677 - Puzzle Box Storytelling
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Today's episode has no bad language, but it does have some mild spoilers for Severance. So if you're trying to go into that show clean without any spoilers, about midway through the show when Craig starts spouting wild theories, just skip ahead 30 seconds or a minute and you'll miss all of Craig's wild speculations. Enjoy. Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Oh, oh, my name is Craig Mazin. And you're listening to episode 677 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what the hell is going on? We'll discuss mystery box shows where the premise and audience experience involves solving the puzzle of what's really happening.

Then we'll talk about revisiting old projects. I am just back from two weeks in New York, working on the Broadway version of Big Fish, which I've been working on for now 20 years. So we'll talk about how writers should approach their earlier work when they need to.

We'll also follow up on home automation and locked pages, plus answer some listener questions. And Craig and our bonus and premium members, let's talk about taking some time off. You just took some time off. You took the weekend off. Your weekend off feels like time off. I had to negotiate it. Yeah. Let's talk about being more deliberate about working on certain days, not working on certain days, and sort of refilling our supplies after a lot of work sessions. So we'll talk about ways to do that.

But, Craig, first we have a little housekeeping. We want to thank all of our premium subscribers. You are the one to keep the lights on here. And when you say you, you're talking to me. I am a premium subscriber. You are. Yeah. I pay the $5 a month. Well, see, that's what we're here to talk to you about, Craig. Because right now you're paying $5 a month. We're going to be raising that price. What? Moving up to $7.99 per month. $7.99?

Because people should really be on the annual plan. So here's what's happening. So our annual plan is staying put at $49 a year. Oh, so that's even less than $5. It is. And we really want people to stay on the annual plan because it's just less tedious for everybody involved to stay on the annual plan. So we're really incentivizing this. Apparently, because we initially rolled out with this price and it was really parity between the two kind of things, people stayed on the monthly plan. People should move to the annual plan. How do you do that?

It's so simple. You click on your account settings. There's a link in the show notes to this. You got an email if you're a proven subscriber. Just please move over to the annual plan. Well, it's good for you. And apparently it's good for us. It would save a listener $48 per year. We're asking you to give us less money. Please give us less money. Please give us less money. We should make the monthly...

$14,000. Yes. And then watch how quickly they go to that annual subscription. Well, we debated. If we went up like $1, would that be enough of a factor? Would it be enough of a friction that people would actually do it? No, I think, can I just say, is there a point in our humanity, in our civilization, where we will just move on past the 99 cent gimmick?

Yeah, I mean, some stuff, it doesn't make sense. It's just everybody. Everybody does it in every way, shape, or form. We're all on to the trick, right? Yeah. We all know what's going on. They're supposed to be doing away with the penny soon. The actual physical penny. The physical penny. The idea of the penny doesn't sort of, the 99 cents doesn't go away. I mean, we could, I could argue that all prices at this point should be

rounded to a dollar. Yeah, they should be. Rounded up or down. But I mean, taxes back figured. Let's say you with like if something costs $99, it's really $100. Well, this is my point. So like, what are we doing? Yeah. So what we are doing is raising the price to $7.99 in the hopes that people will get to the annual plan, which is. I think that's a great idea. I think that's lovely. So we should talk about, Craig, how much money do you make from script notes?

Oh, I have seen $0. I see $0 as well. So Craig and I don't take any salary for this. No. The money pays for our incredible editor, our producer, Drew. I mean, we've gotten cars out of it. Obviously, we got the cars and the houses. Absolutely. All that big podcast money. We're not the Pod Save America people who actually can buy houses with stuff. The Pod Save America guy lives across the street from me. Yeah, so they're doing well. That's a really nice house. They're lovely people. I was in Vegas for a couple of days.

Gambling the Script Notes money. Gambling my Script Notes money away at the penny slot machine. And, you know, they project ads for all their acts everywhere. Yeah. And on the side of a casino that was facing my room, they were advertising a podcast, like a true crime podcast. I don't remember the name of it, but apparently they're on tour. They're on tour in Vegas. Yeah.

A podcast? Yeah. So many questions are raised by this. First off, when are we going to do a live show in Vegas on the Strip? Right. Yeah, that's crucial. Right. Can we have dancers? Yes, we would have dancers. The question is topless, not topless? Or maybe there's two shows, like the later show is topless. I don't know. I would be fine with, yeah, like a kids show, like a family show. A family show, yeah, for sure. And then at night, an adult show. Yes. Okay.

This would be amazing. Yeah. Yes, of course. We could get like the ladies, but we could also get the Thunder from Down Under guys. Oh, 100%. I would definitely have to be on a mixed show. Yeah, we need a mixed show, but not at the same time. I think they would confuse each other with their choreography. Well, different acts. I mean, different sort of segments. Right. You sort of like you bring on one group, then we do like the first half of the show. Yes. Second group comes on, gyrates, we come back.

What a weird thing to come back after, you know, for you and me. Yeah. We're just like, we're the worst people to follow any kind of hot strip show. And then it's just like, all right, back to these two podcasters. Yeah, it really does make a hard transition into like, let's talk about transitions or let's talk about like, you know. Back to slug lines. Yes.

Or I was going to say the Script Notes slot machine. The Script Notes like a video poker machine, like those branded things. That's fun. That's good stuff. Yeah. You know what the jackpot is, right? What is the jackpot? Sexy Craig. Oh, yeah. I always think like, you know, you get, if you get the jackpot, you get to be on a three-page challenge. No. It's like sort of a live show. No. It's better than that. No, no, no. You have to get, if you get five sexy Craigs. Oh, like lining up. Yeah. Oh, gosh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So we don't take a salary. This pays for everything else. But the money that's left over at the end of the year, we donate it away. So we donated this year to Hollywood Heart, which is a beneficiary of our great live show. We also support the Entertainment Community Fund, which helps writers and others in the Hollywood industry. I think that's also some, isn't that also targeting some funds for the fire relief? Yeah. So that's what we do with the money. So thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it all possible.

On the topic of games, though, we actually have a game shipping this week. So way back in episode 655, actually not that way back, 655 is 22 episodes ago. That feels like half a year. Half a year ago, I put out the call that I was looking for an indie game developer to partner up with on a game that I wanted to make.

And Drew, we got like 10 people writing about that. That sounds right, yeah. So I zoomed with a bunch of them. They were all fantastic and great. I ended up picking this Canadian developer named Corey Martin, who has been toiling away. And now just a few months later, we have a game for you to try out right now. So it's called Vertigo. Vertigo, like the thing that flies. It is a roguelike deck builder where you're trying to make words. Craig, you just played it.

