46 | Writing Great TV Characters w/ Javier Grillo-Marxuach

Though best known as one of the Emmy Award-winning writer/producers of Lost, Javier Grillo-Marxuach is a prolific writer of television shows, comic books, movies, and the occasional critical essay. He's a master-storyteller, with a deep understanding of character, no matter how "otherworldly" the project. Today we're going to deep dive on longform character development and Javier's philosophies on "operational theme." And of course, we'll be answering your questions!

Check Out Javi's Website: http://okbjgm.weebly.com/

Follow Him On Social: @OKBJGM

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Meg: Guys, welcome back to the show. Today, we are thrilled to be chatting with one of Hollywood's most well known and respected screenwriters, Javier Grillo-Marxuach.

Lorien: Though best known as one of the Emmy award-winning writer/producers of Lost, Javi is a prolific writer of television shows, comic books, movies, and the occasional critical essay.

Meg: He's a master storyteller with a deep understanding of character. Today, we're going to deep dive on long form character development, as well as Javi's philosophy on operational theme, which I am fascinated by. And we'll be answering your questions that you posted on our Facebook page.

So Javi, welcome to the show. 

Lorien: Welcome.

Javier: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Oh my God. And what a lovely introduction. I hope I can live up to it.

Meg: Come on. 

Lorien: Why don't we get started with our weeks or what we call adventures in screenwriting. Usually, I go first. My week was… I don't know. I feel like I have a hangover from not drinking, unfortunately, but from the writing I finished two weeks ago. I still feel this sort of desperate urge to start something new, but everything I want to start feels too big, too heavy, too complicated. Is that the right thing I'm supposed to be working on? Am I going to spend the next couple of months working on that? That sort of beginning place where it's the blank space. It's not even a blank page. It's like this, ma of time in front of me. What am I supposed to be working on? And so I had like a real funky day where it was just all that. It was Wednesday, I think, and all the inside voices were just full of, “You're garbage. You're crap. You should quit.” All that delightful stuff that's inside my head. 

Meg: Every writer has that head. 

Javier: Oh yeah. 

Lorien: It was really loud. I posted about it on the Facebook group and I just got such wonderful support. No one offered me fixes, which I really appreciated. Everyone was just, “Yeah, that happens!” 

It felt like, “Okay, I can have one really shitty day.” I mean, I had a lot of shitty days, but like that was the pinnacle of it. Then later that night, I let myself do that. I just stopped fighting it. I was like, “Okay, I'm writing this day off.” 

Then later that night, I had this idea and I was like, “Oh!” It's sort of similar to an idea I've been playing with for a while. I got to dive into some research and I felt alive again. Part of that process was honoring that funk I was in. The fighting was taking up so much energy, beating myself up for beating myself up kind of thing.

Apparently, I take a really long time to process this shit, but I have this new idea that I'm playing with, that I love. I feel like I'm gonna have so much fun writing it that it doesn't matter if it's the right thing or I'm gonna spend months on it. I'm gonna have fun. I'm excited about it. 

Meg: Have fun. That's my new motto. Have fun people. 

Lorien: So that felt great. And doing this show is really exciting with Javi. I'm really excited to learn and perhaps this will inform what I'm working on. I'll be all excited on the show and then I'll leave and be like, “Oh my God, I don't know what I'm doing!” So that will be fun.

Meg: So Javi, how was your week?

Javier: It's been really, really busy. The new normal is that we have to hustle so much. I remember at the beginning of my career, if you were lucky and you got on the show, you were there for 22 episodes. You did your year there. You got a month off and then the show hopefully got picked up. Now, I find myself working multiple jobs simultaneously.

I'm writing a pilot that's due a week from today. Then I had a deadline for an episodic script for a show. I'm working one called, “From,” which is going to be on Epics and my first script for that was due. I think Rod Serling once said that he was so busy that if he dropped his pencil and bent over to pick it up, he would already go behind schedule. It's been that week. It's just been a week of powering through it.

My boss on From said we want the script on Friday. He’s a very nice man. He was like, “Is that okay? Are you going to need more time?” I was like, “You know, we all know that the dirty little secret is that when the rubber meets the road, we just sit down and bang it the fuck out.” 

So that's been my week, just banging it the fuck out and hoping that it's good. 

Lorien: Yes. 

Javier: I kind of envy you, Lorien, and the time you've had to hate yourself and beat yourself up because it's such a great part of the writing process. I haven't had a chance to do any of that. I literally have just had to write.

Lorien: Well, and I envy you. I want to be in that, like, “I have too much work and not enough time,” because that's when you get it done. 

Javier: Yeah. Yeah. 

Lorien: Like the sort of unknown.

Meg: Panic writing! I'm a great panic writer. Like, “Oh my God, it's due! Boom!”

Lorien: Yes and then you don't have time to overthink things. You're like, “This is what it is. It works. Let's do it.” I'm in the place where I'm overthinking everything.

Javier: Yeah. My wife says that my process is, if I have a three-week deadline, I spend two weeks hating myself and then I spend one week writing the actual script.

Lorien: I call that the chips and crying stage. I eat a lot of chips and I spend a lot of time crying and then the last week, I write the feature. 

Meg: Good to know that we're all doing the same thing.

Javier: Yeah. This is a lifestyle. This isn't just a vocation. It's a lifestyle.

Meg: It's the artist's way of writing.

Lorien: All right, Meg. Oh, do you have more? 

Meg: I had kind of the same. I had a combo platter of both of those. I'm also on a deadline and things are due and people are waiting. I'm trying to get a new project. Like Javi, in terms of multiple balls in the air to the point that I'm writing and I'm trying to write my passion project with our podcast listeners sprinting from six to eight, which has been super fun. It's the fun part of my day. But my brain is very tired. All I could say is I was on the phone yesterday with my agent and he's like, “Can I just stop you? You sound really tired. Are you tired? And are you okay?” I'm like, “I'm just really tired. I'm tired.” Which then when your brain gets this tired, I don't know if I can trust what I'm assessing because I think I'm just tired. 

