Since 2005, each December The Black List releases its annual list, a survey of the most liked unproduced screenplays of that year. The Black List also works to foster a large community of writers through screenwriting labs, online resources, and in-person events.

 

Write On’s host Phil Galasso talks with The Black List’s Director of Community Kate Hagen about how The Black List supports writers and what she looks for in a script. “I think for me, two of the biggest things comes down to personal voice and tone. If you have a strong personal voice, I literally do not care what a script is about; but if you are giving me personality, if you are giving me a personal story world I have not seen before… I think that goes a really long way.”

 

Moisés Zamora, creator of Netflix's Selena: The Series about the legendary singer, talks to guest host Lee Jessup about why it was important for this show to have a writers room primarily made up of Mexican American voices. "All of the writers I hired [for Selena] were Latinx because it was important for the storytelling… and within that Latinx monolith, there's a lot of diversity, and so I was really proud to be able to cultivate those sort of relationships with those writers and getting to know them and realizing there's so many more stories to tell, from the Latin American, Indigenous, Afro-Latinx point of view."

 

Moisés takes us through his varied writing career, starting with writing novels in Spanish, working in advertising and marketing, to landing his first TV job on American Crime. "I don't think writing is, in any form, wasted. So if a pilot doesn't give you the results that you wanted, it doesn't matter! It just starts developing a layer of talent on top of another layer of talent, and without that pilot, maybe it doesn't lead to another project, so keep your mind open to always growing."