Category: Storytelling

I moved around a lot as a kid. First off, I started life all the way across the world in the little country of Bulgaria, before getting on a plane at the age of eight and heading to the big ol’ US of A. From there, I moved almost every year, spending brief periods in various towns and cities across New England as my parents bounced from job to job. At the time? Frankly, I hated it. I hated having to be reintroduced to a new area, having to make new friends, I hated all of it. But now, as I reflect on those years, I see just how valuable they were. How much I gained from every new experience, every new person I met.

Television writers, for better or worse, often find themselves as the new kid in class. And Cathryn Humphris is no exception. Over the course of nearly a decade, she has worked on shows like Mad Men, V, Under the Dome, Mob Doctor, Elementary, Supernatural, and many more.

Cathryn was kind enough to get on the phone with me and Adam, and spend some time talking about just what it’s like to be a working writer in today’s industry, and all of the positives and negatives that come with that.

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VIKTOR HERRMANN: What I’d like to start off talking about first is your early days. The struggle years. Can you talk about the days before you could support yourself solely on writing. What was that like, and what was the transition like?

CATHRYN HUMPHRIS: It was nice. It’s nice to be able to support yourself doing what you wanted to do. It took me about eight years. I came to Los Angeles right out of college. I was a Radio, Television, Film and Communications Major. I was lucky that I had some friends out here already who had paved the way for me and helped me find my first job. 

There’s a lot of different routes to breaking in, and I went the assistant route. I got early jobs through friends and connections from my school—I went to Northwestern and they have a big alumni community out in Los Angeles. So I started just working low paying assistant jobs. 

Originally I wasn’t sure if I wanted to write for movies or do something else, and I had a friend early on who said, “I think you should look at television, because I know you love writing, but I know you also want to be part of the overall process.” And also television is much more stable than just going from job to job in film.

So, early on I got a job in television. Once and Again was the first TV show I worked on. I was a writer’s PA, which is kind of like the lowest position in the business. Literally getting lunches and coffees and running errands for people.

I just kind of worked my way up through that. I worked for writers who had development deals, I worked for small development companies, I worked for a couple different shows, and just got as much experience as I could get, and also made as many connections as I could make. Which was another huge part of it.

I know you interviewed Genny Hutchison a while back. Genny and I worked together a long, long time ago on X-Files. She worked for Vince Gilligan and John Shiban, and I worked for Gillian Anderson, and we got to know each other that way. And years, years later, when I was looking for another job, John Shiban was looking for an assistant, and Genny recommended me. And that’s part of how I got the job on Supernatural, which ultimately ended up being the show where I got my big break.

Along with working different jobs, I was obviously writing on the side. The great thing about being a writers’ assistant is that you can actually be in the writers’ room. You’re seeing how the process works. You are getting to know the show better than almost anyone.

You know the bosses, you know the dynamics, you know everything. Being in the writers’ room is great practice for learning what you’ll be doing as a TV writer and also for being able to try out your craft a little bit. 

I had also done a program called the Warner Brothers Writing Program, which is a great program that helped people get their foot in the door. Sometimes you get staffed right out of that program. I didn’t get staffed right out of that program, but Eric Kripke [the Supernatural showrunner] certainly knew that I had done it, and people at Warner Brothers were supportive of me and pushing for me.

Ultimately what ended up happening was in the first season of that show, John Shiban and I wrote a script together. John mentored me and shepherded me through the process, and everyone was very happy with the script. And then in the second season of that show, I came back again as a writers’ assistant, and by that point I had gotten an agent off of doing the Warner Brothers program. So, my agent was out trying to get me meetings, and John and other writers I had met were super, super supportive.

I got a job offer on another show, and Supernatural basically was faced with the fact that they might lose me, and so literally overnight they made me an offer to go from being a writer’s assistant to a writer. And I ended up staying there for three years.

VH: It’s pretty clear that you’ve had quite a varied resumé, which I think is indicative of a lot of TV writers. Could you talk about how hard it is to jump onto an existing show, and how you adapt to that show’s characters and writing style?