I text ranted to Lorien today. My passion pilot that I've been writing from six to eight is done and there's no one to buy it. I don't even know why I wrote this. The producer in me is like, “Okay, well, that was a fun sample. No one's buying this. Don't ask your producers to even package it. Move on.” But I'm like, “Am I just tired? Maybe I'm tired.” But I feel the sadness of that. I feel the sadness of really believing my producer brain—well, there's actually not an audience for this. I love it, but… that’s not correct. I actually believe there is an audience for it. I believe there's a huge audience for it, which is basically the masterpiece theater audience that's American, not British. But nobody will make it because it's not appealing to 20-year-olds. It's appealing to 40-year-olds and 50-year-olds. There's no big twist and there's not tons of sex. It’s not about 20-year-olds who are going to have a lot of sex during this period. So I'm like, “Oh my God, it's just a straight period piece. There is no twist for the 20-year-old.” I started to go down into the muck on that this morning and I'm still a bit there.

Javier: I think, one of the things that I'm getting from both of you and that I feel a lot of the time very vividly is there's also a certain amount of postpartum that goes once you finish a script. I'm shocked that it's only been two weeks, Lorien, for you to start a new project because sometimes when I finish something, it takes a little bit more than that to get over having finished and having metaphorically given birth.

Lorien: I don't exactly know what it is because I was working on a project I have in development at the same time. I don't actually know that it's two weeks. It might be longer.

Javier: Well, I'm wondering if Meg's sort of doldrums aren't a little bit of that. I mean, you did just finish it and you've stepped out of that world. I'm wondering if maybe that's it.

Meg: It could be. I'm editing it so my editing brain is on. It’s too long. That normal first pass, “I need to cut three pages, blah, blah, blah.” That edit brain has come on and with it came the producer brain because I used to be a producer. Now, it's looking at it differently and it's hard because the producer doesn't believe in it as a widget to sell. I'll be honest with you. My plan always was to package it with the star, with the actor, with the director so that they have to make it because it's Nicole Kidman and Ang Lee or whatever. 

Lorien: For example, hypothetically.

Meg: Hypothetically if they are listening.

Javier: Hopefully! I hope that's who you get.

Meg: Wouldn't that be amazing? But I don't know. Yeah, I do think it's the doldrums. I also have had this hobby, I've optioned this book series for three years. It's been, write it here. Stop. Write it here. Because it's my own thing and I just made this commitment to finish it. I do think it's a bit of the doldrums. It's been with me for so long to now see it separate from me… it's just this weird… I don't know what it is. I think I'm also tired.

Javier: I think it's interesting because of what we've been going through for the last five years. Regardless of where you stand in the political spectrum, but I think you know where I stand, you've either been fighting a war to preserve your values or you've been fighting a war to preserve your values day in and day out. I think it's taken a toll on everybody and the pandemic and everything else. 

The tenor of our day to day life is so heightened right now. How could you not be emotionally exhausted all the time?

Meg: It's true. And I think coming back out into the world has been so exciting, but it's also oddly tiring, right? In terms of who has masks, who doesn't, what does that mean? You're with your friends. Can I hug you? I think we can hug each other. There's always this processing going on. And I'm really looking forward to not doing that soon, but I do think that's too. 

All right, well, let's get to the good stuff. The Javi stuff. We’re going to go into the brain of Javi. I just want to start off the top with the thing that I really want to talk about, which is, when we were on a panel together, you brought up the operational theme.

Javier: Right.

Meg: I was so fascinated by it and I don't even know how to ask you about it other than to say, “What is an operational theme? What can we learn about it?”

Javier: I think it's what I call the central dilemma of the character who's the main character in a series. I think whether you're talking about serialized storytelling or, anthology storytelling, single episode, or even the short form that we all seem to be writing nowadays, which is eight to thirteen episode series. 

We're still making television and we're not making movies or novels. I think that in order to ensure the longevity of your project, your main character needs to have an irresolvable contradiction in his or her or their center, the center of their soul. That's the thing that drives eight hours of drama. 

It's funny, I just finished watching, I Know This Much Is True, the HBO adaptation of the novel. It's interesting because the Mark Ruffalo character, his operational theme is that he quite literally cannot get over his toxic masculinity to have a real honest  communication with anybody.

He is such a belligerent man and such a wounded guy that he literally just can't get the words out. It's one of the most interesting ones I've seen because you like the guy. You want him to get better, but you realize that it's going to be very slow going.

I think it's the same thing you see with, for example, Don Draper. His operational theme is that he is constantly striving to match up to an ideal life that doesn't actually exist. He created this in his mind when he was the son of a poor farmer, this idealized version of the man in the gray flannel suit.

Even as time passes him by with it, he's still trying to be that guy. The really interesting thing about the way Mad Man ended is that Don Draper never changed. The show continued to basically live in that contradiction even to its bitter end. I think it's something that whether you're doing a six episode adaptation of a Wally Lamb novel, or you're doing Mad Men for seven years, you need to have that contradiction in the center of your character, because that's what's going to drive the story.

I think ultimately it's the thing that makes cops, doctors, and lawyers so prevalent in television. Cops are obsessed with law and order. They're here to bring about law and order and the great thing is there are challenges to it coming all the time. 

When you're not writing a show that has that clear franchise, I think that's one of the biggest challenges that pilot writers have to get to—what do my main characters have in them that is going to stop them from fulfilling everything they want in the pilot episode?

Meg: I love the word contradiction. I think what you're saying is that there's an actual contradiction within them. Forget about the outside world. There might be a contradiction with the outside world. I'm a poor farmer and I want to be the man in the gray suit. But John Draper is so fascinating because he is driving to be that, and yet he is self-sabotaging all over the place.

Javier: Yes, yes.

Meg: And that self-sabotage is that contradiction, right?

Javier: Yeah, absolutely. And also the man in the gray suit is unachievable. That whole archetype was invented by people like him. If you look at Breaking Bad, I think that has one of the greatest combinations of that contradiction and then the outer circumstances that trigger it. Walter White's inner conflict from the first episode is that he has to save everything that he loves and he's unable to. Then he finds a way, but in order to save everything he loves, he has to become something everyone hates and something that is actually who he really is on the inside, which is this amazingly competent criminal. So that push and pull is the center of the series. It starts from jump street on Breaking Bad, the extraordinary circumstance so he gets the chance to become a drug lord. It happens in that pilot, but it's something that's inside of him the entire time. It goes all the way to the end, when he basically becomes evil Batman.

Meg: Is there any hint or tricks you can give us or not tricks, but like advice? Does that operational theme need to show up as soon as you meet the character in the pilot, or is it something that the pilot is discovering and uncovering as you go?

Javier: The character is going to have it in them no matter what. They start with that. The first scene of Mad Men is really interesting because it's Don sitting in a restaurant talking to the black waiter who's serving him drinks about whether he smokes Lucky Strikes and why he doesn't smoke Lucky Strikes and all that.

