Rod Serling on Writing for Television
Posted on September 23, 2011 in General Screenwriting, Interviews | 2 Comments
In this video “Writing for Television” Conversations with Rod Serling, the master storyteller shows us why he is considered by many the best TV writer of all time. “Coming up with ideas is the easiest thing on earth. Putting them down is the hardest.” Isn’t that the truth.
1) 1 receive on the average of five to ten letters a week with offers of collaboration (“a guy who writes as much as you must certainly need some fresh ideas from the outside”). I invariably try to answer every letter, probably from a sense of compulsion and a good memory. I wrote a lot of correspondence myself with collaborative ideas before I was eating gravy.
2) 1 drive a 1957 white Lincoln convertible, so long, so garish, so obvious, that my wife blushes when she looks at it in the driveway. It’s the first big luxury car I’ve ever owned, and it’s one of the few overt gestures of ostentatiousness on my part.
3) 1 fell almost immediately into the speech pattern of the theater with its propensity for terms of endearment (“sweetie,” “baby,” “darling,” “dear”) . I hate to hear other people use these terms, but I’m aware of using them constantly. Why?
4) I’m considered to be a cooperative writer—even now. I don’t get my back up at requests for rewrites. I rarely, if ever, give producers or directors trouble. But now, as I never did in the early days, I’ll at least speak my mind about what I consider to be a wrong approach or an incorrect interpretation. In the pre-Patterns days, I would unquestioningly do any rewrite, change or delete any conception without a single question asked.
5) I have never ceased liking publicity. This isn’t ego for its own sake, because I don’t drop names and I don’t purposely seek it. But I still get a kick when I see my name in the paper, and I probably always will.
6) Bad reviews jar me down to the instep. I will never become philosophically resigned to a negative reaction to something I’ve written. The difference now is that I’m more prone to want to share the blame for a bad show. I try to analyze where the writing was at fault, as opposed to where the production let it down. In the old days, I invariably made the assumption that it was always uniquely my fault.
7 ) I have a hell of a schedule and I’m never without a writing project of some sort. If it isn’t a screenplay it’s a television play.
8 ) I discovered along the way that movies and television are separate entities, and each makes different demands on writing. You write “big” for the movies. You let your camera tell considerably more story than you do in television. You write with a much more pronounced sense of physical action than you’re permitted in the electronic medium. Television also demands a visual sense, but very often the progression of a story must be indicated by dialogue. In the movies, it can often be externalized just by what is seen and not necessarily by what is heard.
9 ) I like Hollywood and motion pictures, though I felt intimidated when I went out there to do my first picture. I was at Metro at the time and was given an office 40 feet long and a secretary, both new to me. Sitting at my desk the first day, I was approached by a secretary from the hall who had seen my coffee pot on the desk ( I drink coffee from morning till night) and who asked me if she might borrow some sugar for a Kaffeeklatsch being held by some writers down the hall. I gave her the sugar with a little penciled note saying, “This sugar comes to you courtesy New York television.” The next day the sugar came back, each cube marked with a skull and crossbones, with the legend, “TV writer—go home.” This went a long way toward breaking the ice. The next morning I was invited to the klatsch and I began to make some good and lasting friends from that moment on. I’m beginning to feel that the Hollywood I felt so intimidated about is a Hollywood that in many ways doesn’t exist any more—if it ever did. There once may have existed the Odets version of a phony, falsely glittering world full of sick people satiated with money, sex, and applause, a flimsy, unreal world that would disappear if someone were to yell “cut!” But the Hollywood of today, at least the one I found, had no more than its share of phonies or neuroses. It was no better and no worse than the New York television world or, for that matter, any area in the theater. I met a lot of adults in Hollywood—producers, directors, writers, and some agents whom I was proud to know. They were sober, intelligent, as-normal-as-I human beings. As in any social sphere or profession, you pick your own friends and your own social milieu. You don’t walk on the wild side unless you choose to.
10) In looking back over the relatively short span of my career, I sometimes make mental notes of the people I’m indebted to. They are legion. But a few of them bear special mention. There was my first agent, Blanche Gaines, who took me on when no one else would have me, who browbeat me, mothered me, argued with me, and did some considerable swinging for me, and to whom I owe a great deal. There was Dick McDonagh, already mentioned, who gave what is so much at a premium in this business—time and trouble. There were directors like Ralph Nelson, Johnny Frankenheimer, Dick Goode and Dan Petrie, who respected me long before a writer got much respect from most quarters. There were producers like Felix Jackson, Martin Manulis, Mort Abrahams, who judge a man several feet way from the bandwagon. And there were the editors like Florence Britton of Studio One and Ed Rice of Kraft, who professionally and personally gave me many a boost up the ladder. In the final analysis, it is relatively simple to buy properties from a well-known writer. I think it takes a helluva lot more insight and a much more knowledgeable feeling for the profession to buy scripts from unknown authors—which all of these people did, and continue to do.
11) I don’t know where I’m going and I’m not sure where I am. My erstwhile success stems from a comparatively small number of plays—far too few, really, to lay any legitimate claim to permanence in the literary scene. I think it’s really a moot question as to how I’ve got this far with the present track record that I lay claim to. I think that I’m a good writer but an undeveloped one. And I rather think that this applies to most young television writers. They have benefited enormously from the public attention that has come to them in far greater degree than that received by most writers in pre-television days. All of us have an obligation to our craft and to the audience to justify this attention. We must aim higher, write better, dig deeper. There are some basic values that apply to all writing, be it television, movies, the novel or anything else. A writer has to write as best he knows how. And ultimately, if this effort shows talent, he will be recognized.
Patterns by Rod Serling | Read More
2 Comments
Amazing that a brilliant and epic writer of ‘out of this world’ subject matter is so incredibly down to earth. Hats off to you, Mr. Serling. Hope to meet you somewhere in the ether.
He’s one of my biggest influences. Reading his words I was drawn to compare and contrast my own beliefs and actions with his; learned a lot from this article.