Update: Lisa Joy interview

Last week’s interview with screenwriter and TV writer Lisa Joy has proved to be one of the most popular to date, not only in terms of the usual metrics (page views, retweets, emails), but also from my interactions with professional writers, several of whom have taken the time to let me know how much they enjoyed Lisa’s observations.

[You may read all six parts of that interview here.]

I forwarded a couple of reader questions to Lisa who graciously forwarded these responses:

Given you live with a talented writer/storyteller in his own right [Jonah Nolan], what is some of the more interesting feedback you’ve gotten from him that may have changed the way you approach your work?

Honestly, for projects I am writing alone in tv and features I tend to not solicit his feedback much. So much of our lives are spent working and to provide valuable feedback necessitates, in my mind, really digging in and immersing yourself in the other persons writing — frankly we are so busy with our own projects that if we were to give feedback on each other’s individual projects too — we might never have time for anything else.

That being said, Jonah is my favorite writer and collaborator by far. And we are always looking for cool projects to work on together. And clearly when we are working on joint projects, like “Westworld”, it’s very iterative — we are constantly challenging and building on each others’ ideas. He loves to start scripts with big, bold ideas and fun, subversive and surprising moments and drive down to finding character. Whereas I tend to start with character first then blow up the story to include those bigger moments and ideas. We always reach the same place but from different directions. He also has a great sly humor I appreciate in his dialogue and what I consider to be a very compelling “rugged” way of writing scene description.

We don’t necessarily give each other feedback or lessons per se — but working with him keeps me on my toes and inspires me to do better because the level he’s working at is so high. Which wow — just reminded me of one piece of advice he has given me which is — read good books, watch good movies, and collaborate with good writers because it influences the level you yourself write at. It’s very true and it’s one of the many reasons I so love collaborating with him.

How do you go about evaluating your own work? That is to say, what tells you this is ready or not ready to share with someone else, given your admitted shyness, reticence, and risk aversion?

It’s quite difficult to be objective in the moment. In the immediate aftermath of writing, I’m often either so pessimistic about it I feel that all is lost or I’m in some weird writers high where I think it’s pretty much the bees knees. Both are wrong. For myself, the easiest way to evaluate my work is to start early enough that I give myself a couple days break or a weekend without looking at it before going back to read the draft with fresh eyes. Fresh eyes tend to be better at judging a work objectively and seeing what is working and locating all the places where things could be done better. I often find myself cringing at the things i had previously thought were inspired. Other times I’ve been pleasantly surprised to enjoy a scene or two that I barely gave a second thought to in the initial pass. Ultimately I only send a script out to people if I’m satisfied after several rounds of subjecting myself to the ruthless fresh eyes test.

Many thanks once again to Lisa for the interview and for taking the time to respond to some reader questions.

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