Month: June 2015

A DOCTOR WHO Writer Talks About – DOCTOR WHO?

We admit it. We at TVWriter™ luvs us our DOCTOR WHO. Any DOCTOR WHO, with any incarnation of the Doctor. And, being consistent types, we also have huge crushes on every DOCTOR WHO writer. So it’s with great joy that we discovered this interview with a New Who writer we’d never heard from before. Happy New Insights, y’all!

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from Den of Geek

As impossible as it may seem, it has been a decade since Doctor Who returned to the airwaves with Christopher Eccleston as a Time War-traumatized version of everyone’s favorite Gallifreyan. Arguably the greatest episode from that first season of “New Who” is “Dalek,” the story that reintroduced Terry Nation’s iconic pepperpots. The man responsible for the episode was British writer and playwright Robert Shearman.

A veteran of the, er, fantastic Big Finish audio dramas, Shearman adapted his own story “Jubilee” for television. Shearman is currently in New York City for a restaging of his 1992 play Easy Laughter, a biting satire that still feels very much of the moment. This Saturday, he’ll appear at Brooklyn’s only Who-themed bar, The Way Station, to host a screening and discussion of “Dalek.” In advance of these events, we had an opportunity to ask him about his fascinating career. Here’s what he had to say. read article

Kelly Jo Brick: The Write Path With Craig Silverstein

A series of interviews with hard-working writers – by another hard-working writer!
by Kelly Jo Brick

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Aspiring writers often wonder how the pros got where they are. The truth is, everyone’s story is different, but there are some common elements: dedication, persistence and hard work.

Writer Craig Silverstein (TURN: WASHINGTON’S SPIES, NIKITA) built the foundations for his writing career back during his days at the University of Michigan where he had the great fortune to study under screenwriter Jim Burnstein (Renaissance Man, D3: The Mighty Ducks). read article

Peggy Bechko on Fear of Flying – or Success

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by Peggy Bechko

Okay, writers, listen up. Pretty prevalent amongst us is shyness and even out and out fear of success.

How, you ask can this be possible? If we’re writing with the aim of having a script produced or a novel published how can it be that we actually fear that which we strive for?

This is a deep psychological subject on which many articles have been written. So we’ll skip the discussion on whether it exists, it does. Look inside yourself and I’ll bet you spot at least some degree of it as it seems that there’s something about the writing life that attracts just this kind of people. You know, like you and me. read article

And the WGAW Officers & Board Candidates are….

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In TV Comedy, the WRITER is Still King/Queen

Put the greatest comic improvisers in the world into a studio with cameras turning, and what kind of end product do you get?

If it’s a scripted comedy show, you get the words as written by the writers, with just a few adjustments. Because “scripted” still means “saying what we wrote” for some very good reasons indeed (not necessarily having all that much to do with the, you know, writing, either):

Will somebody put a big red diagonal line thru this, please?
Will somebody put a big red diagonal line thru this, please?

by Christy Grosz

Comedy might have the reputation for being loose and spontaneous, but when it comes to garnering laughs for TV series, writing and refining is often the key to the humor. While some shows leave room for improvisation, both HBO’s “Veep” and Netflix’s “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” (pictured) achieve their style from a heavily scripted process. read article