670 - Writing Across Mediums
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Hey, this is John. Today's episode is a little unusual because I'm a guest on it rather than being the host. Back in October, I was part of a panel at the Austin Film Festival with a group of writers who worked across movies, TV, comics, plays, video games, and VR. We discussed the similarities and differences between writing for these media and how you put together a career that moves back and forth between them.

It ended up being a really great discussion. So we asked the Austin Film Festival if we could share it with our listeners. And fortunately, they said yes. So in addition to me, you're going to hear from Jordan Mechner, Erica Harrell, and Desiree Proctor. Evan Narcisse is our moderator. He is terrific. I have very high standards for moderators on panels, and Evan is great.

Now, Austin actually records all of their panels and releases them through their own podcast, On Story. So if you enjoy this one, definitely check out On Story because they have fantastic conversations going back years. Script Notes premium members should stick around after for audience questions specifically about writing video games, including the differences between writing an active player versus a passive viewer, strategies for pitching ideas to a publisher, and how to stand out as a writer with the major game developers.

Without any further ado, here's the Writing Across Mediums panel, which was recorded live at the 2024 Austin Film Festival. Enjoy.

Hi, everyone. My name is Evan Narcissus. I'm moderating this panel. About me, I am a recovering journalist who now works in video games full-time. I'm a senior writer at Brass Line Entertainment where I'm working on a big project that I can't talk about. But it'll be cool when it comes out. I've worked as a consultant in video games. I worked on Spider-Man and the House of Morales, Marvel's Avengers.

I was narrative lead on a small indie game called Dot's Home, but I've also written for television. Gosh, I can't remember any of it right now. I wrote for Genlock, which was made here, an animated series. Like, this is my third panel in two days, so I'm a little punchy, but I'm moderating. I'm going to allow our illustrious guests to introduce themselves. So let's start with a man whose games shaped my childhood, Jordan Mechner. Tell the people about yourself.

Well, I started with comics when I was like six years old, and then computers came along, and I switched to making video games. I made a game called Prince of Persia in the 80s. Yeah.

Remade it with Ubisoft 20 years ago as the sands of time for the next generation of consoles. Then with the help of this gentleman here, John August, we actually got Prince of Persia made as a movie, which came out in 2010. So I did a bit of screenwriting and then came back to my first childhood love of comics. My most recent work is actually a graphic novel. It's about making Prince of Persia and games and movies, but it's also about three generations of my family's story. And this is the first book that I've drawn as well as written.

John, how about you? All right. I started off as a journalism major, so I liked writing for other people. I found out there was such a thing as screenwriting, and it's like, oh, I want to do that. And so I started writing screenplays. I moved out to Los Angeles, started writing screenplays, and was lucky to get a bunch of them made. The first of those that got made was Go, which is having its 25th anniversary screening tonight, if you want to come see that.

And since that time, I've had a chance to work in a lot of other mediums. So I have a three-book graphic novel series, which I actually started writing at the Austin Film Festival on one rainy night called Arlo Finch. And those three books are out there in the world. I've done a Broadway show. I did the Broadway version of Big Fish. Learning in the process of sort of how you tell a story on a stage is so different. So I'm excited for this thing about writing across mediums.

I've done some television. I'm looking to do some more television. I got a chance to work with Jordan on The Adaptation of Prince of Persia, but we also did another video game. It was really fun to learn from him the difference between writing for an audience that's just experiencing something passively versus being the player who's actually engaging in the storytelling, and that's what we're getting into tonight. Respect. Put some respect on our name. Yeah. Yeah.

My name is Desiree. Eric is my writing partner. That's true. We started off as Floridians. Yes, that is our origin story. So you bonded over trauma. Yes, yeah, very much so. And also, you know, going to a Florida state school, I moved out to L.A. not knowing that such a thing as like a TV writer's room existed. And so I moved out to L.A. just like...

I know I want to write. I was doing theater, writing my own plays on the side. And it wasn't until we were working on this show called Happy Endings. I was working as a production assistant. And that's when I learned what a TV writer's room was. And we would just hear them laughing in the room next to us. And I was like, that's what I want to do. Yeah. The way that show was set up was the production office was separated from the writer's room by like a tiny hallway that then now felt like a gulf. Like, how do we cross that?

tiny hallway to get over there and do that. It was such a dream. And it's such a dream, first of all, to be here in Austin to talk at a festival, you know, to you guys about this. Yeah, and so then we ended up, a very short explanation of a long career is we ended up writing originally in sketch comedy and then in scripted and then we ended up transitioning into video games because a company called Telltale Games, which Shannon worked at us with, um,

Was specifically looking for female game developers who had television experience. So we ended up moving up to Marin County, working there for a couple years on games like The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Guardians of the Galaxy. Story Mode. Yes. And while we were there, an opportunity came up to apply for the DC Comics writing program. And you needed something published. And we didn't have a book, but...

video games are published. So we ended up submitting some of our game work to be considered for the DC Comics program. We were the only women accepted and we were, I think, the youngest people accepted at that time. And it was such a wonderful learning experience. Scott Snyder taught it and really kind of gave us the education of how to write for comics, particularly for the big places like Marvel and DC.