In its own really subtle way, it's like the scene is basically establishing that Don Draper only knows the world that he lives in and the world that he's created for himself. And he's trying to figure out what the outside world is like. So even as somebody in advertising, his scope of empathy is limited by his own experience.

Most people probably don't read that much into that scene, but that's what I saw the third or fourth time. I tried to study that pilot to see exactly what you're saying. But you don't really get it until the very end of the pilot, when you realize that, you've seen him fucking around, you've seen him drinking, you've seen him at the ad firm, and then you realize, “Oh my God, this guy, has a wife and a kid in, in a suburb.” And then you realize that's the unsolvable contradiction. He has all of these negative impulses and he's also trying to keep up appearances and being January Jones's husband and all that. I think you drop the dime in a big way at the end of the pilot, but I think it's got to be there all along.

Lorien: Right. I'm wondering how you, when you're in your own work and your own pilot, how you check it? Does it need to be obvious in every scene? I love the build of it and then the dropping the dime at the end.

Javier: I gotta tell you, I suck at it. It's one of one of the reasons I wrote the essay is because I needed to clarify that shit in my mind.

One of the things I found out (and this is a vast exaggeration, and I think it's true for everybody) why younger staff writers and younger writers can be very difficult in the writer's room is because your critical faculty grows up long before your creative talent and your belief in your creative talent. So it's a lot easier, especially when you're a starting writer to say, “this sucks,” or “I don't like this” then to pitch the fix. With operational theme, it's something that I identified. Look, I'm sure people have said things like it before. 

I certainly look at all the pilots that I write and think, “Well, what's the operational theme here?” 

I was developing something with Jose Molina, somebody who I do a podcast with and also a writer/producer and a fellow Puerto Rican. We were developing this thing and he looks at me, he goes, “What's the operational theme, Javi?” I'm like, “Oh, crap! He's turning it on me.” The writer Javi writes a little bit more from the heart. And then I go back and I look at it and go, “Okay, did I actually fulfill any of the intellectual goals that I've laid out for people who read my essays?”

Lorien: Right. I think that's so important. We talk on the show a lot about a barf draft or a birth draft when the thing just upends out of you. Sometimes it's hard to be like, “What's the theme? What's the this, what's the this?” You do have to honor that process of it coming out. That emotional blast of it, and then you can go back in and the second, third draft of figuring it out and asking those questions.

Meg: It's interesting to look at your work sometimes as a dream. That there are symbols in there of what that operational theme is, but maybe it's not clear. You have to almost be a detective of a thing separate from you and be like, “Where is it? Is it that piece of her right there? Is that it?” Because I feel like sometimes these characters take on a life of their own. And they're trying to tell you their operational theme and you have to honor it. Versus when I decide what it is and then I try to put it in, it doesn't work as well as looking for the clues in the dream itself of what you did.

Javier: Isn't that the best when you don't think about it, you write it, whatever your process is. Then you look back and you go, “Oh, I did it. Okay.”

Meg: No, often I'm like, “Oh my God, she has no agency, again. Shit.” Okay, I gotta go back. That's every time, I'm like, “Oh my God, she's doing nothing. She's watching everything.”

Lorien: And then sometimes someone else reads your work that you give it to and they're like, “Oh, it's about this.” And there were all those little clues laid in that you weren't aware of and someone else points it out to you and you're like, “Oh, that is what it’s about.”

Javier: I wrote an essay about Star Wars, and my relationship to Star Wars. Then I read it again a little bit later after I finished it and it was published. And I went, “This is all about my divorce, isn't it? 

Meg: Oh my God, that’s amazing.

Javier: So it's one of those things...

Lorien: You can't help it. 

Javier: You can't. Look, I've always said every television show is a therapist's couch for its creator in ways that you cannot discern when you're doing it. I think you try to be aware of it so that you don't foist all of your crap on the world in a way that's burdensome to the world.

When you write, for me, I have to treat it like I'm in session with my psychotherapist. I can't treat it like I'm gonna figure out if I'm actually achieving the correct volume of transference with my therapist. And he's, empathic enough, but also detached. I'm not thinking about those things when I'm telling him about my issues with being rejected as a child. I think it's the same with writing. I think there's all the intellectual stuff. And then I think when it's just you and the keyboard, it’s just you.

Lorien: Meg, that's what you're talking about with this piece. You allowed yourself to be fully in it and then your intellectual piece came in and it's beating you up, unnecessarily. 

Meg: I don't know if it's unnecessary. 

Lorien: I think it's unnecessary. 

Meg: We're not going to get into this. Let's go back to the good stuff.

Javi, we have some questions for you from our audience. So there's some questions right off the bat about Lost. Nicholas–

Javier: I’m happy to answer those.

Meg: Good. Nicholas asked about the development of the first season and how much of that plot of season one was figured out before the writing staff was hired versus how much was created in the room.

Well, they're looking for what a week of work on that show looked like, what were you doing?

Javier: I wrote a very long essay that you can find on my website. I'm not going to be able to cover it. Also, it's a full memoir of that first year, but I would suggest that he read it because I think it'd be very useful.

First of all, Lost was developed in a very different way from most shows. Lost was greenlit off of an outline in late January. This is a time when most network television, and we're talking about the ABC, NBC, CBS model of network television, have been developing their show since the previous summer.

So JJ and Damon write this outline, take it in, they get greenlit. Now they have to write a script and figure out what the show is and do basically six months worth of work in about three weeks. 

What they did was they hired me and Paul Dini, who is a very well known comics writer. He was the head writer for the animated Batman. He's a legend. He created Harley Quinn. 

Jennifer Johnson, who is also just a phenomenal writer and showrunner, she showran The Chase. I worked with her on Cowboy Bebop just now. And Christian Taylor, who worked on Six Feet Under, but he's the showrunner of Teen Wolf.

We're all together, we're all sitting there and our job was to develop the world based on Damon and JJ'S ideas. My second day at Lost was the first day that there was a pilot script. Basically on that first day, Damon sat down and downloaded us on everything that he had in mind. There were things like the hatch. The thing that became the Dharma Initiative was already baked in there. A lot of ideas about what the island was, it being a sort of site for manichean conflict over many decades and centuries and stuff like that. That was all in there.

What's interesting is, people only ask this question about Lost because the show was so popular, but it was no different from a lot of shows. You come in knowing a lot of your basics, and then, the day-to-day work of the room is to break those basics down into the episode.