Tell us about the game. I just played a little tiny bit, but as far as I can tell, what's going on is you get some letters from a constrained letter bank, a little bit like a Scrabble tile kind of distribution. And you have to make some words from your letters. And as you make words, you get some new tiles, you have some discards, and you're trying to hit a point number to move on to the next thing. But when you do, you're going to get some sort of power-up, some kind of...

Bellatro-style card that makes the next rounds better because I presume it just gets harder and harder and harder. It's harder and harder. So it's a roguelike in that it's really difficult to complete a level, what we call a migration, but eventually you're able to do it and then it unlocks more things down the road. So if you would like to play it, you can play it right now. It is on Steam as part of the Next Fest event this week.

So you can follow the link in the show notes or just go to vertigogame.com, click through and see the game that's there. The first 50 levels are up for everyone to go and play this week as part of this special event. And John. Yes. It's called Vertigo. Vertigo. Like vertigo, but with a bird. Yeah. Vertigo. Vertigo. And...

How much does it cost? We don't know yet. So it's free. Oh. The demo is free. Oh. Yeah, so we don't know what the final pricing is going to be. Amazing. We'll ship it sometime this spring, probably. But right now, it's free. It's free. So it costs nothing. Yeah, so you should try it. If you like it, put it in your wish list. Wish list. And so if you played Alpha Birds, it's originally we were going to call it Alpha Birds. It's really a spin-off of the physical game we made called Alpha Birds. But...

But Vertigo was a better name for what this game is. Yeah, I think so. Plus also, you know, people love the stuff on there. And are you going to bring it to iOS at some point? So we'll do Steam first and then we'll see where we're at for it. Because the nice thing about doing it on Steam first is we can then transition to Xbox or Switch or all the other stuff. But eventually iOS would be great too. All right. Great.

All right, more follow-up. Drew, help us out on locked pages and unlocked pages. Yeah, Michael wrote in and says, I'm a script coordinator on a large TV series where our security is super intense and everything is distributed digitally. And since we're forbidden from printing scripts, I thought our show would be a great case study to implement keeping the script pages unlocked throughout production and using the locked scene numbers as our linchpin for revisions.

My stipulation was that I would only do it if it didn't mess with the workflow of any of our departments. However, in reaching out to the departments, I found that not having locked pages would cause issues with the work of our script supervisor and our post-production team, mainly the editors and assistant editors.

So our script supervisor told me that they use a software to do their job that relies on the pages being locked. One of our scripties uses Movie Slate, and the other uses ScriptE, which seems almost Final Draftian in its arbitrary rigidity. The software organizes their notes by scene number, take, timing of take, notes, cameras, and other things,

But each page of their notes corresponds with a facing page. And that refers to the page number of the locked script. So let's pause for a second here. So what I think I'm hearing is that in a physically printed script, you have on the right, if you're printing on one side of the page, like on the right in your notebook, you would have the printed page of page 46, but there'd be a blank page on the left. I think that is the facing page where they're typically taking notes or doing other things on that page. Okay. And

And since the notes are not connected to a specific facing page, if that page were to change with the new content during the shoot, the notes wouldn't line up anymore. And at the end of the shoot, all the notes and their facing pages are exported as a continuous document to send to the editors.

The assistant editors use the daily reports from the scripties to assemble binders for their editors with all the notes and their corresponding facing pages. Those binders are organized based on the locked script, and messing with the locked pages would mean it was difficult for the AEs to match the scripty notes with the facing pages. So it appears that until the software that the script supervisors use can find a way to connect their notes with just the scene number and not the locked script pages, I think locking script has to remain.

I will say, even though I can't figure out how to make it work and not interfere with certain departments, everyone I pitched this concept to was down for a change. From my showrunner to the script supervisors and post-production, people would love to bring things into the digital era and leave some of these old methods behind. Also, no one cares about keeping color names for revisions. So, in talking with my script supervisor, he did bring this issue up, but even he seemed quite flexible about it. I believe there's a way...

in the output to just say, okay, just bring me to the notes for scene whatever. The idea that the assistant editors and the editors are using this massive binder of notes is pretty old school, I think. I have not seen the binder in a long time. Also, the idea of editors routinely consulting the notes while lovely is,

is something I've seen every now and again like a four-leaf clover. It's actually quite frustrating how editors just don't look through that stuff. But in a way, I like that. You know, the editors get their fresh take on things. They don't necessarily want to be bound by whatever opinions were written down on the day. But I do believe that document would still function unless you were literally using it like a printed bound thing, which I don't think anybody does anymore. Right.

or most people don't, I'm sure the ones who do will write in and insist everyone does, the companies that make the software really need to just make this very simple change. It should just be organized by scene number. I don't care. I'm doing it on season three. I'm doing it. I'm just getting rid of the page breaks. I don't care.

I love it. I don't care. That song was originally written about this very topic. Stage breaks. Well, I'm happy that Michael, who is a script coordinator, like the person who is responsible for this, was writing it and was really trying to make this change happen and was consulting with the people who he knew it could affect early on in the process. It really does sound like, you know, it's people have...

entrenched ways of doing things that don't necessarily make sense but it's what they're used to and it would be an adjustment movie productions television productions are rife with this is how I've always done it-ness and sometimes getting people into the new way you gotta kind of drag them kicking and screaming a little bit and once they're there they're thrilled but it does take a moment or two where they're like yeah

I'm doing it. Yeah. And it's good news on colored pages as well because the concept of colored pages is good. The only reason, like at this point now on revision levels, it's just so that you know which, this is draft one, two, three. I might change them to numbers. Yeah, that's what, in the part we cut out here, it says they're starting using version plus number for our drafts. I might do that.

Yeah, drafts. V1, V2, V3, Rev1, Rev2, Rev3. Put a date on it, yeah. And the thing is, I put a date on them anyway. Color revisions have dates. Maybe I'll just do date revision. That's it. The revision is this date. Yeah.

Yeah, how do you like doing dates? Actually, I have a question about this and then about Oxford Commons, but we'll talk about both. Sure. So my preferred way of doing dates is I love periods between dates. And so I love... Very European. You know, the year first and then the month and then the day works really well for me. If you did year, then date and month, you'd be fully European, I think. Yeah, exactly. But doing date and month, like things increase the right way. When you do date before... I completely agree. This is one area where I think we're right. Yeah.