Yes. And so from there, we wrote a little bit for DC and Marvel. And then we ended up publishing our own graphic novel with an LA-based publishing company called Fanbase Press. And our graphic novel is called Nuclear Power. And it's an alt history on the Cuban Missile Crisis. If the United States and USSR had actually nuked each other, what would the world look like today? And both of our mothers are Cuban. And so that incident had a big impact on our life. So that was really the inspiration for that.

And then since then, we've worked on three features, one currently in production, animated feature. Yeah, and on the TV side, mostly broadcasts like Disney Channel, Lopez versus Lopez on NBC. Damn, this is quite a panel, huh? Yeah.

I think one of the things that, well, first I have a fiat delivered from my moderated physician on this. This is an anti-AI room. I'm not going to entertain any questions about AI and how it might impact the industry because we're all human beings here seeking to tell human stories and

And, you know, let's see if they catch up. But like, I hope not. OK, that that said, you know, we've heard from the panel about their journeys a little bit. I want to start by asking what was the form of media, whether it's a TV show, a comic book, a game or anything else that made you decide, hey, people do that. I want to do that. Jordan, let's start with you.

I think probably from as old as I was able to hold a pencil or hold a book in my hand, I was like, I didn't want to just read them. I wanted to make them. And so animation, movies, comics, and books all sort of hit me at about the same time. And that's all I wanted to do until I was about 12 or 13. And then suddenly video games became fun. Before that, there had been pinball. Then suddenly there were Space Invaders. I was like, I want to do that. And games were actually... You were seeing story in Space Invaders? Yeah.

Space Invaders? Apple Invaders, yeah. It was the first game that was actually... You could play it on your computer at home in 1979, and it looked as well animated as the games that you could play in the arcade by putting a quarter into. That's how old I am. And so, yeah, for about 30 years, I just...

made games, and eventually kind of came back. I still wanted to make movies. I still wanted to do books and comics. I finally sort of found a way to weave those all back in. John, what about you? I think like a lot of people, like Jordan, I was reading books like, oh, I want to write stories, so I write short stories. And I always basically wanted to, it's that weird thing where you're kind of copying, you're kind of imitating, and then eventually in the process of imitation, you're adding your own stuff. And I was like, oh, I can do my own thing. So an example would be, I loved this spy magazine, which had this

very specific sardonic tone. I'm like, I want to be able to write like that. And so the first attempts at that are clumsy copying, but then you sort of get better at it and you figure out what it was. And that's been true for all the different mediums. I remember the first time I tried to write a scene in a screenplay format, like this is just so weird and the format is weird, but then it becomes really natural and then you get to be able to find how to tell the story in this strange format. Yeah.

Spy magazine. I've not thought about that for years. That was such like a very specific kind of... There's a great hardcover book version of the illustrated history of it. Desiree, Erica? For me, I was a military brat, so I moved around a lot. And spending a lot of time on the road, I read a lot of books...

because it was the only way to pass the time. And so for me, I think my first attempt was a novel at like nine years old. I don't think I finished it because I was very much into the classics at that age. I was reading like Robinson Crusoe. I was like a Swiss family Robinson knockoff, to your point. Yeah, it was a lot of imitating other people. Yeah, I should go back. I should dig up that book. Yeah.

For me, I think I would love, I loved reading comics as a kid. I think I am dyslexic and it was a bit harder for me to like just actually sit down and read like longer things. So comics were just like such a gateway into matching the picture with words and understanding. I would remember just like playing like X-Men on the playground constantly. So I kind of had that as like something I was really passionate about.

But I honestly thought that when I started my journey that I was going to go with the producer production side of things. And then she met me. And then she ruined my life. I was on a track, guys.

But, you know, Desiree and I ended up pairing up. She had been writing plays. I went to see like her play at the Los Angeles Fringe Fest. And I was just coming up with kooky ideas. And so some of my kooky ideas, I would run by her at three in the morning. And she would take this really wonderful like yes and approach to it. Improv guys recommend it. Take classes in improv. It really does help. And we would then go back and forth, back and forth until we were shaping an idea. And that's really like kind of my footsteps into writing.

Okay, real quick, Erica. You dropped Professor Xavier's school, Favorite X-Men. Well, now I would say Risqué because we got to write a short for Risqué. But back then, I think I was Storm. Nice. I was Rogue. Yes. Okay, you know, we've all worked across different forms of media with different kind of mechanical inner workings and different thematic possibilities.

