Alison Weaverdyck

I realized recently that I’ve done this whole screenwriting thing really backwards compared to a lot of people. I’ve never attended any film school or classes outside of a couple of workshops, so I haven’t made the logical progressions of short to long, or imitation before striking out on my own. So in this third year of my scriptwriting journey, I’ve written my first short film and written my first spec of an existing show. (Not to be confused with the other kind of spec – an original script written “on speculation”, meaning not for hire. Throughout this post, when I say “spec” I mean an episode of an existing show.)

For a long time, writing a spec was the only way to get your foot in the door of TV room. Which makes sense considering the job is basically being a mimic in terms of tone and voice. But lately, it seems the emphasis has switched to submitting original pilots, at least for a lot of showrunners. I had idly considered writing a spec from time to time, but didn’t take the plunge until the 2023 fellowship season came about. The Paramount/CBS fellowship required both an original script and a spec, so I decided it was time to give it a try. Hopefully, telling you about what I went through will help on your own writing journey. (Note 1 – this post contains light spoilers for The Last of Us. Note 2 – the deadline for the fellowship was before the writer’s strike. I stand by the WGA and those on the picket lines 100%.)

Where to Start When Spec-ing?

I had the benefit of writing this spec with a particular program in mind. I cannot emphasize enough that doing research is important before sending something off. And luckily for me, Carole Kirshner, who runs the fellowship as well as the showrunner training program for the WGA, is generous with her insights. I found a couple articles and interviews with her where she talked about exactly what she was looking for in a spec and her advice.

One aspect that was particular to that fellowship was that the spec had to have a similar tone and genre to the original script, and had to be the same format (half-hour or hour-long). Kirschner advised that in general, you want to choose a show that is new, but not TOO new. Something going into its third season is a good bet because there’s been enough of it that the readers could have seen some episodes, but not so old that all the good stories have been told. The exception here being if there was something so hot and popular that everyone was talking about it, you might consider doing a spec. (Which is the road I took, but more on that below).

One other important pointer she gave – which was counter to some of the other tips I’d seen – was not to go rogue just to “prove” how creative you are. According to Kirschner, a good spec has to focus on the same characters and themes as the main series. As fun and tempting as it might be to take a side character and give them a turn in the spotlight, she emphatically warns against this strategy. The whole point is to show you understand the show and voice of the characters. So don’t get cute. Zero in on what makes these characters great and run with it.

Choosing a Show

After I settled on submitting No Rest for the Wicked as my original script, I set out to pick something that would play nice in terms of tone and genre. Which was… challenging. NRFTW is set in 1870s Sacramento, but is more of a supernatural drama with a smart-mouthed, completely irreverant lady at the helm than a straight “historical.” So, I decided to focus on the fantasy/sci-fi genre as a whole and ditch the historical aspect completely when I made my selection.

From there, I made a list of the hour-long fantasy/sci-fi dramas I’d watched over the past 3 years. This included new shows, like Wednesday, and some longer-running show like The Umbrella Academy. I gave Wednesday some serious thought despite being so new because it was kooky spooky fun with a female protagonist. But in the end I decided the age gap and life experience gap between her and Vi was too big. And though NRFTW does have some funny moments, it is definitely a drama that is often like a horror movie or action movie at times rather than a mystery.

Which brought me to The Last of Us. At the time, I had just finished watching the series, which had only been out like 6 weeks in its entirety. But the gruff, closed-off Joel caring for a more naive and younger woman on a quasi-redemption quest – that was really spot on in terms of similarities. Plus chances for horror moments, check. I’m hoping that The Last of Us was enough of a phenomenon that my readers had a chance to catch up on episodes…

Another really big reason I liked The Last of Us for this was that there is a giant time-jump. In one episode it’s September, and in the next it’s December. And during that time they covered several states worth of ground. That left me with a huge amount of time to set a standalone episode that could nudge the characters toward what they’d be in December. That was my biggest challenge looking for an “in” with the other shows I considered. All of them were such tightly scripted, 8-10 episode series that there wasn’t much space to insert something. But the time jump was a perfect opportunity to fill a gap.

Themes

One downside of picking something so new was that there weren’t any PDFs of episodes out in the wild at the time (though I have encountered one since). So, of course, if you have the option, read scripts from the show you want to spec!

Even though TLOU was very fresh for me, I went back and read articles. I listened to interviews. I rewatched the episodes surrounding where my spec would go and took notes about pacing, amount of action, amount of dialogue, and important moments. And because it is also based on a game, I had a huge amount of cut scenes and game transcripts to draw from too.