I go day, month, year, which is more standard, I think. And just because of my old, old, old, old computer days, my convention is to go underscores in between. Oh, yeah. That's fine. Because periods were reserved for file extensions and dashes right out. Yeah. And absolutely no colons on the Macintosh. Good Lord, no. Yeah. So, yeah. So, something underscore something underscore something. Yeah.

Related question, not just some related question in terms of like what your preferences are. For the Script Notes book, we're now starting copy edits, Oxford commas. So my personal take is I believe that Oxford commas can be useful for disambiguating situations. And obviously there's, you can bring up situations where without the extra comma there, you've changed the meaning of it. But I find oftentimes commas are wedged in there in a superfluous way that makes me annoyed. How do you feel? Oxford commas,

from an informational point of view are objectively superior because they give you more information than less. That's always a good thing.

From an aesthetic point of view, they are inferior to the American style. American style is cleaner. In the 94% of cases where there is no ambiguity, the American style just simply reads better. But my thing is, I don't think you need to be consistent. I think if you feel like, oh, this requires an Oxford comma to disambiguate, put it in. Yeah, great. I think we are aligned and agreed. And so that will be the notes back to the copy editor. That was what I did on Arlo Finch. To me, part of the reason is that

Even though this is text that is not meant to be read aloud, I'm still reading aloud in my head. And I perceive as a comma as being a small pause. And it's an unnecessary pause in a series of things. When it's not needed, it's weird. It's a funny thing that in our language, when we do list things, we group the last two things together. And I don't know why. A, B, C, D, E, or F. We just do that. It's weird. It's a strange mental thing. We have one more bit of follow-up here.

Yeah, so in the bonus segment of 671, we talked about home automation. We had a lot of smart people write in. Apparently, Lutron Homeworks is the top-of-the-line lighting system, including shades and curtains. That's actually what we use. I forgot the name of it, but that's what we use, and that's the app I have on my phone that lets me turn on any light in the house. I had Lutron in my old house. I hated it. Yeah. So annoying. Yeah, so I think if it's not set up properly, it can be just an absolute monster. If it's set up properly, I'm just like, I can't.

I gotta go to my phone. The switch is right there on the wall. Well, you should be able to do either one. So it wasn't set up properly. No, no, it was set up properly. I was just like, I don't, I don't, it's just a pain in the ass. Yeah, so I can tell our system, I can just verbally say like, set the lights to 20% and it's a blessing. Everywhere. And it's just, oh, because it's linked into your Alexa or whatever? Yeah. In the TV room, I can just say like, set the lights to 20% as I'm watching a movie and it's just great. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Well, there's also apparently an open source software called Home Assistant, and that can pretty much connect everything, but it's very DIY. You have to set it up yourself. It's not plug and play necessarily. And so we also use, Mike also uses Home Assistant for other stuff, which also works with Lutron, so we can do things that are kind of clever, but it relies on Mike figuring out how to do stuff and then teaching me what the commands are. Yeah, I'm quite good with these things. I did...

I also try to explain to Melissa how the Lutron worked and that didn't go well. And I just, you know, that's also my future. So I have to explain to Melissa. Yeah. And I just know it's not going to go well. Because here's what I'm going to get. I'm going to get a text that says the lights aren't working. Yeah. Or Lutron is broken. Yeah. I'm going to say no, it's not.

It's not broken. Is there smoke coming out of it? No, it's not broken. Yeah. The Wi-Fi is down, which could mean anything. Yes. The wife's Wi-Fi is down. I actually get the wife's Wi-Fi is down quite a bit. It happens. All right. Let's get on to our marquee topic, which is puzzle boxes. This comes from a listener question. Drew, read us a question here.

Christian writes, I love both Severance and From, but I'm worried that they'll both be lost all over again. Oh, jeez. And I'm worried my own novella is in the same trap. I feel really cheated by the end of Lost, but love the middle of the journey. When mysteries don't deepen the focus, but just get wider and wider, it can temporarily create momentum that feels like a recipe for a disaster ending.

How can you keep the pleasures of a puzzle box without falling into the trap of an unsatisfying ending? I love when people say, I'm just worried that it's going to become like that thing that was, you know, one of the most beloved television shows of all time and a massive hit.

Can we just stop with that? I mean, can we just stop with beating up on Lost like it was a failure or something? It was a great success. It was. Well, let's broaden our scope. There's a lot of series that do things like this. So obviously talk about Lost. Severance is a current series. Severance, Watchmen. Yeah. But Watchmen had a built-in ending. So yeah, it was different. Westworld. Yeah.

Yep. Twin Peaks. Yep. Silo right now. The new show Paradise. Yellow Jackets are just still going on. Heroes, Leftovers, Alias, The Man in the High Castle. Good Lord. And so they're a really common thing. And what's uniting about all these kinds of shows is there's a question of what's really going on that is central to the story engine. So it's who killed Laura Palmer? Where are we really? Like, what is this place? What the hell is Lumen?

in Man in the High Castle, why is there this footage of an alternate reality? And what strikes me as different about some of these series, though, is

what the characters inside the series' relationship is to the central mystery, is whether the characters are actively trying to figure out what's going on, like in Lost, like where the hell are we? What is this island? What's happening? Where you're at the same, you as the audience are on the same level as the protagonists, or situations where the heroes inside the story know exactly what's happening, and you as the audience are just behind where they are. So Yellow Jacks is an example of that, where we're getting these flashbacks and

Everyone in the present day knows what happens there, but we're just getting exposed to it bit by bit. Yeah, it's probably a good distinction to draw between mystery and puzzle box because puzzle boxes are constantly putting forth things that are surreal. I think that's kind of key to the genre is a surrealism. And the granddaddy of all these is puzzle.

Mm-hmm. The Prisoner? Yeah. With Patrick McGowan. This is in the 60s. I just remember my dad showing it to me when it was being rerun on PBS, which when my dad would come say, hey, Craig, sit down. We're going to watch something on PBS. I knew I was in for boredom. Yeah. And I had no... As a small child, I was like, Prisoner, just what? Yeah.

And so I just remember there's this giant white floating ball. The bubble. The bubble that is sort of after him. But it's great. And so you have no sense of what's really happening there. Aeon Flux was an MTV series. I also had it. I have no idea how this all connects. The surrealism is crucial. The idea that things are emerging that are very specifically puzzling. Yeah. As opposed to like why somebody did something to me is a mystery. The presence of...

