Desk of Amy Suto

TV writer who eats danger for breakfast

Writing Routines: A Holistic Approach to Crafting Your Weekly Writing Schedule

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If you think I’m writing these blog posts in part so I can spend my mornings browsing aesthetically pleasing photos of coffee and desks and people writing in dramatic lighting, you’d be 100% right.

Also, it’s January, so I’m on that Self Development Kick that we all get when advertisers are hammering into our minds how we can be better, and our new years’ resolutions haven’t faded from our minds for the next 11 months.

Okay, I say that but I love setting and achieving my new years’ resolutions. Maybe it’s my obsessive compulsion tendencies and love for color coding and aggressive goal-setting, but I just adore making elaborate goal tracking whiteboards and sharing my insane notecarding process on my Instagram.

as it turns out, if you write a pilot full of logic puzzles and mysteries, you have to figure out how all those logic puzzles and mysteries actually work

What Makes a Successful Weekly Writing Routine

When I was thinking about my most successful years, I realized that it comes down to how much control I have over my weekly schedule. If I have more flexible hours, I’m able to design my writing routine around creatively inspiring activities that feed into what I’m working on. If I’m struggling with a boatload of freelance projects, I find myself feeling creatively exhausted and my writing suffers.

The best weekly writing routines are holistic and well-rounded: an ideal schedule includes activities that are creative, kinetic, and reflective, and support your writing process so that you can hit the page feeling energized and inspired.

So, using my own trial-and-error, here’s a step-by-step guide on how to build your perfect weekly writing routine:

[Read more…]

Method Writing: Exercises to Experience the Stories You’re Writing

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I love collecting weird hobbies and experiences, and often joke that I’m a “method writer.”

It’s only partially a joke: I’ve been known to seek out adventures in the same flavor of what I’m writing. (See: this deep cut from my archives where I shot guns and learned about them six years ago for a novel I was writing. Baby Amy was — and still is — a die hard method writer.)

When I was writing a story about my hometown, I made the trek back to Middle of Nowhere, Arizona, and made a point of meeting up with as many old acquaintances as possible. I visited gun ranges to learn about what my characters would know about owning and firing a gun, I hung out with tumbleweeds in the desert and watched the sunset. (The sun setting in the desert is probably the only beauty I’ll admit exists in the wasteland that can be endless stretches of brush and plants that want to fight you. Jumping cacti, anyone?)

The stories I’m working on now are being continually reshaped by the experience I’m seeking out — and vice-versa. I make an effort to be a method writer, and it pays off.

I truly believe the more wildly we wander, the better our words become.

So here’s how I approach “method” writing. [Read more…]

The 3 Rules of Making it As a Writer in Los Angeles

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Every artist should have a code, a set of rules, to keep them sane in a city with more traffic than trees and way overpriced lattes.

I have three rules that I set for myself ever since I came out to LA, and they’ve governed every decision I’ve made out here. Here they are:

1. Honor (& Hone) Your Craft

Daily practice will keep you sharp, so keep a notebook or a journal of daily ideas, freewriting, and inspiration on top of your script pages and other projects. [Read more…]

Writing in Hollywood: Should Men Tell Women’s Stories?

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Back in the day, I wrote a guide for men on how to write female characters.

In a nutshell: like human beings. Complex, flawed, whole. Strong — but also weak. A spectrum, just like male characters have been written about for decades in film and television.

However, even though men should portray female characters as complex in their writing — should men elect to tell stories that are told from the female perspective, about the female experience? As storytellers, what should our responsibilities be when telling stories that are not our own experiences? [Read more…]

How to Write a Series Bible for Your TV Show

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It’s the top of the New Year and I hope you’re as ready for this year as I am! Every year after Christmas I let my OCD tendencies take over and deep clean my apartment and get my projects in order by making a project calendar. I also get started on new scripts, so I thought I’d write this post about how to write a killer series bible for your TV show.

Let’s write stacks on stacks of final drafts this year guys, OK?

add some red string and I’m at serial-killer level of preparedness for this year

What is a Series Bible?

If you’re writing a TV show at the top of the year, I wanted to talk a little about writing a series bible. For those of you new to the world of TV writing, a series bible is the document that is like hey guys if we made a TV show about Wonder Woman saving us from the horrors of 2017 HERE’S WHAT IT WOULD LOOK LIKE

 

spoiler alert: it would look like AWESOME

So what would you include in a series bible? [Read more…]

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