https://nofilmschool.com/2017/01/episodic-writing-tv-writing-series-writers-room-sundance

Soloway: "A lot of writers come in with a huge character bible, but as a producer, a showrunner, I don’t want that stuff. I just want you to pitch me the pilot moment-to-moment: protagonist, beat change, need, need, need, so when you get to the end of the pilot pitch, everybody in the room is like 'Holy shit, I need to see what happens next.' That’s what will get you the chance to write what you want."

Soloway: "Here’s my secret: pick your four clearest hours of the day and protect them as your writing hours. For me it’s 6AM-10AM. Three 55-minute chunks with breaks and no internet. Jumping out of bed and writing is a big thing for me, but even bigger is stopping after four straight hours. I create a little crucible of material in my mind, so I can get lost in that world, and then I walk away at 10AM and have a day, a life. Go places, talk to people, have relationships. By the time I get to that screen again the next day at 6AM, it’s like a lover I can’t wait to see."

Soloway: "In long-form TV, it’s the pilot that counts. Pilots are proof of concept. A successful pilot has an engine in it, a beautiful prism right at its center that you can return to over and over again, episode to episode. That’s what will keep it going for five years. That has to be present in every scene, sometimes in every line of dialogue. It’s like a puzzle: in our pilot for Transparent, the engine is Mort/Maura asking the question. ‘Will you still love me if?’"

Karaszewski: "For OJ, there were a thousand different ways to tell the story. So one of the first questions we asked ourselves was, ‘Who is most invested in this?’ We came up with three people who had an emotional investment in what happened, three characters where the personal motivation was also political: Johnny, Marsha, and Chris. We knew that they would be our engine. We used them to tell the story the way we wanted to tell it."

Noxon: "I call it the nugget: you have to find that recurring theme, the ‘Will you still love me if’ through-line. You have to ask yourself, ‘What’s the idea that you most want to explore?’ The nugget in Girlfriends, the project I’m working on now, is that women have bad qualities as well as good qualities. It’s about true gender equality, about finding room for emotions not necessarily thought of as acceptable for women to have—anger, violence. To me, the theme is, ‘We have that, too.’ And that has to be clear in the pilot. It’s not something you can just slap on after."

Karaszewski: "It’s all about personal voice. Don’t write what you think they want. You have to write something that you want to see. I learned that when Ed Wood came out. When I saw the ad for it in the paper I thought that if I hadn’t written the movie, I’d actually be excited to go see it! I’d be the first guy in line! You have to trust yourself: if you believe in your idea and are entertained by it, someone else will be, too."

Noxon: "The easy way to write TV is to see it as binary: one person does something bad, the other does something good, etc. But that’s just not life. Life isn’t clean; it’s messy. And tone is tricky: your characters have stay true to themselves over the arc of the story, but you don’t want them to be predictable. They have to feel real."

Soloway: "In long-form narrative, arcs are crucial. You have to see the arc of each character as each episode progresses, the arc of each season in the context of the entire series. Think about it: you’re following someone, getting to know them intimately for hours. Without a truly deep, fully fleshed-out character, it’s simply not sustainable."