i’m about halfway through a rough draft of my Office spec. the time i put into outlining is paying off, because i already figured out the main story beats and now i can focus on dialogue and jokes. besides being just a valuable part in the writing process, outlining is something i would have to do anyway if i were to actually get work writing for tv.
i sent the first 10 pages to a couple of friends and got good feedback. they said the dialogue was spot on and they could see it as an episode, so i was really happy to hear that. it’s good motivation to keep going and finish.
it was critical that i had read actual scripts of produced episodes. i got a sense of the pacing of the show, timing of scenes, and of course formatting. if you want to write a tv spec, don’t skip this step! only watching episodes is not good enough, and reading transcripts as opposed to scripts is not good enough either.