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| William J. Bell and Claire Labine |
ON WRITING: Can you, Claire and Bill, talk through the steps involved from idea to finished show?
BELL: First of all, you have to structure your show. You have to decide what you're going to put in the show, and what characters you're going to use—
LABINE: Over the long term.
BELL: See, I've never worked with the long term. I haven't for 12 years. The network, God bless them, doesn't know what I'm doing until they get the finished script.
LABINE: Good for you.
ON WRITING: How far ahead do your stories get planned?
BELL: I make them up as I go along.
LABINE: This is the sound of two hands clapping.
BELL: It's not as though I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow. But with some characters I don't know, and I find story as I go along.
LABINE: Bill doesn't do it the way it's usually done. In the traditional way—not in the traditional way at all—in the contemporary way, writers submit long story documents to the network that are purportedly the story for a year on a show. From those long story documents, outline writers structure weekly outlines, sometimes with a hell of a lot of help from the executive producer, the producers, and the network executives: an outline a day for each show. These outlines are overseen by the senior writing team and by the head writer, and then distributed to script writers, who write the dialogue. Then there is another person called an editor who edits the scripts for continuity and tone.
BELL: I've never had an editor.
LABINE: No, I haven't either. And I never will.