I want to ask the biggest commonality across different forms of writing and different forms of media, writing in different forms of media, and biggest misconceptions. You know, I think some of us have touched games to varying degrees, but like one of the knocks on games is like story. For a long time, it didn't matter in games until

until people like Jordan started to change it. But when people think about video games, they think about a first-person shooter where you're just like running from place to place and headshotting guys and not necessarily knowing that there are games that can touch you as emotionally as a well-written novel or play, whatever. So biggest misconceptions, biggest commonalities across the different forms of media you've worked in. Let's start from all the way down there with Erica first.

Kind of like what you just said, I think people have disregarded certain things of mediums like video games. I think maybe I did that too, where you're just kind of like, oh, this is just a, you're going for a puzzle or you're just going for like an action sequence. But becoming a writer and learning about player agency and player choice and being able to give depth

to an experience like does really make you get so invested in that story. Like if you were controlling those things in like a Walking Dead game and you do have to make a choice to someone's bit, like you were really tore up about that.

And I think that that's where video games have become so powerful. I think on the multicam sitcom side of things and television, it's really amazing to have some of your jokes go before 150 people and see if they laugh. And people think like, oh, that's just cam laughter. It's like, no, there's really a studio audience who are in real time giving you feedback on something you wrote, whether that's, you know, someone entering the door and everyone goes, aww, and you're like, oh, we don't need that aww, but like it does affect people. Yeah.

Yeah, in addition to expanding on what you're saying, Erica, people do tend to write off half-hour multi-camera sitcoms as being very formulaic, but really you're putting on...

Yeah.

like a very hard form of television to work in because we've worked in single cam like superhero shows and that's all like written by the time you get to set so when you're on set you're there just checking for coverage and making sure like the director is doing what they need to do yeah yeah and you're getting the performances out of the actors you're very rarely rewriting on the fly and so I think people kind of underestimate how hard it is to write multi-camera television

I think I've noticed from working with folks in video games and game design overall is that in games you talk about the core loop, the core mechanics. What is the fundamental thing that the game is about and making sure that that feels rewarding? And when you talk about a sitcom or any episodic structure of a show, it's the same thing. What is the audience expecting to happen over the course of this time and how do you make that both rewarding

rewarding and surprising? And how do you make sure that you're giving them what they came for, but also surpassing their expectations? And that's the challenge you're always doing. And on a feature level, it's the same thing. You're setting up early on those first 10 pages. This is what the world of the movie is. This is the kind of thing you're expecting to see. And you're continuously meeting those expectations and hopefully surpassing those expectations. But you have to establish that sort of core loop early on in the process.

All of these are storytelling media, but storytelling sort of works differently in all of them. Like in a game, there's sort of two stories. There's the story of the game universe and the characters and, you know, whatever happens in that story. But then there's the story of the player playing that game. And even if the game is just like Tetris, you can still have a story, which is like, I was doing great. I was going for my highest score ever. And then blah, blah.

So when the player's story and the game universe story intersect, that's when you have the opportunity to have the moments of the story that are emotional or surprising or scary or moving happen in gameplay rather than have them happen in a cutscene so that you're sitting back and watching as if it were an episode in a movie. That's where you can achieve an effect in a game that you can't do in any other medium.

So it's an interactive storytelling medium. Books, graphic novels are interactive in a different way, which is that whereas in film editing or TV editing, you know, you control the pace, you're delivering the story, you know, in time. And timing is something that can be really powerful in film and TV suspense and surprise. But

In a graphic novel, it's the reader who decides when to turn the page and how much time to spend looking at each panel. Some people read the words really fast and then go back on a second read and look at the images. Others just stare at every panel and absorb all the details. So you can invite the reader's eye to move over the page, but you can't control it the way you can in those other media. Yeah, so first, perhaps a little known fact is

I believe in the American release of Tetris, they gave the blocks names. Like one of them is like Twisty Steve or some shit. It's amazing. It's like, you didn't need to do this, but I guess we're doing it. But to follow up on what you're saying about comics, like it's interesting because I got into writing comics

after being a critic and journalist. So like I thought about the form a lot from a reader's perspective. When I started writing them, one of the things, I had an artist tell me that like, not a lot of people do this, but like I will describe things in the foreground and the background of a panel. And like you really start to think about them as little dioramas, right?