As with so much great fantasy/sci-fi, TLOU is about what it means to be a human being. This is why I am drawn to these genres myself. But that is a bit broad – I had to dig deeper. And what I decided was that it all hinged on connections. The ones we make, the ones we lose (through death or neglect), the ones we fight to keep, and the ones we blow up spectacularly through our own selfishness or short-sightedness. And the evolving connection between Joel and Ellie is also central to the character arcs. So I needed to come up with a story that would engage with the theme of connection and the specific connection between these characters without actually doing something that would affect the overall plot. Easy-peasy… right?

Storytelling Conventions

One of the unique and compelling aspects of TLOU series is its use of flashbacks. Two entire episodes are basically long flashbacks that add depth to the characters and explore the theme of connection. And spending so much time on the past also gives it a quieter secondary theme of exploring the effects of the past on the present. However, I needed to make sure I kept the emphasis on Joel and Ellie, who barely know each other in the present of the story. So I couldn’t wander too far from the present too much of the time in order to meet Kirschner’s mandate to stick close to the main characters.

Out of the two, Joel is a lot older, so he had a lot more past to explore. I listed out his most important connections – his daughter Sarah, his girlfriend Tess, and his brother Tommy. As reaching Tommy is Joel’s mission, and they spent time together both before and after the infection hit, the choice was clear.

Based on what I knew about Joel and Tommy’s relationship, I started brainstorming key moments that could be good to dramatize in a flashback. I didn’t want to go too far away from “facts” that were mentioned in passing in episodes of the show or game – Tommy’s time in the military, the origin of Joel’s scar, and their time together after the infection and the terrible things they did to survive. But we didn’t get to see any of it – and that’s where the opportunity lay to dig deeper into Joel and his connection in the past. At the same time, I wanted to use the flashbacks to inform the reader how his relationship with Ellie in the present was the same or different.

In the end, I had something with flashbacks but structured a bit more like an episode of Lost with the flashbacks coming in at key moments of the storyline in the present. One of my friends who gave me notes flagged this as a problem, as it didn’t totally follow what the show itself had done. But it tied so well to the themes that I still stand by the choice. Only time will tell if I’m right…

Structure

You’re either nodding along or rolling your eyes at me right now for bringing this up. The two camps – “structure is life” and “structure is for suckers” – have been and will continue to duke it out on the interwebs. I’m basically Switzerland, myself. You do you. But when it comes to a spec script, you have to at least think about the structure of what you are trying to mimic. If you decide to break it, best of luck. But the best way to prove you could play in someone else’s sanbox – which is what it means to be in a writers room – is to respect the conventions that go into that thing. Which includes structure. After all, if you are spec-ing a blank of the week that always starts with the blank wreaking havoc and you don’t do that, you’re going to look like you weren’t paying attention.

Non-procedural shows can be looser, but if you break down scripts or episodes, you may also find patterns that are worth incorporating. Your spec has to “feel” like a real episode, and pacing (which is basically structure at its heart) is a vital component. For the two episodes of TLOU that surrounded my spec, I noted that both of them had something surprising that shifted the direction of the episode around 15 minutes in. And who was I to mess with success?

The Voices

Dialogue has never been a problem for me. In my experience, one of the best ways to get to know your characters and their voice is to get them talking about something and see what happens. When writing novels or short stories, I often wrote out the dialogue of a scene before going back in and adding the tags and narration. I think this is a big reason why writing scripts appeals to me so much – dialogue is so much at the forefront.

Ironically, this free-flowing tendency toward dialogue was actually something I had to fight when writing my spec. Though Ellie will talk your ear off, Joel says very little. At least, Joel of the present does. But Joel of the present has also been deeply traumatized by what he’s lived through (as anyone who survived the fall of humankind would be). I decided that didn’t mean Joel of the past had to be quite so closed off, which would also be an interesting way of exploring that secondary theme of how we change.

My Joel flashbacks moved chronologically, starting with him and Tommy as kids and ending with them arriving at the Boston QZ. My pre-infection Joel and post-infection Joel showed marked changes in how he communicated and how open he allowed himself to be. (Don’t get me wrong, he’s not singing his feelings from the rooftops or anything, but I made him even a little vulnerable.)

But that still left the Joel and Ellie dialogue in the “present.” I definitely wrote too-long conversations at first and had to go in and cut or rethink how Joel would respond. He does so much with looks, grunts, and even his silences, it was a fun challenge to explore him and how he expresses himself. I worried a little about “directing on the page.” But the writer of TLOU TV series, Craig Mazin, often says on the Script Notes podcast that the whole notion is baloney, so I figured I was probably okay.

