Sudden Sabbatical Due to Script Scramble
Obviously I got a bit behind here. The last few months have all been busy, but May really took the cake. With the end of the school year closing in, I’ve been trying to squeeze in as many substitute teaching days as possible. On top of that, and all the usual low-level chaos I keep simmering in my life, the Austin Film Festival Screenwriting Contest closed last Tuesday. I have been working with three other writers on developing a middle-grade animated TV series since last September, and we intended to submit our pilot episode to the contest by the end of April.
Our good intentions, however, were utterly powerless against the disaster that was our first draft. So it was ALL HANDS ON DECK for the last month as we plowed through a truly intense round of revisions that has transformed that messy first draft into something I’m quite proud to have my name attached to. We were fine-tuning right up to the deadline, but managed to get the script in on time!
And now we’re going to have to wait until September for the results. There is a truly tortuous summer in my future, folks.
Anyway, thank you for your patience and I apologize for the impromptu sabbatical.
Free-Write:
Free-writes are short scenes that come out of a short stint of writing time on a program called FlowState, which deletes everything I’ve written if I stop writing. I go into them blind, can’t stop to think while I write, and don’t edit them before they’re posted here beyond correcting any typos or punctuation. Basically: I don’t know what this is about, either!
20-Minute Free-Write: Morning Rush
Jane was not accustomed to the morning rush. She wasn’t usually a morning rush sort of person, more… a mid-morning ease-into-the day kind of person. But the client could only meet at 8 am, so here she was, in the midst of morning rush on a chilly fall Tuesday and hating every second of it.
“Claire?” the barista called out. The girl couldn’t have been more than 19, and seemingly had a piercing for each year. She looked as happy to be there as Jane felt. Jane watched as the girl looked around, called “Claire” again a little louder, and then heaved a sigh and left the drink on the bar. ‘Claire’ clearly wasn’t in any hurry to collect her beverage.
Jane fidgeted in line. The guy manning the register looked like he had lived four years to every one of the barista’s, and he seemed to think the register was either rigged to explode or a piece of alien machinery that didn’t function on the English alphabet. Jane tapped her foot, eying his gnarled fingers as he searched out one button, and then the next, and finally reached for a cup and a pen and asked the guy-at-the-front-of-the-line’s name.
Everyone took a step forward as front-of-the-line-guy moved to the side. Claire’s drink waited on the bar. The barista stared dispassionately at the espresso machine while steam rose up in front of her face. The cashier punched at the register and swore.
A peppy young woman hurried over and punched a few keys, her voice clipped but cheerful. “That’s alright, Roger, don’t worry about it. Just remember the clear out button is this one, not that one.” She swept over to the barista, quickly scooping up a cup and setting it up under the espresso maker. She got the machine running and handed it off to the barista, and then glided over to the baked good case and quickly filled three orders in succession. She flew back to the pickup counter and laid out the little paper bags, then peeked at the name on the cup still sitting on the bar. “Claire!” she called out, voice clear as a damn bell.
A woman in a crisp suit looked up, hardly pausing her tirade into her cellphone, and unfolded herself from a chair by the window. She scooped up the cup and one of the baked good bags and marched out the door.
Jane stepped forward with the rest of her fellow waiters-in-line. The cashier’s voice was reaching her now, slow and thready. Jane sighed, and looked on with envy as front-of-the-line-guy picked up his drink. He paused, on his way to the door, sipping at that precious, life-giving java, and his eyes met Jane’s. They were the color of maple syrup. He grinned, tossing her a thumbs up.
“Worth the wait,” he assured her as he scooted past her toward the door.
“It better be,” Jane muttered to herself, stepping forward again and finally finding herself face-to-face with the cashier.
His eyes were pale with cataracts. He smiled toothily at her. “What can I get for you?”
Jane opened her mouth to order her usual, a cinnamon oat milk latte, but her eyes caught on a sign next to the register listing a few seasonal specials. “I’ll have a maple latte,” she said, glancing almost subconsciously toward the door. “With oat milk,” she added.
The cashier’s fingers jabbed artlessly at the screen. Jane paid. She stepped aside. The barista’s black-lined eyes widened slightly in surprise when Jane was there, ready to take the drink right out of her hand the moment it was ready. Jane bolted for the door, now certainly late for her meeting. She sipped her drink, the bright sweetness of maple conjuring images of pools of maple syrup, bright with laughter.