So when people talk about Lost, and they go like, “Well, they were just making it up as they went along,” I'm like, “Yeah! And also, we knew a lot about what we were doing.” We literally figured it all out. We just had this room. We had this 747 full of all this shit. Then week after week, day after day, we look in the 747 and say, “Okay, we're going to take this part of it out and look at this one.” That's true of every writer's room. I think that we erred a little bit in telling the audience things like, “We've got everything figured out. We've got five years worth of story, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” I think that the beauty of the writer's room is that you create a colloquium of ideas and then they get tested week after week in the writer's room as you break each individual episode.

And that evolution worked out so beautifully on Lost and especially in the first season, which I'm proud of to the point of arrogance. That's what the room does. We spent from that day before the pilot was written all the way to the upfronts in May figuring the show out. Let me tell you about something that we figured out in that room. The pilot had these little micro flashbacks to the airplane before they crashed. Beyond that, there was no plan to do any kind of flashbacks on the show. 

So the pilot is being made. Damon and JJ are in post. We’ve written extensive character biographies. We've come up with episode ideas. Stuff has been pitched to ABC. We're in the process of making the show and Damon says, “Well, we should start breaking episode two.” We knew that was going to be about an euthanasia thing and all of the stuff that happens in episode two.

But then the B story was like Hurley digs a latrine or people sort leaves and stuff like that. These island stories were very hard to put together because they're on an island. The room came up with this idea of, “We've got flashbacks in the pilot. We’ve got these extensive backstories. Why don’t we…” That didn't happen until like April or May, and I think that's the thing. Then people use that as an excuse for, “Oh, you didn't know what you were doing.” And it's like, “Because we were creating it!” It makes you ask the question of, “For you to be satisfied, did JJ have to come in with an actual Bible with gold foil on the pages with everything about Lost for you to be satisfied that we knew what we were doing?” With Lost, because of the nature of that show and because of the hype on that show, we were especially picked over for having done something that all TV shows do.

Meg: That's amazing.

Lorien: In your experience in other rooms, it's that same rhythm and flow, right? You have ideas and then it gets developed in the room.

Javier: Yeah. Honestly with Lost, it wasn't even all that different. I ran this show called The Middleman 528 years ago. Basically, the way we would do it was, every Friday I told the writers, “Every Friday, come in with an episodic pitch for the episode story.” Then we would decide which ones we do and put those up on the board. Then the room was working on all of the personal stories going simultaneously because the show wasn't serialized. On Lost, it was the same thing. We needed to figure out what the story was for that week. We knew what the dart was. It was called the Medusa corporation originally. We knew what that was, but that doesn't mean we know what happens when someone is sick on the island and has to be euthanized. You have to still figure out the dramatics of that and what the characters are thinking and all that. That's every writer's room on Earth. 

It's the same way we did The Hundred. It's the same way that we did The Dark Crystal. It was the same way Lost was done. You spend a number of weeks at the beginning of your season figuring out the tent poles, figuring out the mythology, figuring out what parts of the greater mythology that you've come up from the beginning to fit in the season. Then you break it down week after week. And it takes that long to do it.

Meg: That's so amazing. Rebecca asked us about Lost, and I think about every show you've been on, about pacing. She saw Lost as a masterclass in pacing and she wondered about the process of how you do that in the room and think that through in terms of that pacing.

Javier: Well, I think on Lost, we all sat in that room and we went, “Well, we're masters. So let's teach a masterclass.” No, you know what? I mean, honestly it's so nice to hear that because you have no idea how seat of the pants Lost was. Because it was developed in such a hurry and then because the show was so logistically complicated with our production in Hawaii... we put the fuselage of an L-1011 on a barge to Hawaii before we had a cast, before there was a script. The first script that JJ and Damon brought in was the script where Jack dies in the first 15 minutes of the show. The whole idea was they were going to get a big star and the name Michael Keaton kept being bandied around. You'd think for the first 15 minutes that he was the lead and then like an executive decision, with Seagal, he'd get killed. This led to one of the moments I dine out most about Lost, which is when I read the script and they asked me what I thought,  I said, “You can't kill the white guy.” 

Lorien: That’s amazing.

Javier: As a Puerto Rican, I think I can say that. Then when they came back from network notes, I said, “How'd it go?” And they're like, “Yeah, we can't kill the white guy.” I'm like, “Yep.” Lost was a chaotic, dramatic, and incredible experience. We literally walked into that writer's room and Damon would come in with a large knife and he would split his chest open and put all the bits on the table and say, “Well, guys, that's what we're doing today.” And then he'd hand the knife and he'd pass it around and we'd all do the same thing. So we were very…

Meg: It sounds very Pixar. You could use that same image at Pixar. 

Lorien: Yeah, I feel so at home in this conversation.

Javier: No, it's interesting because I spent two years working with that group and with Damon specifically. So much of what that show is about is primarily his stuff, but it's a lot of our stuff too. And it is that raw. When you talk about the pacing, how I use it now is retroactive to what we did on Lost. We just made that first season, we had no choice, so we made it. It's like we were being chased by a bear. You don't think about, “I'm going to modulate my pace so that the bear doesn't catch me.” You're just going, “Oh shit, I'm being chased by a bear. I'd better run.” 

After the fact, I looked at it and also during it, because I was really active on LiveJournal and I was blogging a lot about how we made the show, especially after it became popular.

After it premiered and we were a hit, I spent a lot of time thinking about what we were doing in there. Ultimately, when we went to do the Dark Crystal, for example, or even when I went to work on the third season of The Hundred, the techniques that I used that came out of Lost were all figured out after the fact.

Meg: We actually have a question about the Dark Crystal, which is, “When you're developing a series based on such beloved IP,” Jason asks, “especially if you're a fan already, how do you modulate your expectations about that?”

Javier: Wow. Well, first of all, it's funny… I've never thought about fan expectations for the Dark Crystal, for example, because we had to get everything past Lisa Henson. She's my boss. She's Jim Henson's daughter. She PA’d on the original movie. She knows what is the Dark Crystal and what isn't so if I satisfy her, I figured we're good. Jeff Addis and Will Matthews who developed the show and Louie, we were all big fans of it. We all loved it. We were all in awe of being in the Jim Henson lot doing that work. Honestly, the Dark Crystal is very odd for me.

Will and Jeff are brilliant and they had created this great pilot and I read it. I loved it. And I said, “What can I do to help?” My role there was to sort of be like an elder presence in the room because Will and Jeff hadn't really even stepped in a writer's room until they sold their first pilot. They were feature writers and they've done a bunch of other stuff.

