How to Make It: Rules for Success from TV Writers

Watching TV is great right now (whether you do it live, with DVR, or an illegal stream). Reading TV criticism is great right now (whether you do it on your phone, on the computer, or in the newspaper). It almost makes you want to, you know, write for TV. Work your way into a writers' room and craft jokes with a crew of like-minded talents. Or develop a pilot yourself and create something that millions will enjoy and talk about. Something to spark a hundred think pieces. Something worthy of a hashtag, a trending topic on Twitter. If the desire is in you, the next question becomes: how?

Curiousity about this very question led us to seek out industry vets for advice. Writers for shows like Arrested Development, Dexter, Saturday Night Live, The Americans, Nurse Jackie, and more explained to Complex how they came up and what they learned. They shared wide-ranging stories about how they broke into the biz, and no two were alike. There are no hard and fast answers to questions of success, no easy solutions to waking up as a showrunner, but there are common factors. Luckily, they deal with drive and a willingness to try.

Here are the rules for success from TV writers.

RELATED: The 25 Best TV Shows of 2013 (So Far)
RELATED: 25 TV Writers to Follow on Twitter
RELATED: The 50 Best TV Dramas of All Time

As told to Tara Aquino (@t_akino), Matt Barone (@mbarone), and Ross Scarano (@RossScarano)

Experience: Writer and co-producer, Southland (TNT); writer and supervising producer, NCIS: Los Angeles (CBS)

Advice: "It's better to write a pilot rather than write a spec show. In some cases, you have to do both, but more often writing a pilot and having an original voice is more important. Say, for example, you want to get a job on Mad Men—it'd be better for you to write an original show set in a world like Mad Men than it would be to write a sample episode of Mad Men. Somebody from Mad Men would read your spec script and say, 'Oh, we don't do shit like that. We'd never do it like this.' They're always going to have that kind of bias.

"If you can, get your hands on actual television scripts, because the stuff you'll get from screenwriting magazines and screenwriting books is sometimes counterintuitive. It often sounds completely different from what the reality of writing a script is. The rule you always hear is that one minute of screen time is equal to one script page, and that's bullshit. The reason it's bullshit is because you can't predict how long a camera is going to hold a shot and how long a director is going to fill the screen with visual information that's going to eat up time. And you have to be careful about getting stuff off the web.

"Occasionally people will publish scripts, but when you read a published script, you want to be careful that it has the actual script layout, as opposed to some of these British editions that just have the dialogue and you don't get to see how the screen descriptions are written. If you like a specific show, try to find at least one copy of a real script to find out how they went about making it from the script."

Experience: Writer, South Park (Comedy Central); writer, The Jamie Kennedy Experiment; writer, Arrested Development (FOX); writer, Dog Bites Man; writer, Community; writer, Portlandia; writer, Kroll Show; writer, The New Normal

Advice: "To be honest, I didn't know I could be a writer until I was one. It wasn't until I was 27 that I wanted to give it a try. I'm dyslexic, so I didn't think you could be a writer if you spelled like shit. Thanks, spell check! The lesson is: you can do anything, even if you're an idiot! See, Sarah Palin.

"But this is a better lesson: Not everyone is an asshole. If you're scared to ask someone for something, you will never succeed. In this business, asking for something is the only way to do it. The way I got in was, my mom's co-worker from 20 years ago had a nephew who was a comedy writing agent. I called him, spoke to his assistant and he agreed to meet with me. I was a stand-up in New York at the time and thinking about moving to L.A. and just wanted to know what I needed to do to break in. He told me about how every writer needed a spec sample and pilot. Before I left, he told me to send him some stuff I'd written. I got back to New York and compiled everything I had—essays, sketches, and weird drawings. He loved them and submitted them to South Park and that was my first job. Matt Rice, the agent in this story, is not an asshole.

"P.S. I am an asshole."

