobble more and more and more. So, for me, I just write really religiously in the order of the script.

But, I have to know what the ending is, so I guess that’s why I … in a way, I’m doing what you’re doing with my expanded note cards, I guess. Because that is me, sort of caring about the ending. I always know exactly what the ending is. If I don’t know what the ending is, I’m dead.

John: I’ll at least have a beat sheet, and by beat sheet, I mean, like, these are the main things that happened in the story, and sometimes I’ll do that as a spreadsheet document just so I can have neat columns and line stuff up. And one of the things I’ll do with the columns, is — especially if a movie has a lot of characters in it — I’ll keep note of which characters are in which scenes. I found this especially helpful for TV, in that you want to make sure that you’re really using your cast smartly.

So for like a TV pilot that I’m writing, I want to see: Where did I introduce this character? Did I get them in before this act break or after this act break? And so an outline that shows, “These are my scenes, this is where I think the act breaks are” — which in TV are really hard act breaks — “and this is where my characters are showing up,” is very important, especially in a pilot where you’re really introducing all these characters for the first time.

When Jordan Mechner and I were doing the Ops pilot, we would send back and forth a spreadsheet to really show and we could sign off like “You do scene 23 and I’ll do scene 36,” and pass off that way.

Craig: That’s how I worked with Scot and Todd on Hangover II. We sort of would assign chunks, because we knew what those chunks were supposed to accomplish. Then you swap them.

That’s the other thing: if you’re working with a partner, I don’t know how you can avoid outlining unless you’re literally sitting side by side playing the piano together, which is very strange to me.

John: There are some writers who do work literally side by side. I met a writing team — I can’t remember which one now — that they always write in the room together. And they essentially just have one computer that’s being shared with two monitors.

They’re a comedy team, so they have to write facing each other so they can see each other, but they’re facing their own screen. And either one of them has full control over the screen at any time.

Craig: That is weird.

John: Yeah, that feels like a three-legged race to me. But everyone works differently.

Craig: Yeah, whatever works.

John: Derek Haas and Michael Brandt, friends of ours, are never in the room together. One of them works on a draft and sends it to the other person who writes it, so 100 different ways to work.

Craig: Yeah, whatever works for you.

John: The outline that we’re talking about so far is really outlining for your own purpose. But sometimes you’re required to share those things with other people.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And that’s frustrating.

Craig: I kind of don’t. To be honest with you, I just don’t. I always say “Look, I have an outline and it’s in my own weird reverse Polish notation and you wouldn’t understand it.” I’m like “I wrote it in reverse mirror writing.”

So I’m happy to talk through what I’ve come up with. I always feel like they deserve that much, but I don’t hand out outlines.

John: I’ve generally avoided them, avoided handing in any sort of outline. But on a recent project with a director, it became really the only way to communicate with him was to say like, “This is really what’s happening.” And because he wasn’t available, I couldn’t give him a written document. There was just no way to get feedback on what was going on.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So it’s tough because you feel like you’re doing writing and you’re spending a lot of time writing for someone else’s ability to interpret what it is you’re trying to do. And so you end up having to, sometimes, generate, you know…

Craig: It’s busy work, a little bit.

John: It’s busy work, that you’re generating false details that might not really be the way you’d approach that scene when you really get to it.

Craig: Right.

John: But you’re doing it so they can understand. And of course, the unfortunate aspect is they always have that outline. So if you vary from that outline it’s not going to be what they expect. And maybe they’ll love what you did that’s different, but if they don’t love it they’ll be able to point back to something you wrote before and say “Well, I thought this worked really well.”

Craig: Well, when you’re dealing with a director I feel a little different about it because theoretically they are sort of more closely aligned with some narrative sensibility and hopefully they can work through your outline with you.

I will say there’s one great benefit to sharing, even if you don’t give a document but you talk through a story. One of the great benefits is everybody does agree on it, or hopefully has agreed on it. And people can change their minds. But there’s a difference between, “You know what? We changed our mind,” and, “We didn’t expect that and we hate it.”

And if everybody agrees that it should go this way and you deliver that and they say “Okay, now that we’ve read it I think we all together made a mistake,” that’s a very different conversation than “What is this? What did you do? Why did you write it this way?”

And so I like to make sure everybody is on the same page. And if you do change something significantly, let people know. Just say “You know what? I think I’m going to change this significantly and here is why.” Get them on board before they read it and reduce the shock factor.

John: I should also…what’s the opposite of preface? I should post-note this last part of the conversation and say this is very much feature screen writing that we’re talking now. In television a lot of times you really do have to write out an outline that a bunch of people are going to read and give notes on and approve or not approve.

