Inside the Writers' Room by Christina Kallas

Author:Christina Kallas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK

Jane Espenson

Jane Espenson’s television credits include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones, Torchwood, Once Upon a Time and the original series Husbands, created with Brad Bell. She has won two Hugo awards.

Why do you think that American TV has so much better writing right now than most American movies?

TV in general is a writer’s medium. You get to dictate the stories, produce your own material, be on set, and whatever else … supervise the editing … Even a low-level TV writer has arguably more control over the final product than a much more experienced feature writer. I think there are some gorgeously written movies out there, but, yeah, TV has so much to offer that I’m not surprised that a lot of the most creative voices work here.

Where did you learn to write and when did you feel comfortable enough to start answering the question “and what do you do” with “I’m a writer”?

I don’t think you need anything to learn to write other than to watch and to think critically about what you’re seeing. It’s like learning to build a machine – the best education comes from studying other machines and learning to extrapolate the general principles of mechanics from them. Not by learning the principles and then setting out to invent something from them. For one thing, that’s just too hard. So I started learning to write TV when I was a kid, watching episodes of Barney Miller or Soap or MASH or Welcome Back, Kotter and thinking about what made them work. I thought a lot about character and dialogue and jokes – in retrospect I should’ve looked at structure, too, but what I got worked well enough. I didn’t study writing in college other than a few courses, none of them on TV writing – UC Berkeley didn’t really offer anything relevant at the time. I guess I was forced to pick it up on the streets. The question about saying “I’m a writer” – that’s funny you ask that. I used to think of that all the time – looking forward to saying that. I said it when I got my first staff job in TV – on the show Dinosaurs. I loved saying it – I still do. It’s still thrilling. Who gets to make their living by means of the funnest hobby ever?! It’s like being a paid “thinker.” I remember I even enjoyed writing it on the unemployment forms during a year I didn’t get staffed on a show.

You are also a scholar, how does one influence the other?

Ha! “Scholar” sounds very, sort of, a couple centuries ago. But I like it. It’s more like I was one of those perpetual students, until I found a way to flop out of the nest. I was studying metaphor, which has turned out to be very important for what I do – especially when I’m writing on a science fiction show. Sci-fi is mostly about metaphor. But I can’t say that anything I studied has really affected stories I’ve written.

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