I remember in Watchmen, they opened a door and there's an elephant in a room with like tubes coming out of it. What? Yeah. Severance, particularly this season, last season was because it was somewhat limited in its scope. Mm-hmm.

It wasn't quite a puzzle box. It was closer to a mystery. This season, so far, has been a puzzle box. Yeah, absolutely. This season is leaning much more into the mythology. Who are the Eagans? What is this town? And the gradual reveal that the outside world is not normal either. And in the first season, it sort of felt like a little stylized normal world. It's clear that the outside world is not a normal world either in this season.

I think it's really important that you're distinguishing between most shows. Many shows have mysteries at the heart of them. It's like, who did this thing? You were trying to solve this puzzle. You have either detectives or somebody who is investigating is trying to solve this thing. It is the building up of mythology and impossible connections that is so tantalizing about a puzzle box show and also can be really frustrating at times. And one of the things that our listener was pointing

pointed to, Christian, is that sometimes it feels like they're just spinning new plates. Well, this is the gift and the curse of puzzle boxing. As a writer, you and I know that if you have a scene and you want something exciting to happen, throwing something in that makes everyone go, wait, what?

Okay, so people are in a house and they think there might be a ghost, but they're not sure. And one of their friends has gone missing. And then they open a door and there's a dragon in it. Wait, what? Black. Credits. Okay, they're coming back next week. Everyone's talking about the dragon. What the hell is going on? This is sort of cheat coding your way to grabbing people's interest. Yeah.

But each time you do it, it's a little bit like heroin. Yeah. Drew, I'm going to talk to you because you obviously know quite a bit. Drew, you remember the first time. Oh. Right? You're chasing that dragon the rest of your life. So that first hit of puzzle boxing, you're like, wow. But once you hit the fourth or fifth, you start to go, okay, whatever.

Kind of anything can happen at any point. The value per puzzle starts to go down a little bit, particularly as the puzzles accrue in an unsolved way. Exactly. So what Christian's concerned about, and I think rightly so, is all of the puzzles have to have an answer. And at best, they are interrelated. And at best, there are one or two ahas that make all of them make sense all at once.

And in the case of Watchmen, I thought that was about as good as it gets. Maybe because it was one season, I went aha for all of it. And when you have ongoing series, the challenge is to figure out how to make these connected ahas that resolve everything without ending your show. So that's the trickiest part of all. That's something when Damon Lindelof came on the show, we were talking about that. And at a certain point, he had to come to ABC and say like,

how many seasons do we have left because like i need to pace out sort of what we're doing here because otherwise we are just spinning our wheels and so he got the answer of like at that point like two more seasons or three more seasons like great so we can plan for this overall where we're getting to and that also ties into how often are you introducing new clues or new mysteries if it's every episode then you're setting an expectation like oh this is this kind of show if it's

once or twice per season where you're doing that stuff or addressing the underlying mystery, then it's not so foregrounded. It's obviously always going to be there as an open, unresolved thread, but it's not pressing. Those are fundamental decisions you make as a showrunner. Yeah, there is that give and take where you, like you say, you get to dole these things out because you know how powerful they are.

But the things you have to watch out for in addition to over puzzling people to the point where they just go, I guess it doesn't matter anymore. Yeah. Is making sure that...

that the characters themselves maintain a reasonable level of curiosity and a realistic interest in trying to solve the problems themselves. Because there are times where the characters just seem to go along with puzzles sometimes, go along with weirdness and then say, what is this all about? And the other one was like, I don't know, let's just, let's see where it goes. After a while, you get the feeling that no one's trying hard enough to solve the puzzles and

Which can also be a little frustrating. So they're fun. Look, the worst part of solving a puzzle is the finish, unless it's wonderful. So it's high risk, high reward. And to refer back to Lost, I think a lot of people just presume that the ending of Lost was quote unquote bad. That's sort of legendarily been discussed to death. Damon himself seems to write an editorial about it every few months. God bless him. And-

It was good, I think. And millions of people thought so. People are always going to disagree about these things. But when you look at a show like Lost, the degree of difficulty to do, how many episodes did they do? Like 20 to 22 episodes per season. It was like 100 episodes or something. To do that is astonishing. What we ask now is maybe to do 20 for a puzzle box. I mean, for instance, Severance is in season two. They did, I think they're doing nine or 10 episodes a season. Yeah.

So I don't know how many seasons they go for, but I can only presume that if we're on Severance season eight, something's gone terribly wrong. I think you're right. Which is a weird thing to say for, you know, because theoretically you want shows to go forever. One of the points you made there about is how the characters in the world are related to the central mystery. And so we're talking about shows where the characters don't have all the information. So it's not just that the audience is behind, the characters themselves are curious. And it's really a question of how do you make the mystery interesting

to the show, but not overwhelming, so that you can actually just do other stuff that a series needs to do in terms of how are the characters and relationships driving plot and story, so it's not all about the franchise mystery of it all. An example on the far end would be The Leftovers, which is premised on this idea that 3% of the world's population suddenly disappears, and we see the effects of that, but no one is trying to answer the question like, what really happened? At least the characters that we are seeing and following. Right, yeah.

don't have the capacity, the agency, to try to solve that. And it's only in the final season that they actually kind of really address what happened and resolve this great loss and make a change that sort of addresses this fundamental mystery. Instead, it's just dealing with the repercussions of the premise rather than trying to solve the premise. More Lindelof. Yeah. I guess Damon is kind of the king of the puzzle box. I think you're right. And I think that a good puzzle box story

makes sure that part of the puzzle impacts the identity and central crisis of the characters and the way their relationships function. So Severance is very good at this. In the end, do I want to know what is going on at Lumen? Do I want to know what Cold Harbor is and the data refinement process?

Sure. Do I want to know why there are goats in that room? Yeah. Yeah. I do. Do I want to know more where Miss Casey is slash Mark S's wife? Absolutely. 100%. And do I want to see how that is going to function in...

within the matrix of Mark's interest in Hellier. Now we're just down to good old soap opera. Yeah. And I love a good old soap opera. That's where my heart is. So your brain is teased and entertained by the puzzles, but your brain will only get you so far. For what we do, the heart has to be there. And ideally, the stakes of the brain solving the problem are fed directly into the stakes of whether or not the heart gets what it wants. Yeah.

