Thank you, glad you enjoyed it!

I feel very unqualified to give advice on this sort of thing as I am constantly struggling with self doubt and discipline and figuring out how to navigate the vagaries of the industry. But I have learned a few things. 

If you can, work with someone. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have a writing partner. Being accountable to Sinead was incredibly helpful, I think for both of us. Whenever one of us got down, the other was there pick us up. Whenever one of us missed a deadline, we remembered how the other one was probably hard at work trying to make the deadline (that said, we missed a lot of deadlines). Whenever one of us ran into a problem, the other one had a fresh perspective on a solution. Even if you don’t have anyone to write with, or don’t want to write with anyone, having someone to run things by is incredibly helpful.

Be willing and able to write garbage. Just get started on something. Even if it’s a germ of an idea, start writing a scene. You will probably never use that scene. Maybe you’ll like a line of dialogue. Maybe you’ll never use it but it will open up a doorway into a character’s point of view or arc or relationship with someone else. Just write and write and write and be ok knowing that you might scrap a bunch of it. If you do it for long enough, good things will happen and something will start to take shape.

Outline. Sinead and I had a verrrrry loose outline for a long time, and I think that’s what took us so long. We had our beginning and our end, but our middle was very unstructured. We kept hitting dead ends and not really knowing how to get around them because we didn’t know what should be there. So we went back and outlined each episode beat by beat and that was incredibly helpful. A lot of it had to be changed and tweaked as we went, but having that structure there was very necessary. 

So those are very basic lessons that I know I will keep drawing from personally as I move forward. It can be incredibly hard and sometimes really frustrating, but keep working because it’s the most rewarding feeling in the end. Good luck!

Reposted from http://ift.tt/2fsCO9g.