Taylor Orci is a TV and screenwriter known for their work on Vida and the Emmy-nominated series Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts on Netflix. Taylor is also known for creating the web video ‘Bitchy Resting Face’ that went so viral it got the term in the dictionary!

 

Taylor talks about how they navigated their writing career and forged their own path: "If I followed all the well-intended advice that people looked me straight in the eye and said, 'I'm trying to help you,' I wouldn't have a job right now. I wouldn't have a career." Taylor goes on to discuss the need for more diversity in the industry, especially in positions of power: "You need to have more queer people and POC people occupying levels of authority… from mid-level to upper level to the executive level and beyond… We need to be seeing more representation and more butts in seats because different decisions are going to be made when you have those people in the room."

 

The feature comedy is about an aimless ne'er-do-well who becomes a tour guide in a historic estate and winds up befriending the manor's resident ghost. Co-writers, directors and brothers Justin and Christian Long talk to Write On about collaboration. Christian says: "We happen to agree a lot creatively, so there's usually not a lot of conflict. We definitely have different approaches as people in that Justin… has a really big personality. I'm a little more reserved, a little more shy, so it takes me a minute to open up to people."

 

Justin talks about how writing the movie helped reconnect him with his brother: "I was working in London and kind of lonely, it was kind of a lonely job… [collaborating on the script with Christian] was a way to feel like I was back with my brother, and it was an easy way to bond from a distance, and it always made me laugh to get these scenes from him, and then he would get my scenes, and he'd punch them up and make them better, and I would try to make his better, and that's kind of how we worked."

 

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The biopic about televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker is based on the documentary of the same name. Writer Abe Sylvia talks about what drew him to the project: "I grew up in Oklahoma in the 80s, and that's right in the middle of the Bible Belt, and while I wasn't raised religiously, it was all around me, and when that scandal first hit, it was everywhere. I wasn't familiar with [Tammy Faye] before that but it certainly made a huge splash in the neighborhood."

 

Abe also dives into the process of writing and researching a biopic. "I think there's a little bit of osmosis that happens from watching so many hours of footage… the important part of the research was to get it into my own DNA and to separate that from 'How do I include all of these facts?' I think that was the ultimate value of the research."

 

Eliza talks to Write On about how she approached adapting a 20-year-old comic book series for FX: “I really wanted to update the way we talk about gender and the diversity of gender in this landscape… it's a more nuanced look at the diversity of the gender spectrum and also making clear that gender and chromosomes are not equal to one another."

 

Eliza goes on to discuss how she built her writer's room for the show. "We had playwrights [in the writer's room], we had TV writers, we had a novelist, and it was a really exciting group of people who kind of all brought pieces of themselves to the table. The writer's room is one of my favorite parts of television. I really love the collaborative aspect of TV."

 

Alissa and Alyson talk to Write On about creating the adult animated comedy series for Adult Swim starring Maria Bamford and Tim Robinson. Alissa explains: "I had this thought, somehow, that [animation] is easier than live-action, and that is not true at all… and I feel so lucky that I was able to do this with Alyson and that we have the incredibly talented team that we do because, I mean, it's not for wimps."

 

The collaborators go on to discuss what it’s like working together in the animation realm. "I actually didn't even understand how hard [animation] was until we set out on the journey,” says Alyson, “but it also is really fun to write because you can do anything, and it's a way to be silly… the two of us together made more sense for it to be animated."

 

The playwright turned screenwriter talks about what it’s like to write material based on real people for the FX TV series. "My job was to adopt 20-something Monica [Lewinsky]'s point of view… and so I wrote based on Monica's story, and then I had the incredible asset of Monica Lewinsky herself reading my scripts and giving me feedback, so I basically trusted that in the writing of it, the scripts would reflect on how Monica experienced it."

 

Sarah talks about her beginnings as a writer and how it doesn’t matter where you’re from. "You need something that's good on the page; that's all you need. You can live in Idaho, you can live in Ottawa, you don't have to live in The East Village or Santa Monica… if you are in any position to be able to write, I do think that having faith in what you put on the page is really what matters."