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Truly Free Film

Inside the Writers’ Room: Post #8: The Real Secret of Success of American TV, Part I

TV is known as a better place for writers than any of the other dramatic media, with the sole exception of the theater, of course. Besides, TV drama is nowadays so highly regarded that it is already changing some of the old rules regarding old industry traditions. The crossover of the boundary between cinema and TV, whereby writers can move once again from one medium to the other, with greater ease, is one of the changes. It remains to be seen whether the crossover experiment will affect the writer’s importance in other media too – especially in film.

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Truly Free Film

Inside the Writers’ Room: Post #7: How To Rewrite and Be Rewritten, Part II

 

In_Treatment_TV_Series-137205646-largeSo how can you stay true to yourself as a writer, especially when one is supposed to be imitating another writer’s voice? For one thing, one can stop chasing fads or writing what one think the showrunner might want to see. Jane Espenson, who has written for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica and Game of Thrones and has also created her own Web TV show, Husbands, talks to me about how important it is to trust your own instincts and your own good taste. She is not the only one: Jenny Bicks encourages “writing what you want to write, going towards the love” and Tom Fontana goes as far as to very simply state that “being successful is being faithful to oneself.”