Pamela Douglas, Author/Professor of Screenwriting: Generally writers need to write what hurts. That doesn’t mean everything is tragic but it means you are tapping into what you must say.
Film Courage: Does every writer need to know how to write a pilot?
Pamela: Yes, every writer needs to write a pilot. First of all, it’s the coin of the realm that people who (people meaning agents, producers, even people who are not in the television business) will read a pilot before they will read anything else. In a pilot they get the originality of your voice and your ability to tell the story and how to write in a shorter amount of time than having to slog through 120-pages of a feature film. They get all of the same advantages in a shorter reading time.
The other thing is that a pilot is likely to show a possible producer or fellowship or agent that you really understand in a compact way how to deliver for today’s audience. People watch television. They are not looking at movies. Unless your goal in life is to write episode 900 of some blockbuster action fantasy adventure, you really need to have a pilot for an original show. It doesn’t mean that show will be made, it will not be made. But this is your showpiece, this is your masterwork that will then get you the chance to be on the staff of a show at which point you can then come back to your pilot and maybe then it’ll be made. But absolutely pilot writing is the craft you need and I would tell any beginning writer that they should have more than one pilot. One pilot isn’t enough, for one thing you learn from every script you write and you just get better and better. The other is that you may find that after your first pilot which you thought was the story you had to tell that, there’s more to you than that. There are more stories to tell generally shows that get bought are built on…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
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BIO:
Pamela Douglas is an award-winning writer with numerous credits in television drama. The Fourth Edition of her book Writing the TV Drama Series (2018) has been adopted by network mentoring programs, and foreign language editions have been published in Germany, Italy, China, Spain and used around the globe. She is also author of the 2015 book The Future of Television: Your Guide to Creating TV in the New World. She has been honored with the prestigious Humanitas Prize for “Between Mother and Daughter” (CBS), an original drama. Multiple Emmy and Writers Guild nominations and awards from American Women in Radio and Television went to other dramas she wrote. She was a creator of the PBS series Ghostwriter, Story Editor of the Emmy-winning CBS series, Frank’s Place and wrote for A Year in the Life, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. She has also been a member of the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America, west. At the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts she is a professor in the screenwriting division where she specializes in television.
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