The Tone

I mentioned before that both NRFTW and TLOU have some horror elements to them, but horror can mean a lot of different things. Neither is a jump-scare kind of endeavor. It’s much more of a creeping dread that sometimes explodes. There’s some violence in TLOU, both against the infected and other humans. It’s short and brutal, sometimes shocking, but never gratuitous and never “fun.” There’s no quippy banter. Admittedly, this is a place where my original script and my spec diverge – NRFTW is more of an adventure and there’s an element of fun to the action scenes. But Vi also has to face threatening ghosts, which is handled a lot more like TLOU in terms of tone.

In my spec, I knew I needed to put my characters in some kind of physical danger, but as the story couldn’t affect anything that came after, figuring out what that might be was tricky. Unlike The Walking Dead, TLOU does not feature the “monsters” of that story world in every episode. Plus, in the episode before the one I was spec-ing, a literal tide of infected burst out of the ground and slaughtered people. AND there was both an intense a shoot out and a whole armed mob. The episode that followed saw Joel and Ellie surrounded by gun-toting cowboys and later grappling hand to hand with raiders. So I needed something different than any of those scenarios to avoid redundancy, and luckily I already had an idea: nature.

I’m a total documentary geek, especially ones about the natural world. There’s a wonderful series from the naughties called “Life After People” that explores what the planet would do if all of humankind suddenly disappeared. And in the immortal words of Ian Malcolm – “Life finds a way.” In fact, it takes hardly any time at all for nature to take over our structures and erase the signs of human existence. In TLOU, 30 years have already passed since the outbreak, which is more than enough time for nature to reclaim what is rightfully hers.

So, opportunities for physical threats – check. But TLOU isn’t just about that. It has philsophical and existential elements as well, which are even more important than survival in terms of the tone. Some of that came into my spec via the flashbacks and the exploration of Joel’s past, but the present needed to raise issues as well. Which all came together once I chose my setting. (see below)

Like editing myself when it came to Joel’s voice, I also had to combat my own instincts when it came to some of the story beats. There was a big part of me that wanted to give these characters a respite and give them at least a bit of an upbeat ending before they forged ahead into the next round of terribleness. Which speaks to how well they were crafted – I love them and I want what’s best for them. But that’s not my job. For balance, I did give them some lighter moments and a chance for Ellie to be a kid. It was only for a few moments here and there, and in a way that served their connection story. But when it came to the ending, it was clear that tone had to win. It wasn’t actually hard to figure out the grim ending – it felt inevitable once I got there.

The World

For most spec projects, the setting will be more or less chosen for you. The Office mostly happens in the office. The Power mostly happens in the homes of the various women, with a few other venues or the street thrown in from time to time. So probably for 99% of people reading this post, you’ve probably got most of locations provided and it’s just a matter of using them right. And remember – don’t get cute. Prove that you can be a good mimic.

(Ironically, for my particular project – essentially a cross-country odd couple roadtrip – the setting was wiiiiiiiide open. But we’ll get to that in a minute.)

But the world of a story isn’t just about the physical space. Time period, for instance will have a huge influence on what is “in-world.” The rules of the microcosm of the story world, too. The Mafia has its own rules that the story will have to respect. If there’s a magic system or chain of command, that has to be taken into account. And for my spec, the threat of the infected, desolation of the apocalypse and the lack of resources were driving factors.

I also wanted to embrace the road-trippiness of their situation. I’ve criss-crossed the US a few times, and especially once you get west of the Dakotas, there’s a certain flavor of Americana you can’t find anywhere else. In the time jump in TLOU, Ellie and Joel travel from St. Louis to somewhere in Wyoming, so I pulled out a map and tried to figure out a likely route. I also didn’t want more than a few weeks to have passed since the St. Louis episode, which placed them in either Nebraska or Colorado, depending on which highway they followed. Which brought me to the wacky world of roadside attractions.

I ran through a lot of possible scenarios – abandoned theme park, overgrown waterpark, world’s largest ball of stamps, kitschy theme restaurants. But once I hit on an open air historical museum that also hosted a pack rat’s random assortment vehicles and other vaguely historical junk, I knew I had my main location. I come from a museum background, and I credit wierd and wonderful places like this just as much as the shiny, expertly curated behemoths with putting me on that path once upon a time. And it also gave me another connection to the past and present/how we change theme. But now, I could raise some questions about human civilization as a whole.

Wow, That was LOT

Hopefully, all this rambling has helped you, or at least entertained you a little. I have no idea if this spec will actually help me do what I want to do, but in the end I was really pleased with the result and proud to share it. So that’s a win in my book regardless.

The only downside is that the original pilot I started nearly a year ago has been dormant as I did this spec and other work for Quivalon (including the aforementioned short script). But I’ve got a birthday coming up and a promise to myself that I’d finish something before then. Wish me luck!

And good luck to you out there, fellow scribes!