And you have these axes, right? Like the X, Y, Z axes for like depth. Like most people think like, okay, it's the right panel, right part of the panel, left part of the panel. You can do foreground and background too. And like you're saying about those gutters between panels and comics, like that's time, you know? So like, you don't have to say months later,

You can reflect that in dialogue. Maybe it's daylight in one scene and maybe it's nighttime in the other. And you can lean on your collaborators to help you do the storytelling in a way that you couldn't necessarily in a novel or other kind of form. So yeah, each form has a different kind of mechanic that you can avail yourself of. All right, next question. What medium did you want to start in?

Where did you actually start? And when did you first work outside of those boundaries? So like for me, I started as a journalist. I never thought I was going to do anything creative. I thought I was going to be a critic and a journalist all the time. But then, you know, layoffs happened. And you're like, I guess I might try writing for games now. And guess what? That's working out for me. So same question for you guys. Where did you want to start? Or do you actually start? And when did you first work out of your initial starting position? Jordan? Yeah.

Well, I mean, I started making comics and movies, but I was like 10 years old. So, you know, it was frustrating to me that I would make my Super 8 animated movie and it just wouldn't be as good as the Disney ones that I loved.

And so when computers came along, I think one of the things that attracted me at age 13 was because the medium was so new, I could make a game. And if it had high-res graphics and it was smoothly animated, nobody could tell that a kid made it. So there was actually, like it seemed almost doable to reach like a real, a large audience with the game, which I couldn't do yet with my movies or my comics, you know, as hard as I tried. Yeah.

I still wanted to make movies, though, so I kept doing that. And so for most of the time that I was making my games on the Apple II, I was also trying to study film, screenwriting, writing screenplays, making short films.

I'm thinking, should I go to film school? Is making games taking up all my time so that they really seemed like two completely separate career paths and it was one or the other. And that was true through the 80s, I would say. And then in the 90s, they started to come together. I did a game called The Last Express, which actually involved a film shoot, casting and recording voices because by then games could actually have dialogue, they could have music, they could have camera angles. And then

After that was Prince of Persia, The Sands of Time, which was a more cinematic kind of game, which then ironically led me back to my first opportunity to write a screenplay that actually got made. But it was thanks to this Apple II game that I had done 20 years before instead of pursuing filmmaking.

I mean, it feels like you had it all planned. Like, we can say it's kind of awkward, but, like, it's kind of annoying. I'm storytelling her. I'm trying to make it seem like it makes sense. Yeah. John? It's great sort of hearing Jordan talk through that thing because what I'm recognizing and sort of resonating with is that you feel like, oh, I have to do this thing, I have to do this thing in this order, and you recognize that ultimately you're just...

doing the thing that's most interesting to you. And if it's the most interesting to you, it's probably going to be the most interesting to the people down the road. So you don't have to have a big master plan. I didn't write my first screenplays with the intention of like, oh, I have to get this made. It's more like, I just want to figure out what this is. I want to see what this is like. So again, so starting off, I thought I was going to be a journalist.

I went through this media program and it was an advertising major, which was creative and got me a chance to sort of learn about a lot of stuff and realize like I don't want to sell like dog biscuits the rest of my life. I was just like, I don't want to go to the Addy Awards for like, you know, some regional campaign. Like that was not going to be interesting to me. And so then it was the decision like, oh, there's a...

This film school, I can go out there, that can be my sort of excuse for why I'm going to try this new thing. And I've always loved being a beginner in some new thing. And so part of the reason why I wanted to do this video game with Jordan or I wanted to do a Broadway show or the physical games that we make is it's so exciting to just not have the expectations of this has to be a success or not. I can just play around and be an amateur. And that's really fun.

Growing up, I was like an annoying theater kid. So I started, still am, nothing's changed. Constantly singing Agatha all along, you know. So,

So I started off in theater, going to theater competitions in high school, writing my own plays there. And you know, that's kind of how Erica was first introduced to my writing. I was part of the Los Angeles Fringe Festival when I first moved to LA. And again, like I said, I didn't know anything about TV or film or how to break into that. And so I started working in production and I was like, I want to get paid as a writer, but I don't know how. And then

Eternal struggle. Yes, yeah. I started, I don't know exactly how I did it, but I started picking up work as a copywriter. And so that was like my first paid writing work was working in advertising.

I was the first person on both sides of my family to go to college. So much like Desiree, like I didn't know much about it, but I did know I could disappoint them by going to film school. And that's what I did. And in film school, I was actually doing more of the like film studies, probably leading towards like the, you know, becoming a critic, that type of thing. But watching film, like kind of studying, but then realizing that, oh, there is this whole world of

that you could get. And it was like, where I first came from was like, I need to pay my bills. Like there's nobody helping me pay these bills. So I started in the production side of things as well. It was like a PA and then worked my way up to coordinator. And once I could kind of get a foothold, of course I was still working in retail on the side.