The other thing I would point out to Christian is that as you're trying to figure out your story and how it all fits together, when you have scenes with characters that know more about what's going on, be really careful about those shifts in POV. And so that's the thing that you're seeing season two of Severance grapple with is that you have characters who work for Lumen who are just having conversations among themselves outside of the severed floor. And...

They know so much more than we know, and those conversations are very carefully tailored so that it does not reveal stuff to us that they would know. And that becomes a really difficult balancing act. And it is very hard to do this kind of show, and again, I tip my hat to Severance because they're doing it, in a world where we have the internet everywhere.

and entire subreddits dedicated to parsing every single thing. So my youngest daughter is currently now into Severance. So she binged season one with my wife and now she's kind of watching season two along with us.

And she was all over the theory because TikTok was all over the theory that Helly was actually real Helly and not, spoiler alert, if you're not watching the show and it just happened. She was ahead of that. I have a crazy severance. It's not a theory. I just had this idea. I'm sure it's all over Reddit too. I'm not original about this, I'm sure. Should I say it? Say it. So I've been wondering lately if it's all backwards. That...

The people on the outside are the ones that have been quote unquote severed. But the outside is in fact the experiment and the inside is very much what is real. Sure.

I mean, as we learn more in the second season, the outside world is not what we think it is. And it's not just that the cars are old. It's that they're in a non-existent state. The license plates don't match. The two-letter state abbreviation is not a U.S. state. It's always winter. There's something really strange about the outside world. One thing that's really strange about the outside world, the fact that Ms. Cobell almost got to the edge of something and then turned back. And it's a lot easier to say...

create a false reality where someone's wife is dead than it is to kill someone's wife in reality and then bring her back to life in a false reality. So I don't know. Anyway, there's just stuff going on that makes me think it's flipped around. And it also, because I keep thinking, what are they doing in data refinement? And perhaps what they're doing is refining somehow the way the outside world functions. But...

That said, it may not be that at all. And also, I don't care. Here's the truth. I don't care. What I really want is for people in the end to be happy or to be resolved to fulfill their destinies by sacrificing themselves

Or doing something for the greater good. We have villains. The villains have become much more sharp this season. Corporation has become much more of a villain now. Mr. Milchick, you can feel his... Oh my God, this storyline. Can I just side note for a second? I don't want to turn this into the 400,000th Severance podcast.

But I was so delighted with this little mini storyline of him being, Mr. Miltry being presented with those paintings. Yeah. It was incredibly, what do we call them, like corporate racist. There's like a corporate racism is its own thing where it's like, we recognize your contributions and look, we made a picture. We want you to be able to see yourself in the story. We just made our leader black for you. But like in a bad painting, it's,

And that little tiny, tiny story between him and, I can't remember her character's name, the woman who speaks for the board. I guess the two black characters that are working for the company. Yeah. Oh, it was just handled in the most delicious way. Really, really well done. It was an interesting moment because not knowing what the real world of the show really is. Okay. Oh, so race is still a thing. Because you could also, based on the evidence of the rest of the show we've seen so far, like...

Does it have the racial history of America? And it clearly has some racial history there. The fact that they are black is actually specific and acknowledged within the world of the show. Right. So, yes, which a lot of times in shows like this, they do the old colorblind thing where nobody has any comment on race whatsoever. So that was a very interesting, you're right, it was like an interesting sort of break in the reality bubble of everything.

Anyway, to, I guess, wrap up the question here for advice, if you are thinking about writing one of these things, obviously, plan everything out, be meticulous, study your great mysteries, read Agatha Christie, read Arthur Conan Doyle,

Read as many things as you can that function like this clockwork machinery. Watch all of the great Puzzle Box shows. Go through the whole Lindelof catalog, basically, the Lindelog. And learn. And then figure out how to both begin middle and end it all and learn.

create the characters that fit into it and are informed by it that we will actually follow and care about because when all is said and done, if you're the kind of person who is only interested in how the puzzle box resolves, you'll probably be disappointed all the time. But most of us

care about the characters and the relationships. One last observation I just need to make is that the fact that we can have this conversation about Severance is because it is a weekly release schedule. Had they dumped all these at once, there's no conversation because you don't know where people are at in there. How are we still talking about this? Like it's not the most obvious thing in the world. I wouldn't even make my show if it were dumped all at once. I just wouldn't do it.

The thought of it, the thought of working that hard for that long for everybody to watch something over one day or a three-day thing and then occasionally nibble on it.

Oh my, it's just, it's, and for what, why, why does Netflix do this? Yeah, there's a project that I would love to be able to make, but if we end up at Netflix and we're released all at once versus someplace else, we would fundamentally have to change how we're doing some things because you just can't count on the... I literally don't understand it. I'm sure there are a lot of people at Netflix or a number of algorithms who would be happy to explain it to me. I just...

It seems so patently obvious that the shows that people talk about, the shows that grip people and get them excited are indeed released once a week. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

All right, so second topic. I was in New York City for two weeks working on a new version of Big Fish, the Broadway musical that I did 12 years ago. So this process resulted in a 29-hour reading where we had actors in for one week. You get to rehearse and perform it once for investors and theater owners and other friends. And it was great. It was so, so much fun. So we had Patrick Wilson starring and Jerry Zaks directing. A great experience.

But then also when I got back from New York, I went in and did a EPK interview for Corpse Bride, which is the 20th anniversary of Corpse Bride. Wow. I wrote with Caroline Thompson and Pamela Petler. 20. 20 years. And so the experience of those things back to back made me think about sort of like when you go back and revisit old projects. And so in the case of Big Fish, you know, this is a thing that I was working on first the movie and then the Broadway show and everything.

Andrew Lipp and I had this giant catalog of like, here's all the songs we wrote for this show. And as we're reshaping and moving stuff around, it's like, oh, I remember this little bit from this little bit. Like the bag of scraps you have can be really, really useful in remembering what was the intention behind some of those things. But for Corpse Bride, it was a chance for me to go back and watch the movie again, which I had not seen in 20 years. And remember like,

wait, what did I actually do on this? And so I went and like, so I watched the movie. Then I read the script before I came on board. And there were so many lines. I'm like, oh, I remember writing that line. Nope, I didn't write that line. That was Caroline Thompson or Pamela Petler. It was already in the draft. But then there are things that I did change and did add. It's like, oh, I had no idea. And that moment worked really well. Like, oh, that was so great. So the chance to reconnect with those things.

