Growing up, not only did I want to be a writer, but I also wanted to be a journalist because I was basically really into the news. You know, as a kid, I would sit and watch the national news broadcast with Dan Rather with my mom and dad. I was very into news. I would read the Hartford Courant. I was one of those kids that I actually read the newspaper, not just the funnies section, not just the cartoons. I read the front page. And in high school, I ended up being the high school editor of my school newspaper. And then in college, I was an editor for the Yale Herald.
So, I ended up going to Columbia Journalism School and got my master’s in journalism, which led directly to being a reporter for the Seattle Times and then the Detroit News and then People Magazine in Los Angeles, which is where I live today. And what happened was – this is now 2002 – a friend of mine, who was a TV writer, she said to me you watch so much TV and you’re such a TV junkie, you know, you watch all this stuff, I can’t believe you’re not writing TV scripts and movie scripts because TV and movies are basically fiction journalism. You’re writing fiction on a very tight deadline. I think you’d be good at that.
So, I found out about the Warner Bros. workshop, which was a six-week program that taught you how to write TV scripts, and my friend had graduated from that program. So, I thought oh, maybe I’ll just send in a script. And I actually did it for fun. And at the end of the Warner Brothers workshop, I got signed to an agency, and I got my first job as a staff writer for the fourth season of The West Wing. I got to work with Aaron Sorkin and everybody during that.
I worked on Supergirl. I worked on Eureka and Defiance on Syfy, did a little bit of science fiction writing. I play the violin so obviously I get hired on Mozart in the Jungle, and the last show I wrote for was a Pretty Little Liars spinoff called The Perfectionists, and I currently am working on movie scripts and TV pilots right now at home.