My job was to be that presence in the room. I didn't come into it with expectations of what I want to do with the Dark Crystal necessarily. I came into it thinking my job is to produce Will and Jeff. It was to make sure that they're always in the front, to make sure that they're seen as the creators of the show, to make sure that they have the skills, which they did in spades. I don't. It was just to provide that coaching thing.

What I think happened for me was when I was able to put my ego aside a little bit, I was actually a better writer for the Dark Crystal because there was stuff in my mind that I would blurt out. Maybe it'll go, maybe it won't. And then a bunch of things… I look at the Dark Crystal and there's a lot of me in that show and it's not at anyone's expense. There's a lot of Will and Jeff in that show, there’s a lot of Louie. I think we all came into it with our own expectations of it. But for me not having expectations and knowing that the bar was set very high in terms of who we had to satisfy… that was all of the matrix of expectations that I had.

Jeff: I feel like what I'm hearing Javi is in the room, your job is to serve the show. It's never about serving yourself. It's about serving the show. Even when you have IP, you are still developing a specific show, even if you were borrowing from that IP, you had to be serving that specific… I keep repeating myself.

Javier: In apropos of your first point, which is you're serving the show, I wish more showrunners knew that and I wish that more writers knew that. Because honestly, I've worked in so many shows where the showrunner's ego was the show. And I don't mean what's on the page. I mean the show. If that person is the kind of person who's like a firefighter arsonist and a last minute savior, you're fucked, because all they do is create problems only they can solve, and waiting till the last minute to do it. And that doesn't help anybody. Yes. Look, even if you're the creator of a show, the characters start talking to you. The characters start telling you who they are and what they want and all that. And that sounds very twee from us writers when we say, “Oh, the characters started talking to me.” But they do. And then the show starts talking to you.The actual show starts talking to you and saying, “We got to go in this direction.” 

I'll tell you a story about that. On The Middleman, the long story short is there was a woman I was involved with in high school who wound up being involved with this photographer who was twice her age. I saw that relationship and was deeply traumatized by it. It gave me a real distaste for younger women and much older men relationships. It's like literally one of the things that I hate looking at. I had that thing on The Middleman. The Middleman is ten to fifteen years older than the other characters. He cannot have those kinds of relationships with anybody who's in the friends group of the other character, who's a girl who just turned twenty-one. He's like thirty-six. What happened was, as the show developed, he had this incredible chemistry with the character who played the best friend.

It was undeniable. It was like literally these two actors and there was nothing between them in real life, but on screen, they each looked at each other like I look at a stack of pancakes. The writers were like, “Dude, we’ve got to get the Middleman together with Lacey.” I'm like, “Absolutely not. I hate that idea. I've been traumatized by this trope. I am not doing it.”

Ultimately, the writers staged an intervention and they said, “This is what the show wants, dude.” And I just had to cop to it. This is a show that I created. That's not the tone of my soul, but the show wanted something that I wasn't ready to give and it took all the writers to convince me.

Lorien: That's a great example of your ego. We have a question, I think this is a Jeff question. Jeff, do you want to ask it… when writing sci-fi genre?

Jeff: You're such a master of working within what we would call genre. Of course, everything is genre. But when we're talking about ideas or properties or tropes that are based on things we know, recognize, and love, I've always wondered, when you're diving into that, I feel like you're almost making a contract with your audience that they expect certain things to show up.

How do you walk the line between giving the audience those tropes that they want and you know they want but not falling into cliché. The example I use is, the ship is going to self-destruct. We know that's going to happen in a space opera type of film, and we almost want to see it, but we want to see it in a way that feels fresh. I don't know if that question makes sense or not, but I'd love to hear you speak on it.

Javier: It's interesting. You think of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, the first movie being very much about giving the audience that old Star Wars feeling. The second one, which is about trying to subvert all of that. The problem with the subversion, especially in that film, is that I'm not sure that Star Wars is the best venue to interrogate the folly of entitled and overconfident masculinity.

It's not about whether you want to subvert it. It's about whether you have the correct airframe to answer the questions you're asking. I think that you have to be very rigorous with yourself when you look at genre material about character, drama, and things like that, about what the characters are actually going through and the experiences of the characters within it.

I got to tell you, I appreciate all of these nice things you're saying about me, but at the same time, I find that's the area in which I have the most to learn. And it's now only dawning on me… I've always known I was somewhat emotionally stunted, but I've always been a plot inward writer. I've always been a guy who figured out when the ship self-destructs. And then I figure out what the characters have to be and what their conflicts have to be for that cool thing to happen. And that's a perfectly valid way of writing. Ultimately, if you're going to use a trope, you need to be rigorous about the characters really having a journey. Because ultimately plot is tropes, character is feeling, and together, to the Bob McKee thing, together they make a story. For example, with Dark Crystal, I know what I'm getting into. I'm making a high fantasy show, so there's a bunch of things that… if you're going to interrogate certain things, you need to be conscious of the venue and what people want from the venue and what the bandwidth is and what that airframe will support. Did that make any damn sense?

Meg: Yeah, absolutely. Because the ship blowing up is a metaphor for the interior of the character. The dream metaphor for what's happening inside. So it makes complete sense.

Jeff: As you say, we can't arrive at those moments unless we've done the work, the character work to support those moments.

Javier: Exactly. The best ship blowing up sequence in my experience is the last act of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It's amazing how much Khan finally igniting the Genesis device to self-destruct the ship to kill Kirk and himself in the process… The movie is called, The Wrath of Khan, so we know what his deal is. When you get to that point, even though the movie is called The Wrath of Khan, you're like, “Damn he's really angry.” This is the end point of that level of irrational fury and you buy it because you've been with that character all through the journey. Whether it's Kirk's character in that film or Khan or whatever… that movie is a piece of pulp fiction. It's a wonderful, beautifully constructed piece of pulp fiction, but what it really does is, if you're a fan, or if you come into it and you like those characters, you're watching Kirk go through his midlife crisis. You're watching Khan go through, I wouldn't call it a midlife crisis, but he's somebody who's basically been in jail and he's sprung out and he's gonna get his. They both have arcs that end exactly where they should. That's the thought process you need to have going into it.

When people ask me when do I think a script is done, I always say the same thing, which is, “When you feel like your main character has been through a journey they can't go back from.” 

Meg: I love that. 

Lorien: I love that.

Meg: Put that on a t-shirt, please. 

Lorien: Yeah. Jeff, write that down.

Javier: You guys are so kind.

Lorien:  That's really great.

