Ooooh...it's Out There

TODAY WE start the long process of once again backing slowly out of the room where all the babies are. (That's a Simpsons reference...Homer in a room with thousands of babies gathered just like The Birds...and he slowly pushes Bart and Lisa behind him and out the door without a word. Priceless.)

Reading Will Dixon's measured response to the great fanfic contretemps of '07 (no caps deliberate, let's all be clear about the status of this argument -- on both sides...ie: very small tempest, very small teacup) got me thinking about ideas and their expression, and it's sparked something that I think is interesting; something that writers deal with all the time.

Will touched on it yesterday in his post about a new CW pilot called The Reaper directed up in Vancouver by Kevin Smith. On the surface it would seem to be very similar to both The Collector and Brimstone -- and I bet others could come up with half a dozen other movies, from Constantine on down.

This is why copyright law does not protect ideas, but the specific expression of those ideas. If I do a vampire show, I am not copying anyone. But if I were to suddenly start writing a show about a female private detective who partners with a vampire and who also has a romantic triangle with said vampire and her ex-partner, a cop -- well, then I would expect some very nasty lawyer letters from my former employers, and an aggrieved book author.

Part of the interesting thing about creative works, especially ones that are ongoing, like a TV series, is that once you set the table (write a pilot, introduce characters, establish template and basic premise) the ideas that can spring from that aren't limitless. There are only so many threads you can pull. Sooner or later, you pull all of them.

It might take seven seasons. Or you might be a show like The O.C. One of the reasons why The O.C. burned out so fast was the rate that they chewed through story. Arcs that would take a season in other shows, that show threw away in four eps. They literally ran out of story.

When you set the table, and you have a room full of writers, there really are basic parameters of where you're going to go. You can be cagey about it. The example I remember well is that in the Pilot of The West Wing, you heard about Bartlet's daughter and granddaughter. Then, in the first season, they introduced Bartlet's youngest daughter, Zoe, as a character. It was a couple of seasons later when suddenly, Ellie, the middle daughter, showed up.

Now -- up til that point, Bartlet had only had two daughters. He'd only mentioned two. (You wouldn't meet the first daughter, Elizabeth, until Season 5) But if you tracked it back, they'd been very careful to never mention that he had only two. There was no reason they couldn't have a third.

It's said that Joss Whedon had the idea to give Buffy a sister in season two...but didn't wind up using the idea til a couple seasons later.

The point is, sometimes the turns and the twists can be sleight of hand, but most of the time you need to hide the ideas in plain sight. (You mention that Wilson has three ex-wives on House, you're going to meet one eventually.) In both West Wing and Buffy, they had to do some gymnastics to get their ideas in there. (West Wing, Ellie is estranged -- that's why we haven't seen or heard too much about her before; Buffy, there's hocus pocus and Dawn, Buffy's sister has a magical origin.)

When you hide these plot filaments in plain sight, it opens the possibility that other people are going to pull on them first. Because ideas and the expressions of them are funny that way. The more you build about characters and backstories and such, the more logical it becomes to go in a certain direction. As a writer, you can write toward that, or, if you're perverse, you write away from that.

Spec writers discover all the time the perils of the logical idea. You're trying to write a sample to get a job, and you're halfway through your draft or your outline and suddenly you turn on Smallville or House or Supernatural and there it is: your story. Or something close to your story. Every writer has this happen to them. And when it does, I say, you just gotta take it as encouragingly as you can: see? You do get the show. It's a badge of honor!

Now go back and start over.

I had a West Wing spec for years that got me work. I wrote it at the end of season one. By season five, they had done two or three of the plots in my script. Years and years ago, in my first attempt to become a TV writer (which I chickened out on) I wrote a Wonder Years spec script about Winnie running for student council president. They did that plot by the end of the series.

The thing is that this sort of thing happens to writers all the time, and there's an element of it that's boring and prosaic, and an element of it that's spooky and weird.

The previous examples were the prosaic ones. Here's the spooky: I was out yesterday afternoon with my friend Mark Askwith. He told a story of back in the day when the legendary comic writer was about to retire and give over his first comic series. And Mark was one of the guys they asked to pitch a story for it. There were four people in contention. Mark slipped his story to someone who was mutual friends with one of the other contenders, the guy read it, and freaked, and said, "You guys have to talk." Mark and this other guy had apparently independently written the same story. Then they found out that a third writer had written his story, and it had a few similar elements. The guy that got hired for the gig was the one who went in a completely different direction.

That's what happens, folks. How? I don't know.

Years ago when I was in University I was in a comedy show. We wrote our own sketches. I wrote a lot. A lot. Three days before we opened we went to see Second City, and saw the show. And three of our sketches -- the concepts were up there big as life.

There were a couple of people who were convinced that someone, somehow had copied us. But I never thought that. A couple of the sketches were topical; about stuff that was in the news -- so even though this was my first example of this happening, instinctively I knew that what we had here was just two people riffing off the same event and coming to a similar comic premise. One of the other sketches was a little weirder, though. I mean, it was a really out there kind of character piece based on a quirk that someone had told me about their days working in a restaurant.

And then the Second City show did a sketch with a remarkably similar thing....even some of the same jokes.

How did that happen? Beats me. To this day, I know for sure it wasn't a case of someone stealing from someone else. But there in the room, you would have to at least entertain the notion that somehow they'd gotten ahold of student written scripts and....I mean....

Naahhh.

In any case, I'm pretty glad that I never thought that Second City was copying me, because the talented guy in that show -- the young kid who I'd been seeing in Second City for a couple years, every week when I went to the post show improvs? Mike Myers. Whatever happened to that dude?

Sometimes ideas are just out there. It's the collective unconscious. I don't know. What I do know is through the years, I've seen many, many examples of people completely independently coming up with the very same idea, at around the same time.

It happens in science, too. The untold story of a lot of inventions, from the telephone to TV, is that people working completely separately on opposite sides of the world make discoveries at the same time. They come to the same conclusion. Who gets the credit is sometimes a matter of luck, sometimes a matter of chicanery. Philosophical concepts spring into being out of multiple mouths. Medical researchers at competing labs try the same thing at the same time, and wind up having to share the credit in the AMA Journal. Astronomers discover something on the same day.

So when you notice that Grey's Anatomy consistently does the same medical case two weeks after House, it aint copying, folks. It's kismet.