“You have to be borderline amused by failure”

Aline Brosh McKenna wrote The Devil Wears Prada, 27 Dresses, Morning Glory, We Bought a Zoo and Cruella, and co-created Crazy Ex-Girlfriend with Rachel Bloom. She has written, by her own count, roughly fifty screenplays and fifteen television pilots.

She came to a bar in Los Angeles to talk to a room of working and emerging writers, and spent most of an hour on the parts of the job nobody films.

Edited for length and clarity.

If you were emerging today, what would you be doing?

I came out here in July of 1991, about to turn twenty-four. So anything to do with breaking in — you’re asking Methuselah.

But I’ll tell you a story. For the first few years I wrote features, and it was very lonely. So I wrote two specs, a Mad About You and a Seinfeld, and gave them to my feature agent and asked if the TV department would read them and tell me whether they were any good.

After what seemed like a long time, an agent from the TV department called me. She said: yeah, these are fine, these are good — but have you been anyone’s assistant or anyone’s girlfriend? Because it would be a lot easier for me to get you a job if you had been someone’s assistant or someone’s girlfriend.

I switched agencies after that call. A friend had been telling me to move for a while and I’d resisted — I was at a big place and it didn’t feel comfortable. But it became clear that wasn’t the way I wanted my work represented.

People have been saying dumb stuff like that for a very long time.

What was the business actually like then?

There was a very, very healthy spec trade. Every weekend there’d be specs coming out, printed on paper — stacks of paper. People would come and get them, make copies, drive them around to everyone. Agencies were essentially in the Kinko’s and messenger business. There was no other way to get a script to somebody.

I can tell by the level of cognition in people’s eyeballs how old they are.

The good thing was that specs sold, and selling a spec launched a career. TV was much harder for me to penetrate. It was — and still is a bit — like high school. Really about who you knew, and I didn’t have those relationships.

When I switched agencies, the new place had a tiny TV department with an agent who talked very fast, had been around forever, blonde hair sprayed into place, big rings, big shoulder pads. She sent me on an interview miles out to where they were producing a show, and I met two guys who clearly hadn’t read my stuff and were doing it as a favour to her.

I called her afterwards and said, they didn’t know anything about me, it was awkward, I felt like the little match girl.

And she said: you are the little match girl. You’re my little match girl.

I still don’t know what that meant.

Could you sell Crazy Ex-Girlfriend today?

I don’t think so. I was so confident about it at the time that I didn’t even register that Rachel was twenty-six and unknown.

We were developing it for CBS initially, but it became clear that at a network Rachel couldn’t be the lead. I said to her, I don’t want to do all this work and have you end up as the third banana in your own show. So we went to cable instead — nine or ten places.

I don’t think I could do that now. Take an unknown person around town with just a pitch. Not unless you had a ton of heat.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of the content creators who are successful — stand-ups, podcasters, TikTok people — don’t especially want to work in conventional television. Their stuff is unmediated. It’s their own creative expression, they set their own hours, they live wherever they want. And the pay for developing television is so poor now that they’d rather not.

How do you handle a project falling apart?

Failure is built into the system. I’ve written about fifty screenplays and fifteen pilots — and you’ll notice, only one series. Maybe one in five screenplays gets made, which is actually a high rate.

So if you want to be a writer you have to be really, really comfortable with failure. Borderline amused by it.

When something doesn’t work out, you have to believe that door closed because another one is going to open. That’s genuinely happened to me — all my eggs in one basket, it falls apart, misery, misery, misery, and then something comes my way I couldn’t have done otherwise.

I’m not a woo-woo person at all. But it’s a bit like dating. You have to believe that if it didn’t work out, later you’ll be holding the thing you actually wanted and thinking, thank god.

Here’s my favourite version of that. I was a staff writer on a show Jennifer Aniston did that was in first position — it ran one season. I went into the first table read and this unbelievably glowy young woman came in, just emanating light, and sat down and read. I thought, my god, who is that?

If that show had been picked up, she would not have been able to do Friends.

I don’t love “everything happens for a reason,” because so many horrible things happen in the world. But professionally? A door closes, and you’re in a room where a door could open.

How do you pitch?

Don’t make it too much of a thing. I’m not a performer. If I have to perform I start sounding like I’m in a road company of Annie — hey guys, here’s my story!

So I just go in as if I were sitting down with you to tell you the idea. Oh, it’s this, and then this happens, and then this happens.

What goes wrong is that writers get into an alternate space, and that space is tied to a piece of paper or something in their head. You’re interacting with someone who isn’t there, because they’re inside a thing they planned to say. You never do that in life. You’d never go on a date having pre-rehearsed it.

I have watched writers pitch by reading off a piece of paper. Nobody wants that. I asked one why, and they said they’d been told they were supposed to read it.

Don’t. Do not.

It’s the same reason people fear public speaking. You’ll be talking to someone who’s cool and comfortable in their body, and then they have to give the speech and suddenly — ladies and gentlemen — the rhythm changes. How many times have you watched someone get aggressively boring because they’re in a rote thing?

What do you lead with?

Tell them why they’re listening. What’s the reason for being? That’s more important than plot.

This is what I think this story could be. This is what I think it’s about. This is why it deserves to exist. Then the details.

So my pitch is mostly preamble, and then I go very fast through the story — because if you’ve told them what it’s about, every beat lands as right, because of the thing you told me earlier. It should all be of a piece.

