Buffy Writer's Blog

Jane Espenson is blogging these days and she's full of great advice on writing.


Here is a list of the Buffy episodes she wrote that I loved. I've included a little taste of her wonderful dialogue.

Band Candy (3.6)

Cordelia: Oh, God. Are we killing something again?
Buffy: Only my carefree spirit.

Earshot (3.18)

Buffy: ...My life happens to, on occasion, suck beyond the telling of it. Sometimes more than I can handle. And it's not just mine. Every single person down there is ignoring your pain because they're too busy with their own.

Pangs (4.8)

Spike : I just can't take all this mamby-pamby boo-hooing about the bloody indians.
Buffy : Uh, the preferred term--
Spike : You won. All right? You came in and you killed them and you took their land. That's what conquering nations do. It's what caesar did, and he's not going around saying, "I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it." The history of the world isn't people making friends. You had better weapons, and you massacred them. End of story.

Superstar (4.17)

Buffy: "But someone could wish the whole world to be different right? That's possible?"
Anya: "Sure, alternate realities. You could uh, could have like a world without shrimp. Or with, you know, nothing but shrimp.

Storyteller (7.16)

Andrew: Oh! Hello there, gentle viewers.
He closes the book on his lap.
Andrew: You caught me catching up on an old favorite. It’s wonderful to get lost in a story, isn’t it? The adventure and heroics and discovery… don’t they just take you away?Hmm.

In a momentary reverie, he tries puffing on his pipe, but chokes on the smoke and sets it down.

Andrew: Come with me now, if you will, gentle viewers. Join me on a new voyage of the mind, a little tale I like to call Buffy, A Slayer of the Vampires.

Ah, the good old days, when Buffy was on...