It also made me really wish that I'd kept a journal, that I'd kept some record of what the experience was like, because in the conversation with the co-director and the producer, I had some ability to remember kind of why things were the way they are. But it's mostly just like, yeah, that thing exists. I'm not quite sure how we got to that moment.

I, I've talked about this before. I'm not a big reflector. I don't, I don't spend a lot of time in my brain in the past. I spend almost no time in my brain in the past. It's all very, I'm not much of one another. Yeah. It's a sort of a watercolor mush. Um, I remember the strangest things and not things that would be relevant, but also in general, not too motivated to go back and watch things. Um,

What does sometimes happen is I get a chance to see something that I did through someone else's eyes. So when my youngest daughter was home from college, she and Melissa also watched the Hangover Trilogy. And that was exciting and fun. Like, because I mean, I didn't sit there and watch it with them. But every now and then I'd wander by and hear something and be like, oh, I remember that day. And it is fun to see...

people who grew up with something come to talk to you about it. It reminds you why you did it in the first place. If you write things particularly for kids or for the broadest segment of the audience, you're probably not in line to, you know, get Portrait of a Woman on Fire type reviews.

Not to say some things like that aren't wonderfully reviewed, but in the end, all that kind of fades away. And then you see like, is there something there that lasted for people? That is interesting to see. But the thought of keeping a journal, oh my God. Well, it's made me think back all the way to like how I...

got interested in screenwriting in the first place was Steven Soderbergh for Sex, Lies, and Videotape. The first script I ever read was his script because it came in a bound book with his script and his production journal. And so I got to see how he made it and what the whole process was. It was so...

incredibly illuminating to me. It made me want to become a screenwriter. And I don't have that for much of my stuff. I do for the Arlo Finch books because I had that separate podcast series I did called Launch, which people can still listen to. And so that really charts the whole process from I had this idea to write this book to the book is now out in French. And so it charted the whole process. But that's such an exception. And I really...

there's no time machine I wish I could go back and do that. But like, I really wish I had records of more of what the conversations were. Because even on CourseRide, like now we can go back and search emails and like emails are so helpful to find out that stuff. But that was back in the time of faxes and phone calls. Yeah. And now the stuff would be, you know,

or Zooms or Slack messages that are not as searchable. So I feel like there's a lack of a record of some of what's really happening in the projects I'm working on right now. Yeah. I mean, other than the insane digital paper trail, to me, the product of the work is the most important thing. And I know that people are fascinated by the process. And we do give them this very curated look at, you know,

stay tuned after the episode to watch the scenes. And so when you're filling those though, those are, you're doing all those in one day, right? Yes. And so you're having to reflect upon like, this is this episode. Yeah. Yeah. They just sort of go, okay, let's talk episode three. Let's talk episode four. Though it's interesting. I, what I don't do is say things like, so it looks like so-and-so is in real trouble.

Because a lot of people do. I don't do that. I don't do that. I like, if there's a cliffhanger, I'll let the show do the cliffhanger. I just try and provide as much thematic context as possible. Yeah. I've never been the sort of person to pick up a book like Stanley Kubrick discusses how he made 2001. Weirdly, I don't care. I've never had interest in that. I've always had interest in just the result. Um,

And it may be because of my deep-seated belief that process is personal. Yeah. And I don't want to follow someone else's process. I don't want to feel like I'm emulating anybody. I just want to try and follow my own natural instinct, which hopefully will get me to the best kind of thing. If I did write a diary called...

The Making of The Last of Us, it would contain quite a lot of, whoa, stuff. Yeah. Not all good, but just like, wow, you really, you guys had to do that? Yeah. You went there? It took how much to build that thing? Yes. But people at HBO will tell you, I am, I just say I'm so allergic to behind the scenes because I don't want to, I want them to believe, you know, like if we keep showing people backstage and that sort of thing is an interest. I just try and avoid that if I can. Yeah.

A case where I have had to go back through a project and sort of like reconstruct a narrative of things is in an arbitration. So there have been times where like I wrote something like, you know, five years ago and I have to go back through my drafts and figure out like, okay, what actually changed after I adopted, sort of figure out like which drafts do I submit? What actually changed? What am I actually saying happened here? And I did a little bit of that for a course where I was trying to figure out what changed draft to draft. And

I wonder if I might be willing to put this in a small box of things I feel like could be a good use for AI in the sense of like, compare this draft to this draft and tell me what changed. Because it's such a tedious task for a human being to do, but actually is so well suited for something that is just looking for patterns. Yeah, although change is difficult to judge if it's judged specifically.

kind of quantitatively. Yeah. I would never do it for something, I wouldn't want to do it in a sort of arbitration situation. But for like, for me talking on the EPK, like, so what changed over the course of between when you started and released? Like, what were the big shifts? Like,

That's hard for me to reconstruct. If an AI or some other system could point out like, this is the character who's different. This is how Barkas was in this draft and this is where Barkas got to. That would be useful for me. I don't know about you, but I've become one of those people. Anytime someone says AI, I go, boo. Yeah, I totally get it. I was watching the Super Bowl and some ad came on and we were like, what is this for? And then finally they got to AI and we all went, boo. Yeah. It's just...

But I guess it's sort of inevitable. And I want to totally validate that experience, that feeling. Also, by saying boo, make sure you're not dismissing that it actually is real and that it's there. Because sometimes people say boo in a disbelieving way. No, I say boo like I don't want it. Yeah. I just wish it weren't there. I do. And I love technology. This one, I just wish it weren't there. I do.

so resent the fact that Google gives me that garbage AI result at the top of the page and you can't turn it off. I'm sure there's some workaround. There isn't.

the workaround is to query Google for results that only occur prior to the date the AI existed. Yeah. It's not useful. Yeah, no. I switched to DuckDuckGo for searches on mobile, which has been fine. What I sort of want to underline is like, I wish it weren't there. Is it valid expression? But that's not going to help us get any sort of policy or regulation or any sort of controls over it. And that's my worry. I can't get any policy or controls over anything. Yeah. I,

I'm not a senator. All right, let's answer some listener questions. Keanu writes, I'm a high school student at Heritage Academy Maricopa, and my class had a question about screenwriting. If a person is in a cave, is it interior or exterior? I love this question. What about Godzilla versus Kong? Would the middle of the earth be interior or exterior, and where do we draw the line? Yeah.