I was like, oh, maybe I can explore things. If I can drop this retail job, I can add a job of writing on the weekends. And that's kind of what we kept doing, nights and weekends for years. Yeah, your first paid writing job was the show we sold to Amazon. Yeah, so the first thing I got paid to write was selling a show to Amazon, animated show. So Erica started strong. It's all been downhill.

Yeah, you know, it's funny because having to switch gears, like I'm working on a game full-time now and I'm also writing a comic series now. So like,

I often find myself thinking, you know, if I could just get the artist to draw from this vantage point, right? Like from this camera angle, like when you're working in a game engine, you can move that camera around really easily, right? But like, you know, describing to an artist, I want an anti-view, but make sure we're going up the left nostril and not the right. And, you know, so my question for you guys is, are there special affordances from one kind of medium that you wish you had in another? Yeah.

Like, you know, I wish I could pause this movie so I could really take in

I mean, you can't. I made the same mistake this morning at a panel I moderated. Yes, you can pause movies. At home, not in the theater. But, like, hopefully you guys get the gist of the question. No, I mean, you're making a great point because that ability to pause is what's so interesting about, like, writing novels for the first time. It's like, I can't count on a person reading through the chapter completely, but I know they can flip back a few pages if they miss a thing. They can sort of take things in at their own time versus a movie.

on a big screen, it's going to zoom forward at 24 frames per second and there's no stopping it. So you have to anticipate that as a writer and sort of pre-digest things so it can all fit through. As a person who adapts a lot of books into movies, that's really my job is to sort of be the person to make sure that it actually all makes sense if you're experiencing it for the first time. Something I wish I could take from

Theater is the collaboration you have with the audience. Like, you're going to believe that this desk represents a whole office. And if that character takes two steps over here, they are in a different world and a different universe that you're having that thing. That is a blessing. And you see movies sometimes that will try to do some aspects of that and it can kind of work, but it's just, that's fundamentally not a cinematic idea. It's a stage idea and you have to accept that.

And graphic novel pages are the same kind of thing where it's like they're on the same page but they're in two completely different spaces. That's amazing. Yeah, you can do things in a graphic novel. You can go from an intimate moment between two people in close-up to a map and it's completely normal. And in film, you can do those things but it's sort of odd every time and it kind of breaks the experience. When I wrote my first graphic novel, Technopolis,

I was pretty new at graphic novels at this point and I had wonderful illustrators, Lynn Pham and Alex Pouvaland. And so I would deliver my script page. I didn't do what you just described. I didn't try to describe what they should draw in every panel. I wrote it as if it were a film screenplay, pretty much in master shot. I figured they would figure out how to put it on the page. But when we got to a fight scene,

Alex said, okay, I completely changed this. And I realized that what I had written, I had written it as if it was going to be filmed, might have worked on the screen. It totally would not have worked on the page because you can't

have that suspense of moment to moment what's happening in the fight. It's more of drawing panels that each one shows the characters in a static position that somehow makes you create in your mind a fight and they say the things to each other. The one thing I would say about comics is you have to freeze time in a comic, right? You've got to pick the moments that the artist is going to draw

And you've got to stitch together a story from frozen moments, whereas like, you know, in animation or film or stuff like that, you can describe something in real time as it happens. Yeah, the reader creates the actions. So you can't say, he walks through the door. Does he have his hand on the closed door? Does he have his hand on the open door? It's one or the other. Yeah.

But I think it was so satisfying when we were doing our graphic novel when our artist would turn in her panels or her pages. There's no better drug. Yes. Getting pages in? No, y'all laugh, but y'all haven't done it. If you haven't done it, like getting pages in, yeah. But the...

even the most satisfying thing was seeing like what they could capture with their emotion that we could then just delete our words. Or like less words, more of your art. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that was such a like wonderful experience to have and to not have like a million notes coming through of just being like, wow, like we described that so well that she was able to do that to where we don't have

describe it anymore. Yay us. Yeah. It's funny, Jordan, your anecdote about Templar, because I had the same thing when I was writing Rises of the Black Panther. I made like two really bad newbie mistakes. The first one was I didn't count my page turns. So... I think you need to explain the add-up. So page turn in comics is a mechanical tool. So it's like, you know, there's a rough shorthand depending on who you are and where you're working with. Like, you want around six panels a page, right? Everything will feel too crowded. So...

I got to panel six. I was like... I had like a little cliffhanger sentence, right? And so the idea is like... You want to see what the next thing that happens. So that's your page turn, right? And you write to page turn so that you want... You keep the reader... Basically, every page has a potential to be a little cliffhanger. So I messed that up. That was the first thing I messed up. The second thing was...

