In the wake my guest spot on the podcast recently, I heard from some of my earliest friends — people I went to junior high or high school with, which was really lovely. One old classmate I heard from is the author of several published fantasy novels, which I find incredibly impressive!
We got to talking shop a little bit, and I mentioned that occasionally publishing short stories is a balm for the fact that the vast majority of what I write — work that is intended for a screen — will never see the light of day.
He asked, why is that?
My answer to this was that it’s just very hard, because we were DMing and because it’s fairly impossible to explain all the permutations of the ways things can not happen.*
But it brought to mind a video that has been circulating lately. It it funny because it is TRUE, and it’s actually a very good overview of what needs to happen before a show gets put on the air.
You might notice that the title of this post is not “What It’s Like to Be a TV Writer,” because even though I “write for TV,” I’ve never been staffed on someone else’s TV show, and with my own ideas for shows, I have yet to progress out of Step 1 in the process she describes. A couple of times I have gotten to some of the later sub-steps, where I’ve definitely experienced how “at any point in the process, the whole thing can just dissolve.”
*The way things don’t happen are different for film and TV, so I’ll be looking for someone who can describe the filmmaking process as effectively as she does with TV.