The following is excerpted from the 4th edition of Pamela Douglas’ “Writing the TV Drama Series,” which is available now.
Recently, a student on the verge of graduating asked me what was the most important lesson I’d learned in writing for television. I considered what mattered in building a writing career and came to this advice: Make friends. Especially on TV series staffs, the act of creating is not private, though you certainly bring your unique talents. Writers tend to want to work with other writers who enable them to do their own best work. That often means choosing collaborators who make them comfortable enough to take creative risks, and who can be trusted to deliver quality dialogue or story twists or humor or tales of life. Much of this rests on what’s on the page. But no producer-writer has the time to comb every writing sample. Producers hire whom they know.
Now, that doesn’t mean you have to party with powerful people. It means forming networks of professional trust. You do that through good work followed by staying in touch. Students just out of film school often form workshops that meet at each other’s apartments, not only for continuing feedback and commiseration, but also for the connections. If you’re not in film school, you might make connections at seminars, workshops, extension classes, social networks, and blogs. Or maybe you’ll land a beginning assignment on a small show. The people in the cubicles next to you aren’t always going to be in those cubicles. Someone’s going to move on to a better series, or become a producer, or be asked to recommend a writer, maybe with qualifications just like yours. Join professional groups and become active in the Writers Guild. Even if you’re shy or a hermit (or so focused on the characters you’re creating you don’t want to be bothered with actual humans), push yourself out of your shell.
If it wasn’t for my history with one particular network executive I wouldn’t have been able to tell a story that meant a lot to me. A teenage friend of my daughter was visiting one day and mentioned, all too casually, that her mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer. The girl blew it off as if it didn’t affect her. I realized she was in deep denial, utterly unprepared to face the reality of the upcoming surgery. Thinking about her, it occurred to me that dramas had been done about breast cancer – and the last thing I wanted to do was a disease-of-the-week movie – but no one had dealt with this serious subject from the daughter’s point of view. What interested me was not the illness but the relationship and how such an event would affect a teenager’s sense of what it means to be a woman, and what would happen if she lost her mother.
Had I asked my agent to arrange meetings with potential producers, followed by waiting for their responses, followed by scheduling network meetings, and re-scheduling them after they’re postponed, followed by who-knows-how-many network pitches, followed by who-knows-how-long-I’d-wait for an answer that might be no … half a year might go by before I could write this, if ever.
Instead, I picked up the phone. I had some credits at a particular network and a year earlier I’d shared a table with one of the Vice Presidents. We were at the ceremony for the Humanitas Prize that gives awards for writing in film and television, and I was a finalist for a script she’d greenlighted. When I didn’t win, she leaned over and whispered something like “let’s try again,” or “let’s do something else.” I don’t think I actually heard her words over the applause for my competitor.
But that was enough of a “relationship” for her to take my call. I did a minimal pitch, like “let’s do something about breast cancer but from the teenage daughter’s point of view.” She said “Sure. Who do you want to produce?” I chose a company I’d worked with before because I liked their attitude of respecting the script and I believed I could trust the taste of a particular producer there. Also, I knew they’d be approved because they were a frequent vendor. The network V.P said fine. One quick call to the producer’s office, and the deal was done. A year later, that project did win the Humanitas Prize. My point isn’t about winning awards, of course. I’m showing you how wheels turn based on relationships – not personal ones, but through mutual respect.
Pamela Douglas is an award-winning writer with numerous credits in TV drama. Previous editions of Writing the TV Drama Series have been adopted by network mentoring programs and published in translation in Germany, Spain, Italy, France, China, Taiwan, and Korea. She has lectured and given seminars internationally on creating for television.
She has been honored with the Humanitas Prize for “Between Mother and Daughter” (CBS), an original drama that also won a nomination for a Writers Guild Award. Multiple Emmy nominations and awards, as well as awards from American Women in Radio and Television, went to her other dramas. She was a creator of the series “Ghostwriter,” and wrote for many shows including “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” which was named one of the top 100 shows by the Writers Guild of America. At the School of Cinematic Arts of the University of Southern California, she is a tenured professor in the John Wells Division of Screen and Television Writing, where she teaches TV drama writing.