Wherever you want. It's just a philosophical question. Am I inside or outside? I love it. It's great. So interior and exterior are mostly useful for productions to figure out if they are actually going to be physically outside or inside so that they can decide if maybe they're going to build a set or if they're going to have to worry about the weather. When it comes to something like a cave,

Personally, I would say interior because you are getting out of the rain. It really comes down to rain in my mind. Like if it were raining outside, would my actors be getting wet? Exterior. Now, if you're under a bus shelter or something, if you're hiding from the rain, sure. But I think probably, and the center of the earth, like you mean like in the molten core of the center? No, no. So in the Godzilla Kong movies, there's this giant underground tunnel.

It's really an outdoor space that happens to have a roof on it. Yes. So in that case, I probably would say exterior because there are probably sub-interiors within that. Like if there's a cave inside of that world where there's the dome sky, then Truman Show, exterior street, interior house. But all of it, spoiler alert, under a dome interior. Yeah. Yeah.

100% agree. It's, you know, the other classic things is like interior space, exterior space. Yeah, exactly. So if it feels like you're kind of outside, it's great. It's not going to affect anything. We get it.

Yeah, it's not going to affect anything, but I do like the philosophy. Here's maybe a useful way of thinking about it. If where you are could be separated from another interior, it's probably exterior. Do you know, like, if you're going to go inside from where you are? Yeah. I was going to go to inside, outside. Like, if you enter a place, then you're interior. If you exit a place, you're likely going into an exterior. Yeah, feels about right. Yeah.

Steve writes, I'm working on a script that features actors who play in a cover band. I'd like to show them performing live on stage in small venues. I've read about some of the challenges David Simon faced while filming bands live in the show Treme, but can you go into specifics as to why? Is it the equivalent of shooting a dinner table scene? Also, am I mistaken in assuming that the songs that I choose will be cheaper since I won't be using the actual recordings? Okay, here's why shooting live songs is hard. It comes down to editing.

So when a band is playing live, it's never going to be exactly the same each time. Their movements, the notes, the tempo, everything will always be a little bit different from show to show. And any tiny difference will make a jump happen if you're going to edit from one camera to the other, unless you're filming, you know, eight cameras. And even then, most of the cameras will be seeing the cameras, right?

So now you've got some painting out to do and you don't get that fluid feeling of going through. So typically what we do is we ask the musicians to play to a fixed track. The fixed track will be in their ears. Yeah. And they mime play along with it, essentially. Or they can live play along with it too, but they have to be locked in for editing purposes. It is a challenge. Yeah.

Yeah. So either a pre-record or a click track, basically something to keep them on exactly the same metronome for things. Yeah. So for Steve, it's looking to do maybe this is a smaller indie kind of project. In some ways, that might argue towards doing some live recording because maybe it has a feel where it's just like you're just going to record the entire thing or it's sort of in a one-er or there's reasons why you're there and you're experiencing it live. I think to the back of the movie Once, which is about sort of the focusing or so you fall in love, that feels like a thing that

what's probably recorded live and made sense to record live. It felt like the right vibe for it. If you're going to do, for instance, that wonderful song Falling and it's two people, one playing guitar, one singing, three, four cameras going at once, that'll get you what you want. No problem. And we face these challenges from time to time and we figure them out with the sound department. But yeah, kind of...

fun, chaotic, proper live with a club and everybody dancing and everything. The sound is the biggest issue is figuring out what we're going to hear and how we're going to hear it. Because the other thing about playing live is,

The music is coming out through big speakers. Now you can record the individual tracks, but you still have to mic the drums. You're getting bleed through those drum mics from everything else that's playing. So what are you going to play for people when they're watching? Because recording live is its own thing. Plus you have the crowd dancing. So it may all look great, but now it sounds like mush or it doesn't connect to what we're seeing.

It's challenges. Answering two more little things Steve asked, is it the equivalent of shooting a dinner table scene? Not really. The dinner table scene is its own unique problem just because of eye lines and getting people to match around a dinner table scene. Here you have a bunch of people who, like, yes, they might be looking at each other and that's just a thing, but it's going to be the same problem whether you're recording it live or they're, you know, they're lip syncing to a thing.

Will it be cheaper than using the actual recordings? No, because if you're going to do your own recording of the thing, you're making your own recording, period. So recording it live doesn't change that. It could be cheaper only in the sense that if you're going to use the recorded version, you have to pay for both the licensing and the mechanical, the master. But I'm resuming that. If we see a band performing on stage, you're going to record a band, that band or another band recording on stage, right?

Right, so that recording you're making, it won't cost you anything. You're just paying the licensing at that point and, of course, the performance fees for the band or if they're actors, that's the acting. So, yes, it could be a little bit more, but then you have a lot of other challenges you're going to have to deal with and you have to weigh those two things side by side. It's a tricky one, but the good news is

Post-production people, production people, sound people, they've all been here. They will all give you advice on the various ways you can go, but it is a bit of an interesting puzzle. And when you're trying to figure out how to, for instance, then shoot a conversation between two people who are off to the side with the band playing in the background continuously from their live performance, how are you going to do that? It's all very tricky. Yeah, there's reasons why you want that band to be looking like they're performing and not actually performing. Yeah. Yeah.

We've got one last question. Todd in Maryland writes, I love when you guys talk about D&D. I've played tabletop role-playing games since I was a kid and think they're great for storytelling and socializing. The strange thing, however, is that very few campaigns stick in my head as being memorable stories. Usually there are one or two standout moments, a funny interaction, a clever situation to a puzzle, critical success or failure, but the personal goals and growth of the characters and the overarching plots are lost in the wash of time.

Have you ever used a role-playing campaign as the basis of a screenplay, or are these two fundamentally different mediums? I think they're really different mediums. Yeah, for sure. I mean, two issues there. One is the campaigns that he's in aren't memorable. That may be chalked up to the DM. I mean, partly that's the job of the DM is to tell a great story, to make more than one or two memorable moments, to provide a lot of great NPCs that you can remember. Yeah.

And to make it all make sense in the end, like it was all meant to be purposeful.

That's an entirely different question than from, and also, let's say you got that. Should you base this? No, you should not. We're about to resolve a campaign that I've been DMing for the last year or so. Listen, I went in with some story points, but I really let the players dictate what was going to be happening. And so they are the storytellers of a lot of this. And so those characters making those choices are,

their bad roles a lot of times are sort of what are the iconic moments from it. And like any good DM...