This is two, not two. The second thing was I wrote a double-page spread. So if you're familiar with comics, when they're stapled and single issues, there's a double-page spread so you can have a whole panorama, right? So I wrote this ambitious fight scene in a double-page spread. But because I miscounted my page turns, they weren't continuous pages. So it was like, yeah. And that was one time that happened. Another time that happened was...

artists i wrote a fight scene and i have this happened to me a few times now and this is where we talk about collaboration across disciplines in all these different mediums but i wrote a page you know again trying to be economical six panels and i get the page back from the artists and layouts and it's eight panels i'm like but i wrote six but really what you understand is like it's the artist is the director in comics they're in charge of the pacing so you

He took a moment to zoom in on a character's face when I needed to describe it, and that gives you basically an extra moment frozen in time for the reader to be like, oh, okay, they're really scared, they're really angry here. And artists can make those decisions, and you should encourage them when you're collaborating like this. That's great what you said, that the artist is the director. I would say the artist is the director, the cinematographer, the set designer, the costume designer, and all of the actors. Yeah. You had somebody...

who can do what you need. You know, I've written comic series where Rosita was playing Panther like six, seven years ago and we had two main artists on it and one of

one of them was great with facial expressions, body language, all the kind of like acting stuff on the page. Another was good with technology and loved drawing big robots and stuff. And I didn't find out until later that the robot guy felt like he wasn't getting enough to draw that's in his wheelhouse. And I basically changed midstream and was like, okay, we're going to have some big giant panther robots and this other stuff in the back half of the story. And he was eaten off of it. So it was really great. Evan, I want to echo off the point you're saying about in terms of

learning what the requirements are of the medium. So like the page turn is a thing you have to learn in graphic novels. And the first time I encountered it, like, oh, that's right. Like I never realized it was there. Act breaks in multicam versus one hours and anticipating that they're going to be there, but then by the time of streaming, you don't know if they're going to be there. So you have to plan for them or not plan for them. For me, learning how to tell Big Fish on the stage was like,

I'm used to being able to cut to the next thing. You can't cut on stage. And so if we need to get to a new set, a new location, that is a transition. Everything is a transition. And figuring out, well, how am I physically going to make this thing happen? And acknowledging that there's going to be 30 seconds of stage wait

to do that. So how are you going to fill those moments? And on stage, you have songs, right? Oh, yeah. The whole thing is built around musical numbers in a way that a game is built around gameplay. Yeah, absolutely. So those are the fight scenes of an action movie. You have to figure out what those are. And then in a novel, I can go inside a character's head and let them know what was feeling. I can, within a paragraph, be in the present tense and go back 30 years to fill in this detail and then come back in. So you just have so many different

but also limitations based on the medium you're choosing. I'm actually curious about musicals. I've never worked on that, but I actually like musicals all my life. And,

Is it good to advance the story during a song? Like in the same way that, like a game level, you know, you want to play the level and you've not just advanced in this, but something's happened with the characters. Like in a song, you want to end up in a different place at the end of it. Absolutely. There's different goals you might have for a song, which might be to, you know, advance the story. But more generally, it's to reveal some part of the character that you wouldn't be able to see otherwise. And so classically, the advice is characters sing what they...

can't say and so they get these moments and they are able to expose a part of themselves that they are sometimes discovering for the very first time and again you don't have close-ups on stage but you do have songs which is that ability to to peer inside somebody and you know just the way that edwin's artist added a close-up in that scene sometimes you need that song to do a thing this is amazing because we've kind of naturally provided a segue to my next question so yay us um

You know, we're talking about these differences in storytelling tools, mechanics, and different mediums. What are the differences in world building that you guys have experienced across these different forms? Like a comic, if it's in a shared universe like Marvel or DC, like you have common stories

knowledge that's understood like okay the fantastic four family who live in a skyscraper in manhattan and spider-man's a guy from queens you know and the forms themselves like we've been talking about panels and and freezing moments in time let you do different things so biggest differences in world building character dynamics and thematic expression

Who wants to go first? John August, it's your turn. All right. You were saying, like, you know, if you're in the Marvel Universe, the DC Universe, you can expect that someone's going to show up with a general knowledge of the DC Universe or the Marvel Universe, which is so fantastic. But that's really true for anything you're writing in any medium because if someone sits down to watch

or an action movie, they get a sense of like, they know the tropes, they know the expectations. And so you come in with those advantages of what the audience kind of already knows. And so if you're writing a vampire movie, we know the basic rules of vampires. So as long as you're not changing any of those rules, you got to tell us that you're changing those rules. But otherwise, we know how vampire movies work. And it's such a huge blessing. One of the challenges of a book is that the audience may not know from the start, the reader may not know from the start, like, what is this? And so in this initial...

