This Writing Life

I’ve had questions about the recent TV projects I’ve been working on and have been reluctant to talk about them for various reasons, chiefly because they’ve turned out so poorly. But here goes.

A couple of years ago, my agents in Los Angeles (I have two who work as a team), approached me about pitching a TV show based on the novel Warwolf. I’d never worked in television and knew nothing about the process, but my agents helped me along, and I wrote a pitch for a Ray Tatum drama and ended up selling the idea to a pair of producers who had a deal with 20th Century Fox.

The next step was to try to sell the show to a network, and to that end I wrote a pilot episode, and the producers recruited David Kelley to run and co-write the show. David has a storied history in television — L.A. Law, Doogie Howser, Chicago Hope, Ally McBeal and more recently Goliath, Big Little Lies, and Mr. Mercedes. He rejiggered the script I’d written, and we pitched the show to the heads of the four broadcast networks.

David Kelley is a lovely guy, and pitching a show with him was a great experience, two days of my life I’ll never forget. Everybody was confident we’d sell the show — I think CBS was the prime target — so confident, in fact, that the studio had already written our checks and was simply waiting to hand them to us. But then the show didn’t sell (I’m not at all sure of the reasons), and I was back on the east coast by the time I got the phone call letting the air out of everything.

It was a pretty devastating turn of events, but my nature is to put my head down and keep working, so I decided to come up with another show, and instead of simply a script and a pitch, I wrote eight full episodes of something called Tarnation. It’s half police procedural, half political drama, and it was optioned by a production company and generated lots of cable interest, especially from Lifetime. All of that network’s pertinent executives in L.A. we’re ready to buy the show. They just needed the approval of the network president in New York, who read the episodes over the course of three or four agonizing (for me) days and decided not to pull the trigger. One executive out of maybe a dozen, but he was the one who counted.

I believe Tarnation is still in the process of not working out — actors get attached, directors, etc. — but I don’t even ask anymore.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the tone of the scripts I write is a problem in the TV business just like the tone of my novels is a problem in the publishing business. As most of you already know, I write comedies that emphasize characters over plot. My books are comic. My scripts are comic. Sure there’s drama as well and sometimes carnage, almost always melancholy, but there’s usually humor throughout, and that seems to be the trouble. Not for me. Maybe not for you. But certainly for people who want a drama to look and smell like a drama, by which they often mean plotty melodrama, the sudsier the better.

My books are largely well reviewed but sell poorly, whether I release them or Random House does. And now I’ve been in prime position to sell TV shows twice and have run into something like the same problem there as well. I’m convinced that a show like Tarnation would succeed because it would sound like nothing else on TV, but me being convinced doesn't help.

So my advice to young writers these days is go for the suds. It’s too late for me, and I continue to like what I do and how I do it, so I’ll keep plowing, but I’ll confess that I’m awfully tired of being unlucky. And that’s how I think of it. I’m not a how-can-you-ignore-my-genius sort of guy. I just know I’ve written a lot of stuff. I know the reading public and movie and TV producers buy a lot of stuff, much of it mediocre, which leaves me to wonder why they can’t buy my mediocre stuff too.

Posterity is for suckers. I’ll keep writing. Please keep reading and evangelize when you can. And let’s not talk about my TV career anymore.