finished my Office script

i’m all done with my first tv spec! the deadline for the nick writing fellowship is tomorrow, but i finished and mailed it off today. the fellowship announcements will be made in late august / early september, so now i have to forget this project and move on to my next one.

i ended up sticking very closely to my original schedule which was:

• week 1 – research past episodes, write loglines for episode ideas.
• week 2 – write treatment, outline, and start writing pages.
• week 3 – finish writing, send out for feedback, revise, and send out.

halfway done

i’m about halfway through a rough draft of my Office spec. the time i put into outlining is paying off, because i already figured out the main story beats and now i can focus on dialogue and jokes. besides being just a valuable part in the writing process, outlining is something i would have to do anyway if i were to actually get work writing for tv.

mini review of screenwriting programs

after spending over a week on research and outlining, i started writing actual script pages for my Offce script.

i have 3 programs:

•celtx
•final draft 7
•movie magic screenwriter 2000

outlining my script

i always outline my scripts, even for my short films. and when i outline, i always use omni outliner. it’s a great piece of software.

for the current script, i made 3 columns: one for the main story beat, one for the slugline (location), and one for any additional notes, like act breaks. i’ll start with just the bare information, like inciting incident, midpoint, climax, etc. then i’ll slowly add story beats, move stuff around, flesh it out. i also color coded it so i can quickly see the ratio of A-story beats to the B-story beats.

finalized my logline

i want to write a spec of The Office and i had settled on the logline after pitching to some friends, but i realized that the story needed to focus a little more on michael. i felt like i needed to examine more of his character and his flaws, so i came up with a way that i can do that while keeping with the basic idea that i already had.

i had 3 weeks to write the whole spec, and it took me 10 days to fully settle on my logline. i don’t regret that at all, and consider it time well spent. next up is the outline.

writer’s guild library

i wanted to look at actual scripts from The Office, but i didn’t have much luck online. i did manage to find 2 scripts from season 2, “e-mail surveillance” and “the carpet” which are both hilarious. i wanted to read more examples though, hopefully something more recent, so i went to the library at the writer’s guild foundation on fairfax and 3rd.

it’s free and open to the public. you can’t borrow anything, but they have lots of scripts that you can look at. i studied 3 scripts from season 3 to get a better sense of the structure and format.

choosing loglines for my office spec

i came up with over a dozen ideas for possible episode ideas, but narrowed it down to 2. i double checked various episode guides online just to make sure my ideas haven’t already been done. then i sent the ideas to a bunch of friends and asked which they liked better.

i got good feedback but the response was split right down the middle, so i ended up going with the idea inspired by something that i actually experienced.

next i need to find and read actual scripts from show to see how they’re structured. movie scripts are fairly easy to find online, but tv scripts seem to be more difficult. i only found 2 scripts for The Office, but i’d like to have more to refer to.

i’m going to write a tv spec script

i just got an email today about the nickelodeon writing fellowship program. you have to submit a spec script on an existing half hour series. a friend of a friend got into that program a couple years ago and landed a staff job there. there is also the disney writing fellowship and you need a spec for that as well, so i decided to write one.