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Advice for a New Staff Writer

Episode - 368

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September 18, 2018 Film Industry, Follow Up, Scriptnotes, Television, Transcribed, Writing Process

John welcomes Alison McDonald (American Dad!, Nurse Jackie, the remake of Roots) and Ryan Knighton (In the Dark) to talk through the basics of the TV writers room, covering how they got in, how much to talk, how to make a living, what to wear and what’s for lunch.

In follow up, we look at disappearing digital purchases and the further fallout from Les Moonves.

We have new Scriptnotes T-shirts available — Colored Revisions! Thanks to Alison, Ryan now knows about magenta.

Links:

  • T-shirts are available here! We’ve got new designs, including Colored Revisions, Karateka, and Highland2.
  • Anders G Da Silva’s tweet about missing movies from his iTunes library
  • ‘Designing Women’ Creator Goes Public With Les Moonves War: Not All Harassment Is Sexual, a guest column by Linda Bloodworth Thomason for the Hollywood Reporter
  • Succession on HBO
  • Be My Eyes app
  • Improv classes for TV writers
  • The USB drives!
  • Ryan Knighton on Twitter
  • Alison McDonald on Twitter
  • John August on Twitter
  • Craig Mazin on Twitter
  • John on Instagram
  • Find past episodes
  • Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available!
  • Outro by Rajesh Naroth (send us yours!).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

UPDATE 9-27-18: The transcript of this episode can be found here.

Related Posts

  1. Writing for Hollywood without living there
  2. Pitching Television, or Being a Passionate Widget
  3. The Post-Weinstein Era

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