Experience: Stand-up comedian; creator and writer on Workaholics (Comedy Central)

Advice: "My path was a little different. A lot of writers start off as writers and come up through the writers' room. You begin as a writer's assistant and then someone picks you as their low-level staff writer, and then you become a story editor, and then executive story editor. You work your way up through the inside. But what I did, since I'm a writer/performer, I created my own concept and me and Blake Anderson and Anders Holm (Workaholics) were able to come up with enough ideas for it. Even in our bad videos, you still saw that our ideas were funny. You saw our potential. We were able to be given a shot through the work we put in.

"I think with the Internet now, it's so much easier to get yourself out there. I'm from Omaha, Nebraska. You can be in Omaha, Nebraska, but if you put in the work and you are serious about your stuff and you're serious about making the production good and the editing good and the direction good and you work hard on your writing and acting, it can happen for you."

Experience: Creator, co-executive producer and writer, Wilfred (FX)

Advice: "If you're a plumber and you have an idea for a TV show, well, it isn't easy to go from nowhere to somewhere. An idea isn't enough. You have to understand how stories are told in that medium, how to cater to a network and studio. To get anywhere, you have to have the kind of drive that separates you from the people who dream about it and the people who do it.

"You also need to diversify and learn everything you can about the whole business. I was an actor for years, and then I realized that writing and producing would get me further. People say it's not who you know but what you know, but it's what you know that will get you introduced to the right people."

Experience: Producer and writer, Secret Agent Man (UPN); executive producer and writer, Kate Brasher (CBS); writer, Over There (FX); writer, Commander in Chief (ABC); executive producer and writer, Dirt (FX); executive producer and writer, Ugly Betty (ABC); writer, Raising the Bar (TNT); executive producer and writer, Rizzoli and Isles (TNT); executive producer and writer, The Americans (FX)

Advice: "My first passion was theater. I wrote plays through college, but was also passionate about television and film. When I graduated, I got a job as a production assistant in Los Angeles. As I was working as a PA, I pitched ideas for TV movies until the person I was working for started to listen. Then, I was able to sell some of the pitches. One was the story of Frank Nitti, who was portrayed in The Untouchables as a psychotic killer, but, in reality, was the brains behind the Chicago mob in many ways. That was made eventually with a then-unknown Anthony LaPaglia. I learned then that, if you control material, you can start to control your destiny.

"The first show I worked on was Legacy, about a family living in the Wild West. A very generous executive producer named Chris Abbott gave me a shot at writing a script, and from there i went to work on Secret Agent Man on UPN. That allowed me to write a pilot for a show called Homewood P.I. that was made at CBS. And I've been going ever since."

Experience: Writer and performer, MADtv (FOX); writer and performer, The Mindy Project (FOX)

Advice: "Whatever you want to do in the industry, do it on the smallest level at first. If you want to be a writer, write a screenplay in your house. If you want to be an actor, put on a one-man show. If you want to be a stand-up comedian, go to an open mic. If you want to be a visual effects guy, go to a visual effects house and say, 'Hey, I'll work here for a dollar an hour.'

"Committing is a big deal. And not getting broken right away. I know a lot of people, friends of mine, who get here from Chicago or other parts of the country and I think they give themselves too short of a clock. And they think, If I don't make it in six months, I'm going to move back back. And my thought is, No one's gonna make it in six months unless they've got a sex tape."

Experience: Creator, executive producer, and writer, Red Widow (ABC); writer, Dark Skies (NBC); writer, The O.C. (FOX); writer, Dexter (Showtime); writer, The Twilight Saga (2008-2012)

Advice: "If it was easy, everybody would do it. Everybody does think they can do it. An enormous amount of craft goes into a screenplay or teleplay. Young students coming in don't realize that there is actually a craft to a scene, having it into a scene, having it out to a scene, how to develop a character in the course of an hour, or the course of the series. It takes experience and it's about learning from other people. I still study the craft, I still learn things from other writers—that's what it's all about."