CH: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I think I have ended up jumping so many times that it’s kind of become secondhand nature for me. 

I was on Supernatural for a total of four years, and so at that point, people would have known me as a genre writer. Which is funny, because I’m not someone who is particularly a big genre fan; I would consider myself more of a character writer. But there are genre shows that I love because they’re fancy packages for telling great character stories. 

So, I’m always the person where, in my writers’ room, they’re talking Star Wars or Blade Runner, or the complicated mythology of some show, and I’m like, “What are you guys talking about again?” I just wasn’t into that world. But the great thing about having that background is that genre shows will always want to hire you.

I had gotten the great piece of advice of, “Write a script that is the opposite of genre. That’s exactly what you want to do.” So, I wrote a very character driven script that my amazing agent ended up getting into Matt Weiner’s hands. I always say Mad Men was the easiest job I’ve ever gotten in my life. Matt read my script, Matt liked my script, he interviewed me and he hired me. It happened within a week or something.

On Mad Men, the thing that was great about it was that because it’s a cable show and it’s only 13 episodes a year, we spent the first two or three months just getting to know each other, really talking about the characters and what you wanted to accomplish. There wasn’t a huge time pressure, [versus] network television [where] you start a job and six weeks later you’ve got to film an episode. 

I think on Mad Men I just had a lot of time to ramp into the show. I watched all of the episodes from the first two seasons multiple times. Matt assigned a lot of reading, so I did a lot of reading, I watched a lot of movies of the time period, I spent a lot of time just getting to know my co-workers. 

You just kind of ease into it that way. You’re spending eight to ten hours a day in a room with people just obsessively talking about the show, so you just kind of catch up. And then I guess going forward, I’ve jumped into a lot of second and third season shows, and I’ve never felt like it’s been that much of an issue for me. There’s something nice about already having a template already laid out. 

I always go back to watching the episodes. Multiple times. And picking up on who the characters seem to be. I do this less now, but earlier in my career, before I would write a script, I would just obsessively read the other scripts. When I wrote my first Mad Men, I spent fifteen hours a day writing or reading the other scripts.

ADAM GREENE: That’s a good transition to our next question: your habits. What would you say are some of the things that you do habitually to get you in the mood for writing? How do you overcome different writer’s block situations or difficult scenes to write?

CH: This is a great question. I am totally a procrastinator as a writer. [laughs] So, television is great for me because you can’t procrastinate, you can’t have writer’s block for very long.

I love being in the writers’ room. I love breaking story. I’m really social; I love working with other writers. I would be a terrible feature writer, sitting alone in a room writing. That’s kind of the part of the process that I like the least.

For me, it all starts with the story and the structure. By the time I go off to write a script, I’m meticulous about making sure that I understand the story that I’m trying to tell. With character driven shows, with a show like Mad Men, the structure is a little less important because you’re really digging into the character work, but even then, if the structure doesn’t work, it’s going to be a lot harder to write. By the time I leave to go off and write a script, I want to understand what I’m writing. The work that should be left to be done is the character work.

You’re always going to find stuff that doesn’t completely work, that you need to make adjustments to. I just make sure we do a really, really good break, that I understand what all of the characters’ motivations are, that I understand the story that I’m trying to tell. Anything that still needs to be fixed, I try to fix in the outline.

In terms of pure habit, the thing about television—which is a blessing and a curse—is that you’re on a really tight timeframe. If you’re on a show like Mad Men, you might have two weeks to write a script. But a lot of the shows that I’m on, a week is a luxury.

That was something I was nervous about early on in my career, and I used to take a full two weeks to write a script. And now, I’m on shows sometimes where, if I’m co-writing a script, we have two days to write it.

I will always procrastinate as much as I can, and so sometimes that means I spend three days surfing the internet before I do much writing, and other times it means I spend thirty minutes surfing the internet. I procrastinate for as long as I can, and then I just dig in. I disappear into the world that I’m writing.

I think for me the hardest thing is overcoming the fear of, “What if it’s not good this time?”

AG: That’s a shared feeling for a lot of writers, I would think.

