6 Questions with Jane Espenson

Join the Q&A with Jane on 12/3!

When I started the Writers Panel podcast back in 2011, Jane Espenson was my first call. I was already a fan of Jane’s writing from Buffy, Angel, Firefly, The OC, Andy Barker PI, and Battlestar Galactica, where she was working when we’d first met a few years earlier. Upon meeting, I became as big a fan of Jane the Person as I was of Jane the Writer. She’s as funny and disarming and lovely and interesting and interested as you could hope for in a dinner companion. There’s also no one, and I don’t say this lightly, as thoughtful about the craft of writing.

One could chalk this up to the 25 years of experience Jane has as a television writer, but I have a hunch she was like this before. She has the mind of a scientist when it comes to craft. I think this is what makes her so valuable to every writers’ room she’s been in. Jane isn’t precious. She takes joy in the process.

I recall the 100th episode of the podcast, a kind of all-stars get-together that included Jane, Mike Schur, Carlton Cuse, Damon Lindelof, Charles Murray, and others. I’d spent the previous two years hearing about writers who love “having written,” so I asked Jane what it is about the actual writing that she so enjoys.

It's finding the right word. I don't feel like I'm great at structure or story or anything, but I love to write the right line, the right word for the right character and then you get to read it to yourself and you hear the actor say it in your head and you get to chuckle.

What followed this was a delightful anecdote from Jane’s co-worker on Buffy, Marti Noxon, who talked about walking by Jane’s office and hearing her laughing out loud to herself as she wrote. That, friends, is joy in the process.

I asked Jane in her first guest appearance on the podcast about what the “Espenson stamp” is on an episode or show she’s worked on. But Jane doesn’t really work that way, which is part of why she can write on shows as diverse as Dinosaurs, Gilmore Girls, Torchwood, and Caprica. (Look at the shows she’s working on right now! They could not be more different from each other). There is, however, a Jane-Espenson-Voice that reveals itself in a playfulness in dialogue and, for lack of another way to explain it, a feeling that a character has been examined thoroughly, dissected and then reassembled to be the sharpest version of itself that it can be.

It’s individual lines. It’s dialogue, because I feel like I live and swim around in the dialogue. Those are the things that come back to me, when someone quotes a line… there are a few: when Willow was caught having scrawled an arcane symbol on her notebook and has to defend it and she says, “It’s a doodle. I do doodle. You do doodle too.” Like, that’s me.

Those kinds of Espenson touches, she says, “are scattered throughout my career. When Dawn is singing about anchovies because ‘they’re the most delicious fishes’, that’s me. Just little wordplay instances.”

One of the many great things about Jane is that her focus on the craft of writing means that her advice is evergreen. Examples will be quoted exhaustively in the life of this newsletter. But look around for yourself. Jane kept a blog from 2005-2010 that is a wealth of valuable craft advice. You can find the archive here. I’d also recommend the Writers Panel episode I recorded with Jane and Doug Petrie (also of Buffy) in which we did a deep dive on craft, revisiting a lot of advice from the blog.

Anyone who attends the exclusive live Q&A with Jane Espenson on Dec 3, 10am PT, should count themselves lucky to learn from her! And the only way to participate (or listen later) is to become a paid subscriber, so upgrade now!

1. What are you working on right now?

Foundation. I’m also consulting on The Santa Clauses, and I write freelance episodes of the rebooted Fantasy Island on Fox. All of them are wonderful and they couldn’t be more different from each other, which is perfect. I love a varied diet.

2. What challenges are you facing specific to your current writing project?

I imagine we all always have concerns about if we’re contributing enough. People aren’t really paying you to think; they’re paying you to have ideas… which is unfortunately a bit out of your control. You can think all day, but will you have ideas? Will they help? I have a fear of unearned pay.

3. What advice about the business of TV/film writing can you give to someone starting out now?

Learn to write a spec pilot and write lots of them. Make your own opportunities — seek out mentors, identify the kind of job you want, ask questions, look for unusual ways in, meet other aspirings and network with them. Make sure this is the job you want. Guard your health — this is a mental job, and anything that threatens your mental abilities is a real challenge. Don’t get complacent.

4. What advice about the craft of writing can you give to someone starting out?

If you’ve heard the joke you’re writing, or seen the scene you’re writing, it can feel “right” — after all, another professional did it this way. But it’s not going to work — it’ll be stale and unfunny. Sometimes when the writing is going very quickly and easily, it can mean you’ve hit one of those situations. Stop and think about a fresh way to approach the moment. Usually this will involve thinking about would really happen, what someone would really say. And remember that the characters in your script have (probably) watched TV themselves and are going to be as attuned to cliches and tropes as the viewers are.

5. What do you respond to most in a piece of writing?

I adore characters who feel familiar from real life, but whom I’ve never seen captured in a script before. I thought Orange is the New Black was excellent at this — you’d recognize a personality, but not because you’d seen them on TV before.    

6. What are you watching/reading/listening to lately that’s getting you excited or inspired

I love Our Flag Means Death and What We Do in the Shadows — the Waititi-verse is perfect for my sense of humor.

Books, I’ve been reading lots of books about creeping authoritarianism. Fun.

In podcasts, I love No Such Thing as a Fish — obscure facts presented in a very funny way, and Game of Roses, which is a very amusing podcast about the Bachelor/Bachelorette shows viewed with a sports-analysis-lens.

But mostly, I’d say I get inspired by the shows I work on – there are always new scripts to read, new cuts to watch, fantastic conversations in the (zoom) room, new ideas to explore. I worked with a writer, early in my career, who was approaching the end of his career. He said that in all his years in the business, he’d never worked on a show that he would watch. Chilling! I’ve managed to avoid that, and I’m very conscious of how lucky that makes me. If you’re lucky enough to work on something good, let that joy carry you. And if you work on something that’s not good, find something to love about it (that one joke, the funny people in the room, the message, the potential… something) and nurture that in your heart!