How to Fake It

A lot of the e-mailed questions I get pertain to my 'House' spec, as in how did I prepare to write the medical stuff? How did I pull off that stuff without being a doctor?

Look, I don't pretend to think I can fool a doctor with the stuff I write. In fact, a doctor would probably laugh at me for most of what I write. But then again, you aren't trying to fool a doctor (certainly not with a spec). You are trying to fool an agent or a showrunner. It's all about faking it.

Right now, I'm on a steady diet of 'Cold Case' -- 4-6 hours of it a day, plus one or two scripts read a night. You immerse yourself in the world. When I wrote House, I lived House. I would write with the show on in the background, rather than music. Normally I find any sound distracting when I write, but in this case just having the episodes playing continuously as I wrote helped the character voices seep into my skull. As for the technojargon, thanks be for the Net. I can't imagine trying to 'fake it' while looking up periodicals and books at the library (my hat is off to all of you who had to research the old fashioned way in order to pull this off. I remember those days writing school papers, and I salute you). Now I can search for 'sphincter of Oddi dysfunction' and find everything I need to know to make my characters sound believeable. I went one step further to buy a differential diagnosis handbook so I could cross-reference symptoms to find possible conditions, but that was just me being anal retentive. I probably could have done it without the book.

For the police procedural, again, you aren't trying to fool a cop. If you were actually staffed on a show, you'd have access to 'experts' who can help make your dialogue accurate and more realistic. On 'House' they have like 2 or 3 doctors consulting for all the medical stuff. If you know a doctor or can call an expert to pitch them your ideas and get their input, you'll go far, but even if you don't know someone (or are too afraid to cold call) you can still do it. It just takes time to do the research.

Speaking of which, I have to go back to researching deafness...