When you're writing for a show, you're writing part of the script. You have to tell the story.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
When you write for a show that's not yours, your job is to hear the voices of the characters and write as best you can for those voices.
Writing a TV show is totally different than writing features, or just, what I started doing is writing features. You write a little bit more organically. You start from the beginning to the end, beginning, middle and end.
Some people, especially literary people, they think, 'I'll write this original script, and it will be full of ideas. I'll submit it, and they'll hire me for television.' That's not the case.
With sitcom writing, you're trying to write stories.
I have been sent three or four scripts for television series, but there wasn't anything I really wanted to do. I want to tell a good story, whether it's a TV show, a movie, whatever. That's really my No. 1 criteria.
I don't generate a storyline and then fill it out in the course of writing. The story actually generates in the course of the writing. It's one of the reasons I've never been comfortable doing screenplays, because in order to get the contract for the screenplay, you have to sit down and tell them what's going to happen.
When I create a TV show, it's so that I can write it. I'm not an empire builder; my writing staff is usually a combination of two kinds of people - experts in the world the show is set in, and young writers who will not be unhappy if they're not writing scripts.
As a writer, it's very difficult to just hand your script over to someone else, especially if you have to watch them hurt it, and that's when I decided I would direct my own work.
Most TV shows are writing the next episode while you're directing the one you're doing, and they're trying to figure out what they're going to do, and they're putting it all together.
The basic rule of storytelling is 'show, don't tell.'