Jane smiled. Perhaps the morning rush wasn’t so bad.
TV Show Review
Dexter (2006-2013)
Alright, so this is an oldie. Dexter ran from 2006-2013. My guess is you’ve either already seen it or have no intention of ever seeing it, at this point. But I’ve been rewatching it this week, so it’s ripe in my mind for a review—and the writers deserve to have their horns copiously tooted.
This show does three things incredibly well: it somehow makes a serial killer with antisocial personality disorder relatable, it consistently writes itself into a corner and then performs some mind-boggling acrobatics to get out of it, and the dialogue is crafted with absolute precision to paint visceral pictures of real and distinct people.
Making a Serial Killer Relatable
Dexter himself should be a main character that alienates an audience. This guy doesn’t have feelings. He doesn’t love, he doesn’t cry, he doesn’t aspire to anything beyond not getting caught. He sticks to his routine. He would be boring if it wasn’t for the fact that he kills people without remorse. So why do people love him?
For starters, he is relatable on a base level. He complains about the things we all complain about in our own minds. He points out the absurdity of our behavior in a dry, accepting way that makes us think “he’s not wrong.” For example, in a scene when Dexter, as a child, is at a beach with his parents and sister and they’re trying to take a family photo, Dexter isn’t smiling. It’s hot and the sand is uncomfortable and getting everywhere and he wants to go home, so why should he smile? His dad has to explain that smiling for the photo will make the people around him happy. That it isn’t really about how he feels, but about building relationships. And we all get it, because we’ve all taken a family photo when we didn’t really want to—we just had a fight with a sibling, or we’d just gotten in trouble, or we were just really over it that day—and maybe we stubbornly glared at the camera or maybe we forced a smile, but we’ve all been there. It’s relatable, even with such an unrelatable character.
Dexter discovering what it means to “act human” reveals us to ourselves. His dry humor appeals to us, and of course, the fact that he only kills other killers and lives by a code allows us to overlook his violent urges.
Writers Writing Themselves Into a Corner
As a writer, it can be tempting to make things a little easier on yourself by letting your character get a little lucky. But it isn’t satisfying for the audience. The more you back a character into a corner, the more it starts to look like there is no way out—the noose has closed around their neck and the trapdoor has opened under their feet and this is the end—the more satisfying it is when the character pulls a Houdini.
In Dexter’s case, the writers aren’t afraid to make his inevitable arrest seem imminent. They aren’t afraid to put every other character in the show hot on his trail in different ways and make Dexter’s every attempt at self-preservation fail. He writes a nonsensical manifesto to throw off the investigation? The lead agent figures out the trick and learns more about Dexter based on that action. He tries to destroy evidence and cover it up as an accident? The samples he needed to destroy were stored elsewhere. No matter how clever Dexter gets, it doesn’t work out for him.
But, of course, he still has to get out of it. And the writers force themselves to rise to the occasion, rather than drag the story down to an easier solution.
Dialogue Building Real People, not Characters
The characters in this show are clearly written from a deep understanding of a range of experiences, and none of them are perfect. Deb is over-confident and fowl-mouthed. LaGuerta is rigid and conniving. Rita is trauma-burdened and self-concious. Batista puts up a front. Doakes is aggressive and single-minded. Masuka is crude and easily distracted. All of them have positive qualities, too, which make them likable characters, but the writers are not afraid to lean into the negative side of humanity. They don’t make apologies for any of their characters’ faults. At times, these people seem just as damaged as Dexter.
The brilliance of the dialogue is how the writers balance the need to make the content clear to a broad audience while cultivating this niche dialect for each person. Batista and LaGuerta break into Spanish when they’re the only ones in the room. Doakes is regimented and uses military lingo. Deb’s curse-word bank is wildly extensive. Their manner of speaking, their sentence structure, their slang—all of these things come together with such precision, so that if you were to pull a single line out of the script and ask who it belonged to, I could probably tell you. That level of detail is an insane accomplishment, and the writers deserve immense kudos for it.
A Great—if Gory—Watch
If you haven’t seen Dexter and you’re a fan of the bloodier crime shows, you should definitely give it a go. There are a lot of opinions about the later seasons, and I’m not going to weigh in on those here since it’s been several years since I watched them. Feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments!
Whether you dive in for a rewatch or tune in for the first time, Dexter proves that even a monster can be a mirror—and killer TV, too.
