Yup, It's All A Joke To Me...

yup, it's all a joke to me...

among the most enduring lessons i have ever received in screenwriting stands this one from glenn gordon caron…

(glenn created and ran the wildly successful, long-running “medium” - on which i worked for two seasons as co-executive producer - as well as one or two other things that have… you know… shaped the very face of popular culture as we know it)

…a legendarily tough grader who likes to do his master-level work without a lot of noisy fuss and bluster (and probably dislikes being singled out for public praise like this) glenn would set the table for every one of our story pitches to him with a single, and deceptively simple, request:

“tell it to me like it’s a joke.”

now, “medium” was several things - among them, one of tv’s best portrayals of a messy but functional marriage, as well as a crime procedural dotted with representations of unspeakable violence, usually perpetrated by serial killers in the psychic visions of its lead character - but “barrel of laughs” is most likely not in the top ten descriptors for that series…

…so how did “tell it to me like it’s a joke” fit into the equation?

a joke - for my money - is to storytelling what haiku is to poetry: the shortest possible distillation of formal intent. a set-up, brief development, and a punch line…

…short, sweet — and, if successfully told, climaxing in an explosive, involuntary emotional response.

for a story to work in any genre, every successful element from the macro to the micro - from the sweep of the story, to the shape of individual scenes, the arcs of the characters, and the very structure of individual lines of dialogue - should be reducible to the specific outlines of a joke.

set up, development, punch line.

as you have guessed by now, the punch line doesn’t have to be funny - it can be horrific (as it often was on “medium”) or tear-inducing, or a twist that sends the story into an unexpected direction - but it is the nexus toward which the set up and development need to work in absolute concert - there’s no room for fat on a joke, only specificity of purpose.

to this day, the “tell it to me like it’s a joke” principle guides me through story and scene development like a trusty compass: if you can tell your story in the most concise way possible and still deliver your emotional punchline, then all the adornments will fall into line as needed.

“tell it to me like it’s a joke” is neither a formula nor a cure all - it’s a test: if your concept survives on the “tell it to me like it’s a joke” touchstone, then at least you know that the gross anatomy is in place… there are still a thousand ways to mess it up, to be sure, but the airframe will fly - so long as you outfit it with all the necessary equipment.

you wanna know my favorite joke?

an aimless young artist is recruited by an organization that fights monsters… while at first she dislikes her employer and considers him a stuffed shirt, she ultimately finds in him the father she never had.

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ealdwineoldfriend

3 months ago

Ever since I learned that the people at Bunnings recognise my name due to my frequent delivery orders I've wondered what they think of said orders. Do they have theories on what I've used the well over a hundred 0.9m run of the mill pine shorts that I regularly buy in batches of 20-30 for. Do they wonder why I need quite so many metal brackets. When I stopped buying tiles and grout in small batches at random intervals, did they have feelings on the fact that I'd obviously finished my tiling project.

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ealdwineoldfriend

5 months ago

writing badly and cringily is actually an essential part of the writing process, both in terms of individual projects and in gaining voice and confidence as a writer in the long term. there is no way around the cringe. there's no way around the work.

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ealdwineoldfriend

4 months ago

👁️

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ealdwineoldfriend

4 months ago

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ealdwineoldfriend

4 months ago

Do you know if Sherlock was ever actually used as a name? Or did Arthur Conan Doyle make it up?

Yes! It was an actual name of Middle English origin, sometimes a nickname for a blond person. Shir meaning bright or fair (possibly related to the root word for shine? idk) and lock meaning hair. It was more commonly a surname before the Sherlock Holmes books came out but it was occasionally a first name. An adjacent name is Whitlock, meaning white haired (or blond) which is a pretty common surname too.

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ealdwineoldfriend

4 months ago

i love characters who are always like fear not, i shall take care of this problem for you….. by sacrificing myself!! and everyone else is like i swear to god if you pull this shit again i’ll kill you

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ealdwineoldfriend

4 months ago

i know i've said this before but i'm going to say it again because the more i work with geriatric women the stronger i feel about the fact that the only anti-aging that women in their 20s/30s should be obsessed with is building strong bones and muscle mass. that's like the most important thing you can you can do right now to lay a good foundation for healthy aging. you can botox the shit out of your face but that's not going to do anything to save you from dying prematurely from a fatal hip fracture that you can't bounce back from because you didn't do anything to prevent yourself from becoming frail and breakable. like i know that sounds harsh but that is reality for a lot of older women and i don't want that to be you.

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ealdwineoldfriend

1 month ago

I think about this drawing every single time I'm doing something badly. Whatever I am doing, at least I'm not destroying things.

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ealdwineoldfriend

4 months ago

something I’ve learned from querying: everything has a million subcategories, and it is crucial to actually learn then.

like when I first started, I thought an agent listing ‘speculative fiction’ in their interests was enough to give me a shot! but now it’s like ok. but does that actually mean fantasy (as opposed to science fiction or surrealism)? and if it does, is it constrained to one of the following:

high fantasy

low fantasy

grounded fantasy

magical realism

etc.

and if fate is smiling on me and it is high fantasy, what sort do they like? because mine starts as a medieval George R R Martin clone before morphing into a post-apocalyptic sci fi, so they have to simultaneously be alright with a) cliched shit and b) experimental weird shit.

and say everything aligns, and that genre works for them - even then, they often accept it only in one or two age categories. there’s mg, ya, na (middle grade, young adult, new adult) and adult. mine is adult, which is a huge strike against it given the genre.

AND THEN! AND THEN! say everything else is perfect. they love high fantasy with elves and unicorns, they want it for adults, they’re cool with genre bending, but in their profile is a phrase I’ve learned to dread: “HEA (which stands for happily every after) required”. I love my little book, but it is dark and full of terrible people.

and then I also have to hope that they’re into queer romance, on top of everything else! it’s a hard process.

currently I have 45 queries sent, 15 rejections, and 30 unknowns, and I think a good portion of those rejections are because I didn’t initially understand that ‘accepts speculative fiction’ shouldn’t be taken literally.

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