A lot of people ask questions on advice for writers. Richard asked about original pilots. Original pilots as samples have become more sought after. It used to be spec episodes. Now it seems mostly original. Is there any purpose to write a spec episode? Are showrunners reading them to the staff?

Javier: I think you should do one regardless. I get it, it's a pain in the ass. It's time consuming. I don't care. Learn how to write other people's show if you want to be a TV writer. People are coming into this field after writing a great blog. They have a great Twitter stream. I mean, that’s great. I don't judge that if that's how you got in. Great. But here's the thing, if you want longevity as a television writer, you're eventually going to have to write somebody else's work, and somebody else's world. If you haven't polished your chops on doing that, you're going to be really bad at it.

It doesn't matter whether you're the fresh new voice of the American theater, whether you're doing an eight episode fantasy show for Netflix or whether you're doing a 22 episode Dick Wolf show on NBC, television requires that the series have a unified voice. So you need to learn how to do that. The question of whether an agent wants it, I think it is something that's just jettison altogether. You need both. You need a pilot and you need a spec and maybe you need two specs. You obviously need more than one spec pilot. You need more than one sample. 

Wondering whether the agents want it is putting the cart before the horse. It's not about commerce. It's about your own education as a writer. And if I bring you into my writer's room and you hand me your first draft and it looks like a play, I'm not going to be horribly mad at you. I'm going to be very kind and I'm going to hand you a copy of the pilot script I wrote and say, “I would like for it to look more like this, please.” And there would be a conversation about that. 

But on the inside, I'd be pretty pissed, because I'm seeing somebody who hasn't had the requisite education to be in this room.

Lorien: There are a lot of questions about what should I be doing. So yes, a spec and an original, and then, how do I pick which show to spec? There's thousands of shows now. How do you know if the people reading it have watched that show and are familiar with what it is? Does that matter?

Javier: No, of course not. There's 9 million networks. I get a call from my agent and it's like, “There's this new show. They want you for their mini writer's room.” And I'm like, “What's the show?” And they're like, “Oh, it's called, Coffins from Space.”

And I'm like, “Oh, that sounds awesome. I like coffins. I love space. Let's do it. Where's the show going to be on?”  And he goes, “It's on Flimby.” And I'm like, “What the fuck is Flimby?” He's like, “Well, I don't know.” And I'm like, “You don't know?” He's like, “Well, it's an app or a webpage or a streamer. I don't know. But they're getting into television.”

Write the show that most speaks to you and that you would most want to write on. You're not doing this for your agent. If your agent gets it and says, “Oh my God, there's an executive at Flimby who's just dying to read an episode of the Octonauts,” then great. But the real reason you're doing it is because you want to be a good television writer.

There was a time, when all of television was 22 episode orders on the air, i.e., when I started working in 1993, you had to pick a popular show. My first spec was an X Files. If you want to be a genre writer, you wrote a Star Trek, you wrote an X Files. If you want  to be a classy Emmy-winning writer, you wrote a NYPD Blue. Everybody had an X Files for a night. In 1995 to 1998, everybody had an X Files for a night. 

That entire environment has changed. You want to sell things, you want to sample, you write spec pilots. I think that's deeply unfair, too, by the way, because I also think pilots are kind of the brain surgery of this.

I think that the requirements of a pilot are so draconian, and we're asking the youngest writers and the least experienced writers in our midst to write them for no money without help, without the help of a writer's room, without the help of executives, and executives are a help in this stuff. I know people don't believe that. That's neither here nor there, but that's the environment we're in. That's what we do now. We write spec pilots.

Lorien: I think that the piece that you said, instead putting on what your agent wants or what someone else says they want, or what someone else says you should do. It's about, “What do I want to be doing? Where do I want to be writing? I want to do writing in this space. So I'm going to write a spec in this space.” There's this idea of like, “I just want any foot in the door. I want any job.” When, if it's not right for you, you're not going to do well in that environment.

So to really think about that. Who am I? What's my voice? What do I want to write? 

Meg: Yeah. What's your widget, in essence. What are you really good at? What excites you? So Javi, let's assume our young writer, our emerging writer, has done their homework. They've written a couple of samples that are based on other shows, other show episodes. They've written their spec pilots. Let's assume they even have a manager and agent, how do they break in? That's always their next question. How do you get noticed in all of the sea of people? You're a showrunner, you're reading scripts. What are you looking for in those scripts?

Javier:  It's interesting that writers are asking that, because that's actually an agent and manager question. And I get it that writers have to be much more entrepreneurial these days because of the fragmentation of the market and all that. But I don’t think the fundamental job of the agent and the manager has changed. And I'll answer the question for writers too. 

At the end of the day, this is a numbers game. The numbers are this: how many general meetings can your agent and manager get you? At the studio and production company level and network level so that a bunch of people know you and like you. So that when they have to staff a show, they're saying your name. That's it. It's a number game. You need an agent and a manager who understands that and will try to get you in as many places as possible. 

The biggest complaint that I get right now about agents and managers is my agent, my manager don't know that many people. There's a couple of reasons for that. The business is so big. And also, for the last year, no one's been in a bullpen. Nobody can run into a bullpen and go, “Does anybody know anyone at Flimby?” Then somebody on the other side goes, “I got a contact over there.” Then they make the call together. 

It's an agent and manager job, but you're a writer, you want to be noticed and you're not writing a script because you're in your two weeks of postpartum doldrums and you hate yourself, so you want to be seen.

Lorien: What? Stop seeing me. Don't look at me, don't look at me.

Javier: I'm sorry, I didn't. Social media right now is the best way to do that. Anyone can talk to me on social media. I'd rather they didn't talk to me like they knew me, or like they were my friends or family.

It's a good relationship you can have on social media, but you're not best friends with everybody. But, you can network and you can get to know so many more showrunners now. Fundamentally, there's two kinds of writers. There's those of us who got into writing to get the love and attention that we didn't get and we will admit to it. That we got into writing for the love of attention we never got as kids. And the second type of writer..

Lorien: Again, stop looking at me. Stop it!

Javier: The second type of writers are damn liars because that's why they're in it too. So there's the honest ones and the damn liars. Many of us are on Twitter and frankly, nobody gets tired of being paid attention to. It doesn't mean that you should spam somebody, but it means that if you're a reasonably cool person who's not going to like overstep and has a good idea of boundaries, you can get a lot of advice and a lot of, relationship with people like me that absolutely no way you've gotten in the 90s. If you're not a social media person, and you have a manager and an agent, it really just becomes about getting the manager and the agent to… Look, there's all these other things right now. This is a time when there are more programs, more committees, more fellowships, more contests, more of everything. And some of them are even legitimate. Ways for a writer to get attention are not exactly opaque, but the problem is that there's no magic sauce. There's no one way to do it.

