I hope she knows you only like the beginnings of things

I thought the last two episodes of Mad Men - 'The Suitcase' and 'The Summer Man' - were two of the finer pieces of TV writing I've seen. I've been watching each episode twice (they screen twice a week here) and the repeat viewing is rewarded: the stories get deeper, and better. Ken Levine writes about the series on his blog: Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner insists he's a team player but his fingerprints are on everything:

Matt comes up with the general arc and direction of the season. The staff works together with him on breaking stories and then write individual scripts. Matt then takes his pass at every draft. That's not to say that a lot of the original writer's draft doesn't make the final cut but everything passes through Matt first. And that's in addition to the scripts he writes by himself. Hey, he's the real deal, folks.

To confirm all this I [Ken Levine] double-checked with Matt, who added this:

"I have had a lot of writers come through the show. And the story process in that room is very collaborative and essential. I do not and more importantly can not do it by myself."

Weiner's education included photography, film and acting. In another interview with Bob Fisher he reveals that the prospect of the writing life "terrified" him:

The popular mythology was that talent and drive had nothing to do with it. You needed to know somebody to get a foot in the door. It's also true that your chances of succeeding are very low when you're an aspiring novelist or poet. My parents were very pleased that I got into film school, because it was like having a relative in the film business. The question was, why would you strive to be in a profession when you could be really good and not make it? The truth is that I am a tenacious person. I've learned that tenacity is a common part of the personalities of successful writers whom I have met. Now, maybe because I have had some success, I can say that the struggling for the 10 years or so before I got a paying job, made me a better writer. It was very clear in my mind that I was not going to set a time limit on myself. I had role models. I wouldn't say they were mentors, because I didn't know them. I would read about people's lives all the time, and see how long it took them, whether it was the Beatles who played together for eight years before they hit it big, or Stanley Kubrick who was also a terrible student with a physician father. When The Sopranos came on television, I found out that (creator) David Chase was 55 years old and I was already 32 years old, but it helped to know to not put a time limit on myself. I was prepared to struggle to the end.

(I appreciate the line about reading about people's lives: I was taught the same thing by my art teacher, Ken Robinson, who always told us to go straight to what artists say rather than what is said about them. Distributing such texts is one of the motivations for this blog.)

When Weiner was starting out he earned money for himself by being a contestant on Jeopardy. Interestingly, a similar thing happened to the Rear Window screenwriter John Michael Hayes. After returning home from service in the Pacific, Hayes was stricken with a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis and spent a year and a half in hospital recovering from the illness. Then:

On a Sunday evening, while his family was at the movies, the twenty-nine year old writer packed his belongings, left a note for his parents and, with only $15 in his pocket, embarked on a cross-country journey, using two canes, his thumb and the goodwill of motorists kind enough to offer a ride... Hayes finally arrived in Los Angeles with $4.50 remaining and checked into the Mark Twain Hotel for the night, planning to go the following morning to CBS, where he had worked previously. En route to CBS the next day, Hayes passed the NBC radio studios, where there was a line of people waiting to get into one of the popular quiz shows, Double or Nothing. Hayes decided to wait and see the show. While he waited in line, one of the show's assistants saw him on canes and let him inside the studio ahead of everyone else. When he got inside, he was asked if he would like to be an assistant. Hayes said yes. The questions they asked were about English literature, and he won $640.

(Stories like that reassure me that I'm not working too hard. And that my health - touch wood - is pretty good.)

Cinema and TV writing has influenced my novels because I relish the moments in a story when nobody says anything and nothing happens - a neat trick if you're using only words, and often trying for the reader who must then do some thinking of his own. Again talking to Fisher, Weiner describes this approach very well:

You know, being a writer, the closest thing in production to writing is editing... [The] dean of the film school taught a class where he would show a film. Then, he would take a break, show it again, and explain it over a microphone as it was happening. That was the best writing class I ever had. That's where I saw The Apartment for the first time. He really influenced me in a non-formulaic way by explaining what tools a writer could use in cinema. I realized that everything I liked about both watching movies and making movies were those visual moments where there is nonverbal communications. Think of what you can learn by looking at the human face. There are those elements and also the real cinematic elements of seeing objects and people in their environments. You see a movie like The Conformist and say, 'It feels as if it's happening' - the storytelling, the incredible dialogue that was adapted from a spectacular novel, and then all the filmmaking that went into it, including performances, and how it was edited. It was very exciting to take these things apart and realize how much thought went into every aspect of great storytelling. That was very exciting to me.

(Re: The Conformist - my brief notes on Bertolucci's talk at the BFI here.)