Experience: Creator, executive producer, and writer, Up All Night (NBC); writer, Saturday Night Live (NBC); writer, Parks and Recreation (NBC); writer, King of the Hill (FOX); writer, MADtv (FOX)

Advice: "Cultivate your unique voice and POV. The more you can incorporate the 'unique you' in your writing, the better.

"When I first started in basic classes at The Groundlings comedy theater in L.A., I was young and green, and wrote generic, mediocre comedy concepts. My first director, Cathy Shambley, drilled me constantly: Write what you know! Be specific! The more 'you' you infuse into your piece, the better. I slowly learned to do that, and began to hear laughter.

"Cultivating my creative POV helped me land my first job at MADtv and with my southern background, I became invaluable on King of the Hill. When I got to Saturday Night Live, I wrote one of my favorite pieces ever. It starred Billy Bob Thornton and Will Ferrell; Billy Bob played a troubled Southern man who'd carved out a tiny four-foot-by-four-foot area in his tiny back yard but was completely stumped on what to do with it. His friends and family worried about him because his obsession with this little area was ruining his life.

"On Up All Night, I wrote an episode where Reagan and Chris drink too much and accidentally buy a 1970s fantasy van from eBay. This ep was directly culled from my life. When my husband and I were living in a tiny apartment in New York City (about the size of Billy Bob's small fenced in area from my SNL sketch) we drank too much one Friday night and almost won a 1973 Gremlin with Levi denim interior off eBay. Thank God we didn't meet the reserve price.

"My Parks and Recreation episode was about the snotty citizens of Pawnee's neighboring town of Eagleton. Parker Posey's character, Eagleton's Lindsay Carlisle Shay was based on the girls I went to high school with that stayed in my home town, lots of money, never left. Forever judgemental."

Experience: Executive producer, Houston Knights (CBS); executive producer, Eddie Dodd (ABC); creator, executive producer, and writer Parker Lewis Can't Lose (FOX); executive producer, Players (NBC); creator, executive producer, and writer, Suddenly Susan (NBC); executive producer and writer, Get Real (FOX); executive producer and writer, Boomtown (NBC); executive producer and writer,Dexter (Showtime); executive producer and writer,Nurse Jackie(Showtime)

Advice: "Read everything. Read the classics, read the novels that are out now. Understand viscerally the way three-act drama works. Read Aristotle. Know it so that it becomes second nature. Then get your foot in the door any way you can. You can be in grad school and have written the best script ever written, but it will be almost impossible to get it read if you aren't inside the business. You have to get in the room.

"I hadn't really wanted to work in TV, originally. I was doing graduate work in California in English, teaching English classes. One summer I needed a job. When you live in New York and you need a job, you wait tables or drive a cab. In California, if you need some money you go on a game show. I went on Split Second, a Jeopardy-type show, and wound up writing questions and answers for the show. That got my little toe in the door of show business. It allowed me to network and meet other young assistants.

"I wound up meeting with the kings of television movies back in the day, Rick Rosenberg and Bob Christiansen, and they gave me a job reading scripts. They liked what I was doing, and offered me a job as a secretary. I turned it down and went back to grad school, though they continued to give me scripts to read. Eventually I realized I wanted to work in television and took the job. From there, I worked on TV movies, started making pilots, was a showrunner—that led me to where I am now, at Nurse Jackie.

"Eventually, Dexter came along. Showtime gave me a call, asking me to take a look at a pilot that was just made that needed a showrunner. I did that show for the first four years, then left to come back to Connecticut to be with my family. Then I moved to Nurse Jackie.

"We're in a new golden age of television. The real golden age was Max Shulman and Paddy Chayefsky in the '50s and early '60s. This new golden age is about cable television. Because they aren't beholden to advertisers, premium cable especially, they've shaken up the monotony of the '80s and '90s. I'm most proud of my work on the fourth year of Dexter. We hit our stride and made one of the best years of television ever."