As a writer, you come to understand that words are important.  For example, if I remark that every night before bed, I rub peanut butter all over myself, you might be moved to conjure that image, whether or not it’s true.  As a writer, you’re granted the power of suggestion.  A writer traffics in semantics and subtext.  Your words carry meaning. A writer must persevere under conviction, internal or external, perceived or imagined, in the belief that it will result in something beautiful.  You have to be willing to challenge the assumptions of the viewer.  Subvert the expectation.  To introduce a unique world or circumstance with your writing is a negation of the principal of comfort in routine.  How do we further subvert and impose that subconsciously on the viewer?  By breaking convention from the get-go. Start with the language itself.  Allow the characters their full range of expression.

Your ideas must come from a modicum of internal truth.  You have to be the right person to tell the story.  You’ve got to identify and solidify that part of yourself that is other from everyone else, say it’s something you don’t like that everyone else likes, and then explore why that is, what the facets of it are, then once that examination is complete, extrapolate it and abstract it until it’s universally identifiable in a narrative sense.  If you cater only to the psychological minority that you’re in, you’ll only ever engage a fraction of that minority, because maybe it’s even a shame to not like what you don’t like, so they won’t want to engage in consumption of material that alienates them further.  If you want to write a story about a guy who really likes racing marbles, you have to frame it as a story about ambition, competition, and purpose, otherwise the only people you’re going to reach are marble racers, and even then, maybe only half of the marble racers are going to think it’s any good, because you didn’t portray marble racing exactly how they wanted you to.  Your ideas must be accessible and identifiable in order to be viable.  By that same token, I try not to hold the hand of the audience too much.  Contemporary audiences seem to be losing the ability to put two and two together, but I don't want to submit and just give them four.  Respect the art and be truthful to the expression of it, but understand the audience’s capacity to understand is vastly different from yours.

It speaks to something that the first official note I got boiled down to “I love this, it’s incredible.  Dumb it down”.  You have to not only understand the intentions of your native art, but understand the lens through which it's going to be viewed.  You say, if I'm doing a vertical series, I'm going to have to catch that person's attention within 3 seconds.  And I'm going to have to distill everything down to its most accessible form so that the majority of people can identify with it and enjoy it enough to continue watching.  There’s obviously a disconnect between that reality and what the process should actually be, which is, I feel compelled to tell this story, and I'm going to let this story be dictated by the necessities of the story itself, not the constrictions of the method by which I’m able to tell the story.  But I tend to spend more time figuring out how to work past such an injustice than I do remarking that the thing is unjust.  I engage a gratefulness that I’m able to tell the story at all.

Something you might note in my material is a complete abstention from using the phrase "A beat". I detest it. You'll never see it on any of my scripts. Whether it's relegated to sit in a parenthetical or take up the space of an action line, you won't find it in my work. There's a reason for that. I believe that your action lines should be able to be more than just an indicator of movement or the passage of time. I prefer not to waste an opportunity on the page to further illustrate the piece for the reader, actor, or viewer. You have a chance to pull something internal about the character into focus. You can call to light a filmable motivation that an actor can interpret in their reading. Some believe that to be the job of the director, or producer, or the gaffer, or anyone but the person who actually created the thing, but if you're the person who knows this story better than anyone, you should make it your goal to internally clarify that story as much as possible. You grew it from a seed, you don't want to watch it wilt under the care of a different gardener. We're wordsmiths. You can indicate the passage of time in a much more interesting way that hopefully gives an insight into the character's thought process, into what your characters are really doing or what their true intents are. And I'm not suggesting that between every line of dialogue you put a paragraph explaining which of his eyelashes are out of place, or exactly when the idea to write this line came to you under a fucking cherry tree, you just have an opportunity in the single action line to guide the character's thoughts. Rather than "A beat", use something like "A revelation --". Because that implies both a slight pause between the thing, and reason for the pause.

In writing, I try to avoid the formulaic as much as I can, rather sometimes indulging a spontaneity or strangeness, but mostly allowing my trust in the characters to dictate the process.  I know their voices will speak for themselves.  I believe the character should inform the movement of the drama, not the inverse.  You can allow inspiration to materialize like that, asking, how will each of these characters react differently to the given conflict, and what dramatic threads will sprout from those reactions?  I do as much work to develop my characters as possible, to give them as much texture and doubleness as a real person possesses.  I believe the contradictions of one’s spirit are one major factor that constitutes the depth of their character.  One thing you hope to do is to allow the character’s intentions and backstories to seep through every decision, every line.  I try to distill that into single expressions.  Say I have a character who, in spite of their generous spirit, allows themselves the occasional pessimistic utterance, whether it helps the current situation or not.  To use an example from The Healer, Thomas, who’s a character dwelling with tremendous feelings of circumstantial depression, is met with a suggestion to look on the bright side.  He responds in the only way he can.

“Yeah, well, with every cloud and its silver lining, it’s still got a gray fuckin middle.”

You infer so much about him in just a single sentence.  Of course, the additional goal in the long term after a line like that is to see the character grow to refute statements like that.  And we do.

The character’s backgrounds and experiences ought to inform their actions, and it’s through these actions that we learn what those backgrounds and experiences were, rather than a flash to white followed by the character goofing around in a fatsuit for a few seconds.

There’s an undeniable energy around work you know is good.  When you move on to other things, though you try not to admit it, you can sense something’s missing.

I believe every detail, every word, every experience, the tight and messy, the good, the bad, it’s all ripe for rendering.  You can draw on anything, and typically the more specific the inspiration is and more abstracted the rendering is, the better off you’ll be.  The intention is to create something lasting and meaningful.

Of course, sometimes phrases appear in my notes like “show idea: alien with tits”, so make of that what you will.

© 2026, SAMUEL KINSELLA