10 pages, you really have to get a sense of like, this is the kind of thing that happens in this world. This is like the kind of thing you can expect. You mentioned vampire movies, maybe think that AI is a vampire. Just don't let them, don't invite them in. You're a rule. Don't invite them in. Erica, Desiree? You know, when we were working on the Lopez versus Lopez pilot, you know, we're establishing all the characters and you have to do that in their first line of dialogue.

And so for the medium of a multi-camera sitcom, it's all about character and about every single word on the page because there's a certain musicality rhythm to a joke that you also have to land. So you're trying to establish a character and their sense of humor and make the audience laugh all in one line. So that's some of the challenges when world building in a sitcom when you're building something from scratch is

I actually find it a little bit easier when you're working with pre-existing IP because you already know the rules of the world. You can then know where you can play within that sandbox, so that is great. And when we did our graphic novel, we were writing it at the same time as an hour drama as a graphic novel. So we're like, okay, in the hour TV script, we can expand in these things, we can kind of do this, but in a 20-page comic, it's like we're doing like,

So we're kind of doing an abbreviated version of just like one paintbrush stroke of what this is versus being able to expand it, maybe like expound upon like what our world in 2024 would look like if bombs went off, a little bit more detail. And working within the rules of comic books, you kind of want to have like something that we were taught going to the DC Comics program is you want to have like a fight scene in every issue.

And so we brought that into our comic. And so it's like, how do we organically have a fight scene or an action set piece in every issue, which is not something you have to worry about when you're like writing for television necessarily. Yeah. Yeah.

Unless you're writing for Buffy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And every show is going to have its conventions and you're teaching the audience quite early on in the world building, like this is the kind of thing that you can expect to see in one of these episodes. And if it's a Buffy episode without a fight sequence, it stands out because it does that one. Yeah. These expectations are double-edged, aren't they? Like if you take the example of a vampire movie, it's like,

We all think we know how vampire movies work, but think of, like, Let the Right One In. That was a great vampire movie, but, you know, it had different rules. So to communicate how the rules are the same and how they're different, that's absolutely unique to that movie. It was kind of part of, you know, the joy and the charm. So I think the challenge in adapting something across media, so if it's a video game that has a huge following or a comic book that people have, like, read all the issues and they think they know all the characters...

You kind of have to start from zero if you're adapting it. You're making a movie based on a comic book or based on a video game or whatever. It's like you're setting the rules of that version of it from the first frame. There's some things that people can smile at. Oh yeah, I know that. And they're happy. Others, you're going to have to do it differently for whatever reason or you want to do it differently because this is something that you've decided you want to subvert. So you have to communicate that

clearly like what the rules of this version are and sometimes when people are attached to the version that they know they're gonna be like wait this character was described in the novel as six foot tall blonde and blue eyed and this actor is not I don't like it I have a friend of mine who is um altitudinally challenged and is will be forever mad that Hugh Jackman plays Wolverine in the X-Men movies cause like he's supposed to be

Wilfred's supposed to be a short king and we have so few short kings. Yeah, he gets mad about that. You know, since we are blessed to have a writing tandem and, you know, you guys work together too, like talk to me about the writing partner relationship. You know, I've co-written a few comics and I work as part of a writing team in games or I have. Like, what do you get out of a writing partner and why should you have one?

It really prepares you for rejection, like, up front. Wow. I mean that in a very great way. Welcome to couples therapy. Because if there is someone that you can trust and you can pitch something to and they don't like it...

And then they can kind of take the time to explain why. If you're in a television writer's room, we have been in rooms where we have seen someone get their pitch rejected and they will literally go like, and cross their arms. And it's like, we had like 10 years of saying no to each other, like to practice either covering that face up. Yeah, we gave each other a thick skin. Yeah. And I think another advantage is, you know, having somebody to,

split the work with let's split the pay with yes and also split the pay with unfortunately um but it's it's nice to have when we're working on an idea together and if it's something that's very personal to me it's kind of nice to have somebody who has an outside perspective to let me know like oh this might be not quite relatable here's how we can adjust this and vice versa it's like a marriage

It is. It's like a marriage. Like, with my husband, I'll have to be like, oh, I need to check with Desiree. Are we working this weekend? Or are we doing this? Or are we meeting up? And that you have to find somebody who will actually show up and, like, do the work with you. Because I think you and Tried made me, like, partner with a couple other people. I, like, tried. I'm like...

A lot of people are flaky. And like, if it's, you know, 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning, like it's 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning, we're sitting there writing. But, you know, it's hard to find somebody who can be that reliable too. I will say I was really intimidated when we wrote together on Ops. It was a TV pilot about private military contractors that we sold to Fox. I had a bit of imposter syndrome. I was like, okay, John knows how to do this.

I've never written for TV. We broke it out in index cards and then you said, all right, you write these scenes and I'll write these scenes. I was like, are we really doing this? And I would say that as a person who was always writing by myself, I was kind of a terrible creative roommate. No, you were good. But there were a lot of times where...