Take The Pit. It’s about economic destruction. If you watch ER, there’s nobody in the waiting room — they come and take people out of a waiting room with three people in it. In The Pit there’s a whole crowd bleeding and dying. That’s what they wanted to talk about. Who’s having a STEMI and who needs an amputation is all in service of the bigger idea.

Don’t get bogged down in the specifics, because specifics are boring.

Do you need the whole series worked out?

It depends on the show.

If you’re writing Everybody Loves Raymond — a situation that recurs — you don’t need to explain that then he forgets to take the cash out and then he leaves the milk in the car. That’s not propulsive. Those shows have incremental character arcs inside a giant machine, and they take their time. I’m sure nobody pitched ten seasons.

But if you’re pitching a thriller, you have to know exactly what’s happening.

With Crazy Ex-Girlfriend I felt strongly we needed the story worked out, because it’s such a slender idea that nothing about it tells you it could sustain seasons. So if you’re pitching something that won’t obviously strike people as sustainable, do the work.

You write a lot of women who apologise for themselves.

That’s just what people are like. That’s how you experience people.

It was much easier to get people interested in a movie about a dragon lady than to get them to wrap their minds around a movie about a doormat. And we had a lot of resistance from men who felt it wasn’t feminist. Which is wild, because most women recognised it instantly.

The friend I wrote 27 Dresses about — when she was single, we had a rule. If she ever referred to herself as unattractive or flat-chested or whatever it was, I would punch her in the arm. I’d find a spot and punch her, the way an older brother would, to make her stop.

Go shopping with a woman. I can’t wear that, I’ve got saddlebags. I can’t wear that, my boobs are upside down. Women have inculcated this giant list of shortcomings they can rattle off on command.

I once met a man who said something like, well, because I’m really good looking — and I thought, oh, that’s interesting. That might be for others to say. If a woman said because I’m so pretty, we’d all be astonished.

What do you do when you’re stuck?

Everyone’s different. Some people make a mosaic by laying tiles in order as they go. I can’t do that. I have to put tiles in all over the place and see the whole shape before I refine anything.

Otherwise I’ll stay in the first fifteen pages forever, because it’s so much easier to live there than to go into the messy, yucky part in the middle of the table where nothing makes sense yet.

One easy hack: whichever scene you’re most excited to write, write that.

There’s a term I learned — anal explosive, as opposed to anal retentive. Some people won’t move on until they fill the grid in order. Most of us go around it. Well, I’ve got that area, and I’ve got that one. Think of it that way and it’s much less intimidating.

And if it’s really, really stuck? Just skip it.

Do you outline right away?

I like to take a long time before I write anything, because writing freezes it in my brain. So I talk it out. I’m lucky to have people at my company whose job that partly is — I’ll call and say, is this a good idea, what do you think?

I have more ideas than I can write now, so we give them to other writers. That’s where a lot of our projects come from. When I was starting out, people would ask if I had ideas I was trying to write and I’d think, I just met you, I’m not telling you that.

Though when I first met JJ Abrams, he was a Prada fan and took me to lunch and asked if I had any ideas. I pitched him Morning Glory. He said great. And we did it.

How do you take notes?

I’ve got very good at it. But in my twenties I had a writing partner, and we came out of a meeting where we’d been given some very bad notes, and he said: you have to learn not to make a face like you’re having an aneurysm.

I said, what was I doing? And he showed me.

Here’s what I do now. I get very excited about the good ideas, and I try to ignore the bad ones. If someone really wants an explanation for why I’m not doing something, I’ll give it — but only framed as a bad idea in service of what might be a better one.

People are going to say dumb stuff to you. You’re going to say dumb stuff to people. You will get notes that are completely wrong. You learn to arrange your face.

And when you give something to a reader, don’t ask for analysis. Ask: were you bored? Did you know she was working in a coal mine? Did you understand he was Italian? Are you getting it? That’s worth more than someone’s script breakdown.

An audience member asked whether the cerulean speech was fair — isn’t inventing a shade of blue a bit silly?

No one’s asked me that quite that way. And it is a little silly, because the belts do look identical.

But let me give you a better example. Everyone in this room — the shape of the pants you’re wearing was not chosen by you.

Everyone remembers when, for no reason, our pants were four inches below our waists and every woman’s butt crack was out. I had little kids, and all the moms would be squatting on the playground and you could have posted a letter. That’s because Alexander McQueen showed bumsters. It took five years to get from his runway to the rest of us.

Men used to wear enormous voluminous pleated pants. Then Thom Browne types started showing skinny ones, and now men’s pants are too skinny and too short, with the crops and the socks. Now volume’s coming back — you watch Colman Domingo in something enormous that flares at the bottom, and I guarantee you’ll be looking at a different silhouette in Banana Republic soon.

Every woman here threw out her scoop-neck t-shirts at some point. There isn’t one in this room. Twelve years ago everyone would have been wearing a scoop or a V. Now we’re all buying gigantic thick crew necks.

There’s a history behind that polo shirt you don’t know — a band here, a collar here, three buttons, something to do with sport and sailing. It could be McQueen, or it could be Irish fishermen who wore those sweaters because it was cold, and somehow I’m in eighth grade in a giant itchy fisherman’s sweater.

Everyone here got up today and made a decision about what to wear, and everyone is evoking something specific by it. This gentleman’s hat and glasses tell you a lot — you’re not expecting him to be a Wall Street guy, you’re expecting a drummer.

So clothing is, on one hand, very important. And on the other hand, not important at all.

If you want to be a writer you have to be really, really comfortable with failure. Borderline amused by it.

Aline Brosh McKenna speaking at a Storytelling360 StorySocial