#spec scripts

Hear me out:

I don’t think we should eradicate the short-story fan fic format, just add a new format to the library. 

I am an aspiring film/television writer. I went through four years of college, two of which were actually spent taking classes for my major (I did my general education at community college then transferred into my degree). I took screenwriting classes for three out of the four semesters that I spent in my undergrad degree and the only way to learn how to write scripts is to practice.

I also found that one of the most frequent forms of writing that I do is fan fiction, but I never actually write my fics down because I hate writing short stories. And why should I even bother? I want to make a career writing screenplays, not short stories!

WHAT’S DIFFERENT ABOUT SCREENWRITING?

Screenwriting doesn’t have all of the daunting prose that short story writing has. Want someone to walk to the other side of the room? Say that exactly. “The Hero walks to the other side of the room”. Boom. Done. You can say they “saunter” or “stroll” or any other adjective if you want them to do that, but in screenwriting you want to be as direct as possible and still leave it up to interpretation by your actor. As a dyslexic woman, I found this EXTREMELY favourable to finding a proper flow for every damn sentence on the page in short story/novel writing.

WHAT IS A SPEC SCRIPT?

Have you ever read a screenplay? Have you noticed the numbers and camera directions in the script? If so, you were reading a SHOOTING SCRIPT. That’s different, and not what we want. A shooting script involves direction, which can really hinder the writing process. A SPEC SCRIPT should be entirely focused on the story. Here’s an example of a spec script if you’d like to see one. 

NOTE - If you want to write novels, it makes sense that you should READ novels, right? Same goes for scripts. If you want to write television, you should read television scripts. If you want to write movies, you should read movie scripts.

Spec scripts are the kinds of scripts that are submitted for consideration, both to screenplay competitions and to studios in general. If you want to work as a writer in the film/television industry, you NEED to know how to write a spec script.

HOW WOULD I EVEN BEGIN TO WRITE A SPEC SCRIPT?

Screenwriting, unlike writing short stories or novels or other kinds of fiction, has a defined structure. There is a wrong way to write a screenplay, and the only way to learn it is through study and practice. And guys - there are SO MANY RESOURCES.

PROGRAMS:

WriterDuet is my favourite, but there’s also Celtx, Amazon Story Writer, Final Draft, etc.

BOOKS:

There are TONS of books on screenwriting. Screenwriting for Neurotics is a personal favourite b/c it’s the textbook that we used in class and it’s only like 22 USD for a new copy (less for a used or kindle copy; my library even offers a free PDF version). There’s also books like Save the Cat, Write a Screenplay that Sells, and other books - I’m sure I can make a better list at a later date. You can also find pretty good lists just by googling.

WHY SHOULD I WRITE FAN FICS AS SPEC SCRIPTS?

It’s hard to finish a script. I’ve been screenwriting for two years and I’ve only ever finished one script. And guess what- that script was a FAN FICTION. Well, sort of. It was an episode of an existing TV Show that I wrote for entry into a writing competition. 

But writing that script really HELPED ME. Not just in my career (because I haven’t gotten the results of the competition yet), but in my self-esteem. That script showed me that I CAN do this, and more importantly that I can do this in a short amount of time (that script took me a week to churn out, revisions and all).

IN CONCLUSION

If you want to work in film and television, you should write film and television scripts. I know one of the most frequent and well-structured works I come up with are fan fics, and if that’s the case for you then why are you writing it as short stories when what you want to write is screenplays??

This is fan fiction. This woman is describing the way fandom writers write fan fiction all the time.... and she’s describing it like it’s not already part of my day-to-day existence.

This is the sort of outline/breakdown thingy I did for an episode of the Flash as research for a spec. The spec itself is currently being worked on and will take the place of that research ep pretty soon. The structure of Flash episodes is pretty formulaic as is normal for shows like it. You could pretty much layer the episodes on top of each other and place the same pegs without knowing what the characters are saying and be in the ballpark of where those elements would be. This is the kind of show that’s great for a spec(other than serial being hard) in terms of structure. As long as you know where things are meant to be placed roughly, you can build situations that fit those marks. It makes structure easy but it can turn into box checking and can come at the price of other good things. Sadly the 6 act structure is hard to work with when it comes to pacing and other narrative qualities. Writers are expected to have a hook at the end of each act (when the top peg color changes) but it means narrative stupid can occur and loss of tension or arbitrary stakes are added.

A spec script is a highly structural, restrictive episode of a tv show that is sent to an agent for circulation with no pay or hope of airing in the hopes of getting a job as a writer or writing assistant. They’re basically highly restrictive, arc-plot light fan fiction that aims to capture the feel and characters of a currently airing (usually in its 2nd-5th season) show. A spec cannot resolve overarching conflict, it can’t be a finale or a setup for a larger plot and it generally can’t change too many elements (there are specs that do to an extent, called “off book” specs but they’re risky) They’re basically a case/problem of the week episode.

Each act is separated by a new color pin at the top. So act one is purple, act two is green, then blue, back to purple, then green and act six is blue.

The side pins are which plot(s) is primarily addressed in the scene as set up, reminders and resolution. This set was for Flash 1.06. I have a few others but decided to see if s1 kept the same structure as the later ones. When it did, I thought it was interesting, so have how I breakdown research for specs I guess.

Hopefully the pegs are at least distinct. Sorry if they aren’t. My phone doesn’t like... things. I basically peg them off with whatever is the most prominent or whatever plays a large part in the scene. There’s often more than one, which is usually good. Too bad the dialog in this show struggles to support the elements cleanly much of the time. They’re there at least.

Clear is CPlot The plot surrounding the specific episode Pink is BPlot The character relationships. In this case, between Iris, Eddie and Barry. A little bit with other characters too but BPlot usually focuses on the “love interest” if there is one. Black is APlot The overarching plot of the show/season

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