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FROM JOHN WELLS

John Wells is Executive Producer of Southland, and previously ran ER and The West Wing. He is also past president of the Writers Guild of America West.

Pamela Douglas: If you could go back in time and talk to your own young self when you were a student in film school or college, what do you know now that you wish you’d known then about writing and producing television series?

John Wells: I wish I’d known how long it was going to take. You come out and you sort of assume it’s going to be a couple-of-year process and you don’t really start making any headway until you’ve wrtitten about a foot and a half of material, measured up off the floor. That’s when you really start to think of yourself as a writer in the way you look at the world. It’s a craft that takes a tremendous amount of time.

I wish I had more of a sense that it was much more like learning to play a musical instrument. After four or five years you start to not embarrass yourself. It takes ten years before you can even begin to call yourself proficient. And that’s very difficult for students because they’ve been through twelve years of primary school, four years of college, and often a couple of years of graduate school and they think they’ve already done sixteen, eighteen years of education, so they want to go do it right now, though they’ve actually just started.

It looks deceptively easy from the outside. If you look at the lowest common denominator you think, “I can do that.” The craft that’s necessary — the time it takes to have enough trial and error and to keep going with it — that takes a very long time to develop. I’m very suspicious of writers who haven’t been writing for ten years. I will often ask people for three or four or five pieces of material if I’ve read one thing of theirs that I like. I know they’ve given me the thing they’re proudest of, and I’m looking to see the growth, and how much they’ve done and how much they’ve committed themselves to the long-term process of writing.

I’ve supervised well over 600 scripts, and personally written well over a hundred, and I still finish each one disappointed in my work. It’s a life-long endeavor, never something you succeed at. I’ve been working professionally for twenty years and I’m always learning something new every day about writing.

PD: You could have chosen to write in any medium. Why TV?

JW: The feature world, which I remain involved in, is not a medium, generally, where you’re able to write about character in the depth I like to write about character. There are characters now on ER whose growth I’ve been writing about for years. I don’t mean to compare myself to Dickens, but I heard Steven Bochco talk about that years ago, when he explained that what he was trying to do on Hill Street Blues was like the way Dickens published a chapter a week.

And subject matter is different in television. The kinds of things we can write about seriously are more appealing than most of what you’re offered to do in features.

Beyond that, it’s much easier to be involved creatively in your work in television than in feature films. It happens a lot faster, so there’s not time for as many cooks in the kitchen. But also you get to see your work and see it quickly. I’ve done work on features that haven’t been produced for years, and [when asked for another draft] it becomes hard to remember what you had in mind when you first wrote it three years ago. In television, you’ll finish a script and see dailies on it ten days later.

PD: People talk about how television is changing now with cable, the Internet, and the influence of DVR. What does the future hold for the art of television drama?

JW: The technology makes for short-term changes, but we’re still doing what Chaucer was doing a thousand years ago. We’re still writing stories. I think we are structured in such a way that we’re interested in people, and we’re interested in hearing their stories and metaphors for our own lives and going through cathartic experiences. That hasn’t changed.

I actually think it’s a more exciting time for a writer because there are many more ways for your material to get made. You can write something and make it on a digital videocam that you buy at a store. You have an opportunity to work on shows on cable which have content you can’t do on broadcast television. The opportunities are limitless. There isn’t as much money to be made doing it, but you have thoughts and impressions about the human experience you want to share with others. This is the way to share it, and now there are more opportunities than ever.

PD: Any final words of wisdom for a beginning writer?

JW: It’s going to take a lot longer than you think, and don’t give up. Just keep writing.

There was a guy I went to USC with who I used to see every year at a New Year’s party. And every year I’d ask him what he was doing. He told me what he was working on, and I realized it was the same thing he was working on last year. That went on for three or four years. You need to be writing, at the minimum three or four specs a year, different shows. And you need to do that while you’ve got whatever day job you have to keep you alive. That’s the sort of commitment you need to really succeed.

Even my friends who came out of school and immediately got jobs or sold screenplays — within three or four years they ended up having to do their period of four or five or six years slogging. I really don’t know any talented writers who ended up being successful who haven’t had a struggle. That’s just what being an artist is all about.