You're not going to have my career. I'm not going to have your career. Oftentimes that question of how do you break in presumes that there's a path. There's no path. We're all just like water molecules bouncing off of each other. 

Meg: Making it up.

Javier: Yeah, exactly.

Meg: So our last question here because I know we're running out of time is… so now our emerging writer, they've done their homework, they've gotten the agent and manager, they've actually gotten in to interview with you and you've chosen them to be in your room.

They're showing up on the first day. What is your advice to those young writers coming into your room? 

Javier: Don't be a doctor no. I understand that your critical faculty has developed, especially now that you're on Twitter and you talk about all the stuff you hate, which you shouldn't do. If you can't fix it, don't break it. It's that simple. If you don't have an idea to pitch in place of the thing you don't like, just listen. It's okay to just listen. 

If you're not talking enough, somebody's going to tell you and it's going to be fine. Also, read the room. There's some showrunners who just want an audience. I don't like working for them, but there's some of them. 

You have to figure out your showrunner's management style. So the moment you get there, you should be observing, and not necessarily looking to make your mark. 

I would also say this. When the showrunner says, “Everybody come in with five pitches on Friday” and Friday rolls along, I would say the other thing you should do is always volunteer to be first.

I think we talked about this in the other panel and people weren't asking questions immediately. Always be first because if you raise your hand first and your idea is brilliant, you've set the tone. If you raise your hand first and your idea sucks, then the showrunner will say, “Oh, this is not quite this. This is not quite that” or whatever and then they'll move on. By the end of the day, nobody's going to remember your idea sucked.

Lorien: You will though.

Meg: Every piece of advice you just gave is asking the person to put [aside] their fear of their anxiety of themselves and their ego and, “How will I appear and how will I look? I have to be smart so I'm going to say everything that's wrong.” You're asking them to turn all that off and be present to observe the showrunner. Observe the room. Listen. Think about the ideas about the story.

Everything you're talking about is about being present as a writer versus walking in with your fear, which is going to trigger your ego. And it's hard to do. Believe me. I remember the first day walking into a TV room. It's hard to do. But that's the goal to do. I think it's really important for any room you walk into.

You could be walking into an interview with a manager. You could be walking into a feature room. You could be walking into a room at Pixar. It's the same process. You've got to get present with the story and what's happening in the room.

Javier: Yeah, absolutely. I think ultimately, few people hate themselves as much as I do. Few people hate me as much as I do and that makes it real easy to go through life. About halfway through my career around the time when I quit Lost, and that was about 10 years into my career, I walked out and I remember after everything I'd been through on Lost and the crazy insane rollercoaster of popularity and everything else that happened on that show. 

I remember sitting there for a second and I said, “A showrunner can tell me that I can't write their show, but a showrunner is never going to be able to tell me that I can't write.” I am a writer and I am good at this. And that's why I was working on this level. I can't continue to pretend that I have imposter syndrome or whatever.

The math is just way too much in my favor. So it was actually harder to make peace with the idea that I am good, competent, and worthy than with the idea that I suck and I'm an imposter. That's actually ultimately a very comfortable place to be because you know what everything is when you say, “I'm good at this and I'm going to go into the great unknown.” You're going into the great unknown. For me, the great unknown right now is improving my understanding and exploration of character. But the moment that you say to yourself, “I'm a good writer,” the showrunner read my script. They liked it. They hired me. And all I need to do is to be here, and not be worried about what they think of me or whatever. I'm in this room. I earned this seat. Then you can be there. The best analog for this is the code of the samurai where the samurai assume they're dead before they go into battle. So whatever happens in battle, fuck it. 

I just remember, having quit Lost, and my last day as I was leaving, holding this banker's box, I was very sad about it. Nobody wants to quit the most popular Emmy award-winning show on television. There was very mixed emotions, but I remember just having that moment. I was going to go work on another show and the showrunner for that show is somebody who is known to be a very tough grader. I just remember going, “Yeah, but fuck it, I'm going to pitch everything I can. I'm going to leave it all on the table. And if they don't like me, that's on them.”

Lorien: What pisses you off about writing?

Javier: What pisses me off about writing? When you write an entire script and there's some foundational premise of it that's wrong, but you try to get away with it. Then you give it to your friend and they go, “Dude, there's a foundational thing wrong with this.” And you'd be like, “Oh, just give it to me!” 

I've written so much in that kind of delusional state of, “No, it's not a problem that I have a monstrous carbuncle in the middle of my forehead. That's fine. It's going to be fine.” And then you're like, “Oh, the problem here is the character's got to have a monstrous carbuncle in the middle of my forehead. Okay. I guess I got to go burn it off and go through that pain.” 

Lorien: That's awesome.

Jeff: The follow up to that is, what brings you the most joy about writing?

Javier: All of it. I love writing. I don't have hobbies. I'm not a functioning person. I don't have hobbies. I like going to the movies. I like watching television. My hobby is writing long memoir essays. Obviously, my children and my wife are the most important thing in my life. My relationship with my daughter is mediated by her love of the Avengers. That's where we bond.

I love writing. I love sitting down at the keyboard and banging it out, even when it's really frustrating. It's what I do. Do you know what a Semič writing is?

Jeff: I don't think I do. No.

Javier: It's a kind of art that's gotten a lot of traction recently where you're literally create letters and they don't mean anything, but you're organizing them like writing on the page. So you create. I love the work that a lot of people are doing. I literally developed an alien language. I have this scorching case of attention deficit disorder so I need to doodle while I'm in a writer's room so that I can actually be present.

For most of the Dark Crystal, Blood and Treasure, and Cowboy Bebop, I must have drawn about 500 note cards of this alien language. Because even while I'm in a room writing, I love the scratch of ink on paper so much that I'm writing fake words in a fake language on a page.

Meg: Amazing. Wow.

Javier: Don't be like me. Have relationships, have sex, smoke drugs, and have a real life, guys. You don't want to.

Meg: It's our last question. If you could be remembered for any scene, what would it be?

Javier: In The Middleman pilot, the premise of it is that super intelligent guerrillas have escaped from a lab and have decided to earn their keep in the world by taking over the local mafia. 

