I’ve decided to start blogging again.  Posts may initially be short and somewhat irregular, but I’ll be working up to what is hopefully a more reliable schedule. My goal is also to write more posts that are informative to a wider audience and not strictly personal.

I just graduated from California College of the Arts with my MFA in Writing this past May, and in the weeks since then I’ve had a lot of time to think about where I want to go next, both in terms of my writing and my overall career.  I’ve always wanted to work a TV-related job, but I think what held me back in the past was not knowing how to make that happen.  Now that I’m living near L.A. and have some more experience with screenwriting under my belt, I finally have a chance to start making this happen.  In the coming weeks I’ll be reading a teleplay from a current or past show that I admire on Sunday and spending the rest of the week analyzing its parts, (re)watching the final episode it spawned (if at all possible), and figuring out why it works well and what could be better.  I hope to blog about this weekly.  For the first week, I’ve chosen an early draft of the pilot episode of Supernatural, written by Eric Kripke, which was first included in the season 1 DVD set.  The first five seasons make up one of my favorite television shows and I’m looking forward to exploring it on a deeper level.

What is it about writing for television, particularly cable television, that appeals to me?  Strangely, although I’ve always loved television and dreamed of having a job in the industry, I didn’t think I would enjoy a job behind the scenes in the writers’ room.  Why?  Because as a fan and active participant in various fandoms over the years, I’ve seen how crazy the rabid fans can get.  It’s impossible to please everyone, and the ruts that happen every once in a while are often blamed solely on the writers, who get all sorts of hate on various modes of social media.  Not only are these writers trying to please the fans, but they are trying to please the network and keep the ratings up.  Not only that, but they are trying to create an organic and continuous story that appears in that magic little light box for a short time once a week, never knowing when the plug might get pulled before they have a chance to end the narrative on their own terms. Not only that, but they must compromise and work well with a large group of other writers.  And yet, I find that these seemingly negative points are challenges that I can learn from.  Not to mention that I love to work collaboratively with other people; writing fiction is far too solitary.  Ultimately, there is something fragile about writing in a serialized format that you can’t get with writing films or novels, something special about viewing the ever-fluid and unfinished product as it plays out on screen.

A lot has happened since my last post and I intend to write about those things as well: the projects I’ve completed, the ones I’ve only started, and the ones that are planned for the near future.  Until then.