Screenwriting : Writing Long Form Television by Richard Toscan

Given the growing interest among screenwriters in long form television -- mostly because of the form's relative freedom to explore complex character-centered ideas -- I think Beau Willimon's discussion of the writing process for Netflix' House of Cards would be of interest. (Willimon first came to notice as a playwright with Farragut North.) "The writing of the show is pretty typical compared to other shows. You’ve still got to get the 800 pages down and it still takes a certain minimum amount of time to film it. The release model might be completely different but the making of it is very similar to a lot of other cable shows out there. I hire a staff of writers. We spend the first few weeks mapping out the grid for the whole season. Then we get into individual episodes, take a couple weeks to break an episode, write an outline. Then someone starts to write it. That’ll either be me or one of my writers. They usually have two or three weeks to work on that script or give notes. They do some rewrites, I take it over, I do a pass and share it with the other EPs, Netflix and production. It goes through multiple drafts — white, blue, pink, green. And at a certain point we do a table read. I do some more changes and then oftentimes I’m tweaking and rewriting stuff right up until the day before production. That is coming out of conversations I’m having with the director or the actors. What we filmed the previous day might inform the scene that we’re doing the next day [because] we discovered something. I’d say, 'Hey, there’s an opportunity here to add a grace note to this next scene or to rethink where this arc is going.' So, it’s a constant process of evolution. Sometimes, as in season one, we’ll have major storylines worked out and you’re responding to what you’re seeing in front of the camera. Corey Stoll is a great example. He was so fantastic. We knew he would be but he was so fantastic that I shifted an entire storyline into his and that required rewriting a lot of the subsequent episodes. You have to have that sort of flexibility. You have to be open to discovery and always leap on an idea that is better than the one you had before."