You edit as you go. I mean, as long as you don't make a change that undoes something that we all saw happen or somehow invalidate things, you're fine. And it's a little bit like the puzzle box thing. You just want to make sure that when you get to the end, people aren't like, oh, this is sort of so like nothing mattered. You just randomly did this, even though all these other things happened. Yeah, the puzzle has to make sense in the end. What is, I think, consistent with

good cinematic storytelling is the players, the protagonists, should be the most memorable characters and the one who are driving things. And so while I set up a villain and sub-villains who I thought were useful and good and interesting, your heroes should be driving the story and that they have. Yes. So you hope that you have a group of players that create relationships with each other or key relationships with an NPC. But the point is relationships. Yeah. And how they interact with each other, that's the fun. So when I'm a player...

I'm so much more interested in how I deal with the other party members than I am with how I deal with the rest of the world. Absolutely. One of the things I did in this campaign, which we tried out, which mixed success, but I said, you know, in our session zero, as we were getting stuff ready, every character had to have relationships with two other characters around the table. And so it didn't have to be like brother and sister, but they had to have some other connection with them so that they came into this small community with a sense of,

some sort of shared history and purpose and relationship. And

And it's an idea I would continue through to the future, even as we're looking at our next campaign. It's like, I would love to come in with my player being connected at least to one other player. Yeah. I think it's a good icebreaker method. But what happens is the players, as they play, they begin to figure out who they are. And then they just create new relationships. So, like, some of them are good running jokes. So, you know, I had a good one with Phil Hayes' character based on the Session Zero episode.

But then a lot of them just emerge because somebody's character may irk your character by what they do. And then that's the thing now by the choice they made. So as long as you give people room to, you know, find their own bonds and flaws, as D&D says, then you're doing great. Yeah, good.

Let's do our one cool things. My one cool thing is a show slash experience I had while I was in New York City called Life and Trust. Now, Craig, when you were in New York ever, did you go to Sleep No More? I sure did. Yeah. Did you like Sleep No More? I definitely went to Sleep No More. Craig did not enjoy Sleep No More. I attended it. Yeah. So let me talk about Sleep No More and I'll tell you about the differences between this and Life and Trust. So Sleep No More, you go to this space and you drop off your coat and

put on a mask and then you're wandering through this space and you start to realize where there are actors. But basically anyone who's not wearing a mask is an actor as a performer in this world. And you start to realize like, oh, Macbeth is happening kind of around me. And as you're wandering through the space, there's really very little structure to it. And you're seeing scenes and moments, but it's cool. And also has a feeling of a little bit of an escape room in the sense of like, you could just spend all the time looking at the very cool set direction and such.

So while I was in New York this last time, I went to see Life and Trust, which is by the same folks who did that. It is done in a bank in the financial district, an incredible space and just like gorgeous and much more ambitious than Sleep No More was. And as you're entering it, there's a little bit of dialogue at the start as you're sent off. But then like Sleep No More, you're wearing a mask, you're exploring the space and you're

And you could just look at all the incredible set decorations throughout the whole thing. You realize that what's actually happening is probably Faust or a version of Faust

And I thought the structural elements on it worked really nicely. We just had a really good time. If you're going with a group, you end up getting separated kind of by default and you're sort of having your own experience. And then really part of the fun of it is when it's all done, which is about three hours, getting back together and like, did you make it to that space? Like, I had no idea that thing was there. I saw this scene happen and you're trying to piece together what all happened. I really dug it. I remember that...

I was uncomfortable wearing a mask and watching people. So whatever a voyeur is, I'm the opposite of that. I felt very uncomfortable. So no reflection on what they did, their performance, the quality. It was all clearly working at a very high level and people do love it.

I just thought like, oh, if somebody were to be looking at me, I'm the bad guy. I'm just scrolling around eyes wide shut style, just basking in the performance. And I kept thinking to myself, a lot of these people are the classic starving artists in New York, working this gig for probably not a lot of money and then waitering during the day. And then I show up at night

And I just sort of casually watched them. And then, you know what? I'm not going to watch you. I'm going to turn away and watch something else. I'd rather walk down that hallway than look at you and appreciate what you're doing. I just felt so...

So that was my, and I don't know if anybody else had that. I think it's a valid experience. And I will say that this show was much more dance driven than the other one was. The other one was like, and so you know me, I love dance. You used to love some dance. And so at times you realize like, oh, so there's choreography happening. Like, oh my God, I need to move really quickly because they're about to slam into me. Like they have to be like so ready to do things on the fly, which is fun and impressive that they could do.

Here's the moment we had at the end, though, that made me... This is true for all Broadway actors, but I really felt it for this, is...

So we're down in the financial district and I have to take the train to get back uptown. And we get on the train and like two of the performers are in there too, along with all these young Chinese girls who were there who had just seen the show and I was like fawning over them. It's like, man, you just did this thing and you want to be done and suddenly there are people there who saw you do it. Well, you know, I don't... Some actors really enjoy... Some actors love it. I mean, some fans, are you kidding? Who doesn't like a few fans? All right. So life and trust is my one cool thing. Well...

My one cool thing, and this is, let's see, it's, yeah, we're getting close. This is kind of a sad one cool thing, but it's a wonderful one cool thing. So in about a week, my intrepid assistant, Allie Cheng, will be graduating out of assistant university and we'll talk about what she's doing next. It's quite exciting. For another time, that's really up to her. But I just wanted to make her my one cool thing because for two years, she has just been the best assistant.

You know, I'd never really had assistants, but if you're going to be a showrunner, you need not just an assistant, you need like a super assistant. You need somebody who is kind of

operating like your auxiliary brain and most importantly is filtering everything that goes in and out to make sure that the showrunner doesn't drown in information so organization and anticipation but then also all the good nurturing stuff and then like hey i want to try something fun for dinner what's the best blank and she knows everything about everything everywhere

And I also have spent, I don't know, I must have spent like probably a thousand driving hours with her, you know, because we just drive places because you got to go scout, you got to go to your sets, you got to here and there. So she's just like an incredible wingman and such a super person. And I won't have to miss her because she's still going to be around. But she just did a fantastic job. She is my absolute one coolest thing this week. The great Ali Cheng. Fantastic.

That is our show for this week. Script is produced by Drew Marquardt. Don't know him. And edited by Matthew Cilelli. Never heard of him. Outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That's also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You'll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You'll find those all at Cotton Bureau.com.

You can find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all those premium subscribers who really need to switch over to the annual plan and not the weekly plan. Save money. It's going to $799, but soon it'll be $799. That'd be crazy. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we're about to record about taking time off. Craig and Drew, thank you so much. Thank you.