40 years worth of TV writing experience and info, yours for the taking.
by Theresa Wiza
Ever since I first watched The Dick Van Dyke Show, I have wanted to write for television. I wanted to be part of a team that would mold the characters everyone else would either love or hate. I wanted the camaraderie of writing buddies. I wanted to recline on couches or walk around the office drinking coffee and brainstorming sensational ideas. I wanted to create at least one television show that would result in phenomenal success.
We don’t know David Marko, but we want to. And we think that after you read this you will too:
I’ve kept this secret for a long time. It’s more of an embarrassment than a secret, I suppose, shameful to me and to my beloved profession. Creative executives in every medium get a bad rap because a few bad apples spoil the barrel. I didn’t want my stink added to the stench.
More great advice from one of the best reasons to visit Santa Fe: (Hey, Peggy lives there, that’s all we’re sayin’.)
Writing is always a tricky business. It’s the writer’s job to hook the reader without the reader knowing he or she has been hooked. You want the reader to fall in, enjoy the adventure and not be aware of you, the writer, or even the fact they’ve been ‘away’ except for that golden afterglow of reading a truly great story.
Can you believe it? A discussion of fiction writing first written over a decade ago and yet truer than anything we at TVWriter™ have read since? Teresa Nielsen Hayden, you are fucking awesome! (But you’re not from, um, that Nielsen family, are you?)
Start with some principles:
“Begin not from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion-Do not afterthink except for poetic or P. S. reasons. Never afterthink to “improve” or defray impressions, as, the best writing is always the most painful personal wrung-out tossed from cradle warm protective mind-tap from yourself the song of yourself, blow!-now!-your way is your only way-“good”-or “bad”-always honest (“ludi- crous”), spontaneous, “confessionals’ interesting, because not “crafted.” Craft is craft.”
Jack Kerouac