There's a scene where there is a silverback gorilla in a strip club and he's running his mob empire. I got to do that on television. A silverback gorilla in a Tony Soprano tracksuit, in a Tony Soprano strip club, running his mafia business. 

It's either that, or it's episode seven of the Dark Crystal. We had to do an exposition dump where we had to explain the entire mythology of the Dark Crystal to the characters in the show. It is the most bananas, convoluted… I couldn't begin to explain it to you. There was this planet called Thra. There was a crystal in the middle of it. The crystal spawned this woman named Aughra who was sort of a weird imp with a third eye. The crystal was also her heart. Then the planet was invaded by another species called the Urskeks. Then the Urskeks took control of the crystal and in trying to purify themselves, they split into two beings. 

Meg: How do you remember it all?

Javier: It's insane. You can't explain it. I had this idea to have the puppets do a puppet show explaining the mythology. I am proud of this to the point of being insufferable, but they made it, they shot it. We got it past all the goalies and they made this thing. I remember going like, “Oh my God.” I'm sure I've written, I don't know, but this was just like, “I'm the guy who did the puppet show in the puppet show.” 

Meg: Oh my God. You're so delighted. I love it. Amazing. You’re so funny.

Javier: Dark Crystal. Going to work on that show was like eating candy every day. It was the best thing ever. This is what everybody listening to this podcast wants. This is when you're going to know it. I went into a room and the Jim Henson archives had given us a framed picture of Jim Henson, Frank Oz, and Gary Kurtz. Gary Kurtz produced this little independent film called Star Wars looking at a puppet. And it was sort of a picture of the three of them at work. And I had seen that picture in Starlog magazine when I was 13-years-old. And I went to work at the Jim Henson studios in a room that had that photo.

Then when the making of the book for the Dark Crystal came out, my daughter was really into that. She can't watch the show because it's nightmare fuel, but she was really into it and she knows the names of all mystics and Skeksis and everything. She reads the storybooks and all that. I opened the making of the Dark Crystal Age of Resistance book to a page that has a photo of me on the set.

She went, “Daddy!” I’m like, “Who's this?” She's like, “That's the collector.” And I'm like, “Who's that?” “That's Jen. That's Rhiann. That's…” and then I opened the page and I'm like, “Who's that?” And she goes, “Daddy!” I got to literally walk in the footsteps of these wizards that I worshiped when I was a kid. And my photo is in one of these making of books. That's it. You can be rich, you can be famous, you can be whatever, but this is the reason. I helped further Jim Henson's legacy. My God, it was so wonderful.

Lorien: Beautiful.

Meg: Thank you so much for being here. 

Javier: Thank you guys. I hope I will at some point meet you both in person. All three of you.

Meg: Yes, I hope so. Check out Javi on online. You can find him on Twitter under his handle @okBJGM. 

He also has a link in his bio there to some incredibly helpful writing resources. Really just Google him guys. He writes amazing writing essays.

Javier: Thank you.

Lorien: Thanks.

Javier: Oh. And the other thing I want to say, I'm sorry, also in that page, I have a page where I have PDFs of pretty much every pilot I've ever written. Samples of Lost scripts, feature scripts I've written that didn't sell, bibles, pitches. The entire history of my development. How I've developed and all of that. I'm not putting it up there so that you can do it like me. You can do it any way you want, but it's just so that you can see how. I found out most people don't pitch until they pitch. So I'm trying to get resources out there. So if you need models for some of this stuff, I've put it out there.

Meg: Amazing resource. I'm going there as soon as we're done with this.

Javier:. You don't have to, you know that. I mean on a professional craft level, I'm lucky to be occupying the same space as you guys.

So, cool. Well, thank you so much.

Lorien: So thanks for tuning in. And if you haven't yet, please join our Facebook group. That's the best place to ask questions and get immediate feedback from us and our other fans. And if you have an anonymous question, you can email us at thescreenwritinglife@gmail.com and we will do our best to get to it. We have a lot of emails over there, so we can't get to everything.

Meg: Please drop us a review on Apple podcast. That helps us out. Helps us keep going.

Lorien: Remember, you are not alone and keep writing.

Jeff: Another amazing episode of TSL. Thank you so much to Javier Grillo-Marxuach for that amazing interview.

Javi is just such a generous writer and he just gave us so much today. If you haven't been to his website, there are really tons of resources there. Unsold pilots, features, pitch decks, bibles, and just anything you could need. I have linked Javi’s website in the description below. You should definitely check it out. 

Now it's time for some of your amazing reviews, courtesy of our awesome audience. I'm going to start with That's No Moon, whose review says, “Screenwriting and mental health asset. Come to this space to learn that your writing heroes are mere mortals. They too have to slog through the mud while balancing the many plates of life and work. Thank you for the transparency and vulnerability.” That's No Moon, that's why we're here. Thanks for being a listener. 

Next up, we have a review by Gup, who says, “Great listen. Insightful, helpful, funny, human. A good listen for any writer.”

Finally, Tim Hume says, “This is a fantastic screenwriting podcast. I love this podcast. Is it for you? Take this handy quiz and find out. 1) Can you read or write? If yes, score 3 points. 2) Are you currently a writer? If yes, score 2 points. 3) Are you or do you want to be a writer? If yes, score 4 points. 4) Are you a human being? If yes, score 1 point. 5) Do you have emotions? If yes, score 2 points. 6) Do you have vulnerabilities? If yes, score 3 points. 7) Do you want to experience a sense of community and less loneliness? 7. If yes, seven points. Finally, 8) Do you want to learn more about being a screenwriter? If yes, score five.” He says at the end, “If you scored more than two points, this podcast is for you.” I love that handy little quiz, Tim. Thank you so much.

Finally, we have No B.S. in NYC who says that this is their official favorite podcast. “I'm in love with this podcast. Every episode is both educational and motivational. The hosts are charismatic as can be, and the content focuses on writing and development techniques and tools of the trade, as well as the business aspects of being a writer. It's an utterly engaging, holistic approach to growing as a screenwriter. Keep up the great work.”

We will keep up the great work. Thank you for those reviews. And the reason we read those reviews is to not only feature your amazing writing on our show, but because it really helps us. The more reviews we get, the more visible we become, the longer we can do this show.

So if you haven't written a review on Apple podcasts yet, we ask that you would consider it. Those five stars in that review really help our visibility. Or if you haven't joined our Facebook group, we think that's a great idea as well. There's a huge community over there. And if you have questions or concerns or just need some support, that's the place to go.

And I think that's all I've got this week. So as I say every week, y'all, happy writing.