CH: Yeah, I think so. And that’s been kind of a blessing of my career, of jumping around to so many shows. I’m definitely able to take it a lot less seriously than I used to take it. I’ve been on shows where by the time the show premieres, you wake up the next morning and you read the ratings and say, “Oh, well, this show is going to die soon.”

That’s a horrible feeling, but I think it also helps you keep things in perspective. Which is that I’m exceptionally lucky to be doing the job that I do, and hopefully my career is going to be long and I’m going to work on a lot of different shows. Some of them are going to be easier than others and harder than others and more fun than others. That helps me now with the pressure.

VH: That reminds me, we read an essay you wrote, “Why We Write.” In that, you talk a lot about the fear and dread that writing can cause in writers. Can you elaborate on that? Maybe talk about a time either career-wise or when you were working on a script where everything seemed to be going wrong? What kept you climbing back into the ring?

CH: It’s funny thinking back to that essay, because when I wrote that, I had probably only been a TV writer for two years. The battle to get in was fresh. There were a lot of times as an assistant where I just felt like I’m never going to get my break, this is never going to happen for me. And I kind of just made the decision to keep going for as long as I felt the good outweighed the bad.

This business can be really, really hard. There’s a lot of nastiness that happens. There’s a lot of times where you get close, and then it doesn’t work out. But I think I kept going for the same reason all young writers keep going.

You feel like you have something to say. You feel like you’re pretty good at this, like it’s a lot more interesting of a job than most jobs that you could do. I’ve loved television and movies all of my life. The idea that I could be part of that was really, really fun.

But the fear part was, for me, sitting down and facing that blank page. That’s when it’s all on you. It’s probably part of why I’m so meticulous about the story break, because the more that I can stack the odds in my favor, that’s a good thing.

I think most of us feel like, “What if we fail this time?” I think that’s a huge fear for young writers. I think for some writers that’s probably the fear that drives them their entire life.

It’s interesting, because now, having worked on so many different shows, there’s a lot less of that fear [for me]. There’s a lot more of, “You know what? I’m making television, and it’s awesome, and I wouldn’t trade this for any other job.” But it’s a television show, and some episodes are going to be better than other episodes.

I hope most of my episodes are good, but I’ve written some crappy episodes of television. [laughs] Usually for things that are only partially in my control. There’s so many forces at work: the show that you’re working for, the boss that you’re working for, production realities, the studio and the network. There’s just so many different things.

If you have two weeks, and a network and a studio and a boss that are fully supportive, you’re probably going to have a better script than if you have two days and a show that might not even make it to air because your ratings are so bad.

I feel like more often than not, I’m able to be proud of what I do, but I keep it in context. One of my favorite experiences was being on the show Ringer, and that’s not a show that probably a lot of people saw or remember—it only lasted a season. I loved every second of that show, and I’m incredibly proud of the work I did on that. I’m incredibly proud of the work I did on Mob Doctor, even though that’s not a show that’s going to be remembered in history the way Mad Men is remembered, but I had a great experience on it.

I just try now to enjoy the things you get to enjoy about [the business], and not take it quite so seriously as I think I did at the beginning.

AG: You worked on episodes 302 and 311 of Mad Men. Episode 311 especially was a pivotal episode. You have these strong female characters being able to voice their frustrations in Joan and in Betty, and Don being knocked down a peg and having to come to terms with who he really is. So, that’s a big episode. How did it come about that you were able to write for that episode, and what was it like working with Matthew Weiner?

CH: I was really lucky. Matt is incredibly talented, and it was an incredible room filled with writing heroes of mine. I got to co-write episode 311 with Marti Noxon, who was a writing hero, and it was just a room filled with amazing writers; the majority being women, which is rare in Hollywood.

It was an incredibly collaborative room. Matt gave you a ton of breathing room. He was wearing a lot of hats, and he was in and out of the room a lot, so you’d do a lot of the work collaboratively, breaking story with the other writers.

One of the things I’ve always loved about Matt is that he was a very good showrunner in terms of being able to come in having twenty minutes to listen to a pitch, you’d pitch out what you came up with, and he was always clear on saying “I don’t like that, I don’t like that, I don’t like that, I like this—this is the heart of your story. Re-break it around this.”

