How to spec a House

Clearly, nobody knows what to do about my query situation.

But that's okay, because I got a question! Thanks, Cecil!

Okay, so Cecil wants to know how I researched my House spec. I heard an interview once on NPR with David Shore, who said that he has a really close friend who's an amazing doctor with lots of stories about crazy medical situations nobody knows what to do with. So they don't have to spend days, nay weeks, scouring the various internets for rare diseases to use on the show. They just call old Morty.

We don't have that luxury. Unless we have a brother who's an intern or something, but most of us don't. That's why Al Gore invented WebMD.

Whenever I watch an episode of anything, I think about things I want to see. For instance, on Firefly I always wonder why Jayne is so devoted to Mal. We never really see Mal do anything that shows why Jayne is so desperate for Mal's trust, and I don't count that one time when he tried to mutiny in "The Train Job." That happened before we established a throughline for the characters, and that episode was written over a manic weekend. Anyway, I always wanted to see more between Mal and Jayne. So if Firefly was still on the air I'd write that, because that's what I want to see.

So for House, I thought of something I want to see. I thought up a character dynamic I'd like to see and how I could turn that around to a lesson about one of the main characters. House always solves the mystery by thinking about something that's going on in his life and connecting it to the situation, just like Sherlock Holmes.

So I started with character first. How can I show elements of their personality that I want to see? What kind of characters can I create that will bring out those elements?

Once I had my characters I went to WebMD. I looked up a myriad of rare diseases until I found one that intrigued me. My main goal was to find one that looked like a lot of other diseases and had a ton of ambiguous, common symptoms so that I could give my characters lots of seizures and hives and stuff and perfectly intelligent experts in their fields would still not know what the patient has. After I chose a disease I looked up everything I could find about it, then sent away for more information from the organization that promotes research for it. Then I made a list of every disease that had similar symptoms. The whole process took about a week.

From that point on it was just plug and play. I developed a scene around the characters and plugged in a symptom. Then I went on for an act doing more character stuff and plugged in a more specific but misleading symptom. Then I just did that until one tiny clue everybody has previously dimsissed led House to make the personal connection that blew the case open, although for my spec I concentrated a lot more on Foreman. That was the A story.

Then there's the clinic story. For that I just lifted a woe-filled tale of a really disgusting and rare medical problem that happened to a charismatic friend of mine. I put him in the clinic exactly as he is and made him treated by the doctor that most contrasted his personality, in this case Chase. Then I figured out a way to keep the clinic story in line with the theme of the A story so the whole episode felt connected.

The medical stuff is just a means to an end. It's always about character first.