How to become a TV writer in 700 easy steps

When I was a teenager, I obsessed over the writing credits for my favorite shows. As I started thinking about what I wanted to do with my life, I immediately wanted to add my own name to those credits. It became the closest thing I had to a dream job. When I moved to Los Angeles, it was mostly to pursue a career in TV writing – though I was also interested in writing TV criticism. A blog that I started got some attention, which led to one thing, which led to another, and if you're reading this right now, the odds are very good you first started reading me because of that TV criticism.

Yet I never entirely gave up on that other dream, even though at every turn, it seemed like a long shot for a whole bunch of reasons. Then, somewhat abruptly, my wife/writing partner and I got an offer to work on one of our favorite shows on TV. A few hours after I publish this, unless a meteor lands on my head, I will spend my second day ever working in a TV writers room.

(Brief pause to acknowledge that after my first day, the Writers Guild went on strike and I with them. The strike was long and bruising, but we won. I'm so glad that our hard work and solidarity mean that this unexpected career shift of mine might really be able to become a career.)

For several years, I attended a screenwriting convention here in Los Angeles. At it, various writers would share their advice on how to "break in," and I would write down that advice and attempt to apply it to my life. Yet most of that advice – draw on alumni networks, get PA jobs, etc. – wasn't really advice that I could readily apply to my own situation.

At one of those sessions, a writer whose name I've forgotten told his story of breaking in, only to conclude it by saying that he thought of Hollywood as a walled city with many people trying to get in. The walls have holes in them, which allow people to squeeze through here and there, but once a hole is found, somebody comes along and seals it up, so others can't widen it.

That metaphor goes some distance toward explaining why it has long been much, much harder for people who aren't straight, cis white guys to make it in Hollywood. There's another truth in the core of that metaphor, however. Everybody's path to "making it" is weird and convoluted, nobody's is quite like anybody else's, and those holes do get filled in quickly. Whatever story I tell you, all of its particulars can only ever apply to me.

I am, at the end of the day, an extremely low-ranking writer who has spent exactly one (1) day working for television, but I did make my way in via the most convoluted process imaginable, one I can't imagine anybody possibly replicating. (Do you want to work for nearly five years writing 15-ish recaps per week for The A.V. Club, working yourself to the bone but meeting a lot of cool Hollywood people in the process?) But I also remember how much I valued stories like my own when I was a young writer starting out. So maybe you'll find something useful in what follows, which I've attempted to structure as something like "five lessons I learned." Is any of this broadly applicable? Maybe not. But it worked for me, and maybe some version of it will work for you.

1) Write what you want to write (within reason). The script that has opened every door for Libby and me is called Thorns. It is about queer teenagers growing up in fundamentalist Christian South Dakota, which is to say it's the least commercial thing imaginable. Every time I tell someone it was part of us getting a job on a show about teen girl cannibals, they look at me like I'm high.

When we started writing the script, I was represented by a former manager who wanted me to write stuff that would sell. Obviously, he did. That's how he would get paid. But from the moment Libby and I started talking about Thorns in the summer of 2016, I knew it was something I had to write, if only to get it out of my system. The voice of my manager got stuck in the back of my brain, though, and I could hear him saying that, hey, nobody was going to want to buy that.

And you know what? It's now seven years past 2016, and though Thorns got us close to a lot of writing jobs, it only just now finally opened the door for us. From a strictly utilitarian perspective, my former manager was right. But Thorns opened way, way more doors for us than the various more commercial things I wrote at his behest.

People can sense your passion for what you write. (This is true for criticism too! I can tell when you're writing about something you love versus when you're writing something you just thought you could sell.) When you've made writing your career then, yes, you need to worry at least a little bit about finding a way to make a living at it, but when you're just starting out, I think it's worth writing the thing that demands you open your copy of Final Draft or Scrivener every day.

2) Write other stuff, too. You know what else ended up opening doors for us? Arden, the scripted fiction podcast I also started working on in the summer of 2016 (a fruitful period!).  

For the most part, the people Libby and I talk to about jobs have never listened to Arden, but knowing that it exists and that I co-created it and we both worked on it lets them know that we have some minor knowledge of getting a thing out into the world. Is making a podcast anywhere near making a TV show in terms of complexity? Heck no. However, it involves skills that go beyond just writing a script, and some of those skills – working with other writers, running a writers room, directing actors, etc. – are applicable to a job in TV or film.

The weird paradox of all of this is that the less we focused on TV writing specifically and the more we focused on storytelling in whatever form we could find, the more doors opened for us in the world of TV. Being able to say, "Oh, I wrote a novel!" or "Oh, I wrote [insert a piece of journalism either Libby or I wrote]!" has made us seem like we'd have more to offer in a room, where you want a lot of writers who know a lot of different things.

3) Watching things critically helps a lot. Let me start by stating the obvious: Working so many years as a TV critic who occasionally had a reputation for being a little bit caustic (a reputation I think was unearned!) did make my other writing goals slightly harder to pursue. It is also not lost on me that the show I'm now working on is one I've written about very favorably in the past. I am aware of how that can appear!

Libby and I both worked as journalists prior to working as TV writers, and we are constantly aware of the (incorrect) stereotype of the wannabe artist who becomes a critic instead or the journalist who abuses their level of access to enter spaces that would otherwise be closed to them. We tried to go about breaking in as ethically as possible, to the degree that we broke in without having an agent or any other form of representation. Again, however, you just have to take my word for it and trust that, yeah, there were times when someone who might have helped us out was less inclined to because they remembered some review I'd written five years earlier that I had entirely blanked out of my memory.