And it’s really maddening if you’re coming from a feature perspective because you’re used to being able to have a wider range of options ahead of you. But because of the schedule of American television at least, a lot of decisions get made based on outline level. And so the network and the studio could come back and say just basically throw out your next three episodes’ outlines, and you’re back to square one.

Craig: Yeah, I actually understand that. I mean, you’ve got so many episodes you have to produce, even if you…just now from the network side, just as a show runner, you have a staff, you have people, you have to assign tasks to them, if somebody’s outline isn’t quite right, and you know that you need a little extra help with the script that is right. You just need to know what the stories are, just to map out the season. Even just that you know you don’t have three action-y stories in a row if you have the kind of show that sort of goes back and forth.

I remember, Star Trek, I liked The Next Generation. I watched a lot of those. And there were some that were sort of war episodes, and there were some that were kind of science-y episodes, and then there were ones that about character. And I could see where you wouldn’t want three of any particular kind in a row.

John: Absolutely. I’ve just been watching the most recent series of Torchwood: Miracle Day — it’s the American BBC collaboration on it — which has been really fascinating. And it’s because it’s only a 10 episode order, I find myself doing things that’s not quite really fair. Which is saying, well, they knew there were only these 10 episodes, so they could have done things a lot differently.

And 10 episodes is such a weird in-betweener. Because it’s not like…if it’s six episodes, then clearly they could pre-write the whole thing, and block shoot it, and do sorts of special things. At 10 episodes, you’re kind of making a real TV show. You’re probably into production while you’re still writing the next ones, so you’re not quite sure what’s going to be working and what’s not going to be working. I have this temptation to write a blog post that’s sort of like, takes a look at everything that actually happened over the course of the season, and sort of proposes a different way of blocking it out.

Because, like all TV shows, you have an instinct about sort of when you’re going to make reveals of certain key information, and this felt like they missed some really good opportunities, too, or they delayed a little too long in revealing certain key information.

Craig: Hopefully, we’ll get our first angry response from the show Torchwood.

John: That’d be great, because I enjoy Torchwood, and I have enjoyed watching it. But it certainly had some ups and some downs.

Craig: So the quote is “John August enjoys highly flawed series Torchwood.”

John: Oh, I love highly flawed series. I am the only person who will confess to watch every episode of V, the remake of V.

Craig: The new V. Because I saw the old V, and the old V was awesome.

John: The old V was so good. With its barely concealed Nazi insignia.

Craig: I think at some point they stopped even trying to conceal it.

John: It’s just kind of gray.

Craig: Yeah, it was awesome.

John: Yeah, and Diana…and so, the challenge, of course, with the new V, is that they had me, because first of all, it was V, because V is fundamentally great. And Elizabeth Mitchell from Lost, she’s some sort of witch. I cannot not watch her. So, she could — I’ve said it before — she could just be boiling water all episode, I’d happily watch 60 minutes of that. It’s terrible.

Craig: I’m not — I haven’t seen any Torchwood. I’m going to, just as a counterpoint here and for the creators and writers of Torchwood, I think you guys did a fantastic job. I don’t know what he’s talking about.

John: Trust me, Craig literally doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

Craig: I literally don’t know what he’s talking about. I did not know there was a show called Torchwood. [laughs] So, there you go. I have the television-watching habits of a 90 year old woman.

John: Or, a father in his early 40’s.

Craig: That’s right. So I can tell you all about Phineas and Ferb and Adventure Time and cool shows like that.

John: All right. So, I think we’ve discussed the hell out of outlines.

So, outlines, as a summary and bullet point: Many ways to do it, the most common being index cards or whiteboards for generating the stuff of outlines. A lot of times, they’re a written document. You know, you could do it in a sort of spreadsheet-y format, you can do it as a just a text document. It’s whatever helps you sort of figure out and remember how you’re supposed to get through a story.

The one point I did sort of want to make, is — because I am a lot more sort of on the fly, off the cuff sort of changing stuff as I go along — as I finish a day’s work, I’ll always be that like, these are the next three scenes that happen. Because sometimes those aren’t what I had originally planned, but as I’m writing scenes, I have a very good sense of where I want to go next in this story, so I’ll always leave myself at the end of the day with some breadcrumbs for like, this is the trail of what happens next.

Craig: I usually, when I finish writing for the day, I curl up in a little ball and cry.

John: That’s another equally valid choice.

Craig: Thank you.

John: And thank you, Craig.

Craig: And we’ll see you guys next time on Scriptnotes.