And I think that’s a gift from a showrunner, because you work for a lot of people that don’t have that clear vision, but also maybe other people [who do] that aren’t able to collaborate.

Matt certainly has a reputation for doing a lot of on-the-page rewriting. He has a lot of ownership. But I have to say, at least my experience in the room was that he was very open to what other people brought to the table.

I had a great experience on that show. I learned probably more—in the room, on set, and in the writing—than ever before.

And the way it works with Matt, at least when I was there, is that he wouldn’t assign episodes ahead of time. A lot of shows, you know it’s your episode, and you take ownership of breaking that episode. But on Mad Men, we would just break all the episodes, and Matt would turn to you and say, “You’re writing this episode.”

At the beginning of the season, for my first episode, I had two full weeks. And then he gave me a bunch of notes, and I did a second pass, and at that point he took it over and did a rewrite. As the season goes on, things get more crunched, and so for episode 311, that Marti and I wrote, I think we probably had four or five days to do it.

I knew that episode was going to be a huge episode, but I had no idea that was going to be the one he assigned to me. I was quite grateful when I got assigned it, and I was thrilled to be writing with Marti. That was one of the greatest experiences of my career, to get to co-write an episode with Marti Noxon.

I was a low level writer, and she was a showrunner. She was amazingly collaborative. She was so generous with me, she gave me amazing feedback. I just loved writing that episode, and I knew it was going to be a big episode. But I guess that’s another place where, even at that point in my career, I just don’t understand being too precious about that stuff. Any of the people on staff could have done a beautiful job writing that episode.

If you’re coming into the TV business and you’re going to hold on to every word that you’ve written, this is not going to be a good business for you; you should probably think about writing a book instead. Your stuff is going to be gone over by your boss, by the studio, by your network, by your actors. There’s going to be a lot of changes.

One of the things that I think Matt is good at is, we would go back into the room after we did a table read, and we’d go through the script. If there were lines that weren’t working, you would change them. That’s an important thing to learn. If a better line comes from your co-worker or from an actor suggesting something, you shouldn’t be afraid to be collaborative. This is a collaborative business we’re in.

VH: What is your unwritten rule of screenwriting? Something that is perhaps ignored by a lot of teachers or by a lot of the so-called “guide books” on the craft, but is something you consider paramount to writing?

CH: I guess, this is maybe less about writing in general but more about television writing, which is that perspective is huge. When we talk about these rules, or we talk about, “it has to be this way, it can’t be that way, this is good writing, this is bad writing.” Whoever you are working for or whoever is making the final decision is actually the person that’s in charge of deciding what they think is good or bad writing.

Having gone back and forth between so many shows and so many showrunners, I will literally be on a show one day where a showrunner will say, “If you do X, I’m firing you, it’s the worst thing you could possibly do in your scripts,” and then you go to the next show and the showrunner says, “I LOVE it when people do X.”

It took me a whole lot of years to understand that it’s all perspective. There are certain things that I personally think make for a good script or for good writing, and they can be totally opposite of what someone else thinks makes for a good script or good writing.

There’s obviously honing your craft, and there’s obviously certain things that a lot of us can agree on that are better or worse to do. But I think anyone who watches the landscape of television, and the many varied things that are out there, in a certain sense, who’s to say what is wrong or right?

AG: You’re working on Under the Dome. Where and when can people check that out?

CH: It is going to be coming back to CBS for the third season this summer. We’re going to be on Thursday nights, which we’re very excited about. I believe it starts June 22nd with a two-hour premiere, and I’m writing episode 4 and then I’m slated to co-write the finale, so hopefully people will check that out this summer.

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And we hope people check it out too! As with our previous interviews, I think there’s some invaluable advice and experience Cathryn shared with us in the above interview. Hopefully you will find it helpful. Ms. Humphris dropped some truth and science on us all, folks. So study up, and get writing, get filming, get creative.

You can also check out her essay on the blog series Why We Write from Feb 5 2008—a time before she had the experience or resume she now enjoys.