All of that said!

The fact that we had both spent so long watching TV and films with a critical eye helped us a lot when it came time to really buckle down and start writing. We knew what we wanted, and we knew what we didn't want, and we knew how to pull apart the things we really loved to see what made them tick. I had always approached writing criticism from the point-of-view of someone who was interested in storytelling first and the medium I was writing about second, so if you read some maxim of how things "should" work in one of my reviews, it's inevitable that fed into Thorns or Arden or my novel or something else. The single best thing anybody can do to become a better writer (of any sort!) is to just consume a lot of stuff and think about how it works, what it's trying to make you think or feel, and what it's actually making you think or feel.

Just, y'know, don't write 15 recaps a week because your gender dysphoria is just that bad.

4) A lot of it really is just networking. I hate that this is true because the prominence of people helping out those they feel kindly toward is one of the reasons Hollywood remains so insular and relatively closed to new voices. The industry has gotten better at this just in the time I've been living here, but it still has a long way to go. It's getting slightly easier for talented writers to break in via a variety of different mechanisms, and many of those writers are staying in the system and even occasionally advancing within it. (The resolution of the recent strike should make this pipeline easier to move through. Hopefully.)

Still, networking is inevitably always going to be at least some of getting a job in Hollywood, as it is most fields. I came to think of it less as finding people who would do us favors and more as finding people with whom our creative sensibilities vibed. To some degree, it was important to do this because the second we made friends with someone, I had to stop writing about them in a critical capacity. Knowing that the person we were asking for favors was someone who got our work and clicked with it on some level meant we were probably going to have a relationship deeper than a reciprocal one.

Also: I was so, so, so, so bad at networking before I transitioned. Back when the world perceived me as a guy, so many people basically offered to hold open doors, then throw me through them, and I often didn't take them up on the offer, simply because I didn't realize what was happening and felt ill at ease in my own skin. Far fewer people held those doors after I came out, but I was much better at pursuing those opportunities when they arose. So, if you are bad at networking: Have you considered transition?

5) Maybe don't care so much? In April, I was laying in bed, gobbling up Maureen Ryan's Burn It Down, a deeply reported book on the many, many problems within the Hollywood system. I had recently sold a novel, and I was having good luck placing freelance articles. Well, I thought, writing for TV was a thing you wanted to do when you were 13. But you've found so many other ways to tell stories, and Mo's book makes it seem like that job can kinda suck. Maybe, I thought, it was time to let go.

The next day, we got the Yellowjackets offer. Dreams never die that easily. I'm thrilled to be going back to that job today. I hope it's the start of a long, productive new chapter of my life and career.

When I think about what lesson to take from this story, however, I think it might boil down to "There should probably be other things you're passionate about." Don't get me wrong: I love television, and I love writing, and I love television writing. But it was only as I let myself focus on other things – even if they were just, like, tabletop games – that my writing started to get stronger and doors started to open up.

Then again, I've "made it," if only temporarily. It's really easy for me to say, "Don't care so much." I know what I would have thought of me saying that five years ago. I would have gotten so mad.

Writing is a job, yeah, but it also tends to be a way that those of us who practice it use to make others hear us. That's good because that's how art works, but it's also dangerous because you run the risk of nobody hearing what you're saying and feeling more isolated than ever. Having other things you love will help you at least have something else to think about when a notes call is particularly brutal or you just feel like giving up. Then, you can say to yourself that if this writing thing doesn't work out, you can always retire to the mountains and become a professional beekeeper.

Don't get me wrong: Your story deserves to be told, and I can't wait to hear it. In the meantime, though, bees need to be kept, too. Your life will be better and richer if you have other things to care about – and your writing will be better and richer, too.

Talk back to me: What's your single best piece of advice for your career? Tell me in comments! (Remember: Only paid subscribers can comment.)

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Three things: Here are some things I've been up to recently.

• I love this recent trend of studios rereleasing films that were only niche hits at best on initial release but have gone on to greater success in their post-theatrical lives. As a great example, A24's theatrical rerelease of Stop Making Sense reminded me of why that movie is perhaps one of the most joyful ever made. I'd seen it a number of times at home, of course, but the experience of watching a fantastic band at the height of its powers do its thing, captured by the sure-handed direction of Jonathan Demme, was absolutely sublime. Between the twin successes of this and the Oldboy rerelease, I hope we see a lot more of these cult favorites coming back to theaters.
• I clicked play on this short documentary about the missing creator of a Scooby Doo fansite at a point when I really needed to start getting ready for bed, and then I watched the whole thing, I found it that fascinating. What I'm saying is: Don't click play unless you can spare the 25 minutes.
• When Libby and I put the baby to sleep each night, we read to them from chapter books. For the Halloween season, we've been working our way through The Bellwoods Game, and it's just about everything you could be looking for in a middle-grade creepfest. There are ghosts and haunted woods and complicated relationships among kids and family secrets. It's just so good, and it has some amazing art by author/artist Celia Krampien. Highly recommend!

This week's reading music: "Burning Down the House" by Talking Heads

Next time: Kirsten and Natalie #8: Marie Antoinette and V for Vendetta

The free edition of Episodes is published every other Wednesday, and the subscriber-supported edition of Episodes is published every Friday. It's written by Emily St. James, who covers whatever she feels like writing about, but if you have suggested topics, please reply to the email version of this newsletter or comment (if you are a paid subscriber).