So our previous collaboration, he had come to me and said, let's do Prince of Persia. I said, fantastic. So I was going to executive produce it, but I was not writing it. Jordan wrote an incredible script that's not reflected on the screen. But Jordan wrote this incredible script and I would give him constant notes on it and such. But it was like you're in a plane and you're a pilot, you know how to fly, but you're not allowed to touch the controls. That was the maddening thing about it. So then when we were actually working together, it was great to be able to sort of divvy up the work and I could see like, oh, he's written these amazing scenes. I'm going to nestle them together with these scenes. But I also felt like,

if there was going to be a disagreement, I would kind of always win. And that wasn't the best thing. We also got to collaborate on a video game, and that was completely his wheelhouse. Jordan's like, ah-ha! And so I deferred all...

He was the master in that. You thought I knew. Yeah, you thought I knew. Yeah, so it was fun to sort of get a sense of when somebody's fully in their space and knows how to do things that I just can't do as a collaborator. I want to stay on you, John, because it's interesting you talk about writing solo. I think a lot of people here know you for your endeavors with podcasting, and you obviously make software to help screenwriters like

Thinking about craft as it's expressed, like in a screenplay or a comic book script or a bunch of banks of lines in games, like what has changed for you in terms of your perception of like a line of dialogue in different media, what the possibilities are?

Actually, I'm going to pull out two different questions here. So things I've learned sort of... Collaboration. Collaboration, working with other folks. I've become a much better manager over time, I think, because of needing to work with different people who are just so much smarter and better at the things than I am to do stuff. So when I was directing my first movie, The Nines, I had an amazing cinematographer. And so I wouldn't tell her, like, I want the light like this. I would say, like, I want this to feel like you're two beers in on a great July night. And that is a thing that she knows how to do. And...

I can't describe anything better, but I would just kind of be poetic on stuff. When I'm talking to our composer, Alex Worman, I could say like, you know, this is what it needs to feel like. I'm not going to tell you the notes. I'm not going to tell you how to do it. And so the same thing is true when working with a coder or with a designer. I'm talking about like, this is what I'm experiencing. And let me give you the broad strokes, crude version of what I'm seeing. How can we solve this problem that gets to this end result? So really talking about what you're going for versus how they should do their job.

And I would say in graphic novels, the same, like illustrating is not the same as graphic novel or

Like there's great illustrators who will do an amazing illustration, but then when they try to lay out, you know, a scene across two pages, it's dead. And then there's artists who can't really draw very well, but their books are just riveting and touching because, you know, the way they tell the story. As a writer in collaboration with illustrators, like I wouldn't try to spell out like what angle to draw it or how many panels to do any more than I would like write a script and say, you know, you want to use a 50 millimeter lens. It's just,

describe it in a way that it can sort of read the scene, feel the scene, and then they reinvent it on the page in the way that a film crew and cast would invent that scene. It's interesting, for the first time, drawing my own

It's sort of the same. It's like almost... Why can't this guy nail a C? And I gave my... I didn't feel like I had to deliver a completely polished script with no spelling errors to give it to myself to draw. I could sort of like, okay, it's half finished. I'm going to just start drawing it now. But it was interesting to see how I would... If I was struggling with a page, sometimes I'd be like, why are my drawings coming out so bad today? It's like...

Oh, it's because the script is wrong. So I'd be like, okay, go back and change the scene, have it happen in a different location or switch the position with another scene, which I can't do when I'm working with an artist because if I gave them pages and they gave it back and I was like, oh, you know what? These pages you just spent two weeks drawing, I have a better idea now. They would kill me. Yeah. Okay, last thoughts before we open up the Q&A. Anybody? Okay.

I would say sometimes you'll have an idea, and I don't know what medium this is actually best suited for. I think that's a place that a lot of us are starting from. It's basically, how does the story want to tell itself? Does the story want to tell itself over the course of multiple episodes or multiple issues? Does the story self-contain? Does it have a beginning, a middle, and an end? If it's a beginning, a middle, and an end that feels like you could tell in about two hours, it's probably a movie. It's probably the best story.

suited for that. If you don't know what the end is, then it's probably not a movie. I think that that's another sort of key sign. Does this feel like a thing that you are sitting on a chair watching or does it feel like a thing that you're participating in? That's a real difference. And do you need to get inside a character's head to be able to understand it? Because if you do, then maybe that's a book or it's a musical so you can get that, the power of song to get inside somebody. So I think it's always worth asking like,

this great idea I have, how does it want to live and how does it want to tell itself? Nice. Well, I think we are at time and I want to thank our panelists very much. I want to thank Evan. That was really well done. Evan. Thank you.