Susanna Fogel and David Iserson on Breaking In, Endurance, and the Reality of a Writing Life

For screenwriters of all levels, the film and television industry is often imagined as a neat sequence of milestones: getting read, getting staffed, selling a script, and moving steadily upward. The reality, as screenwriters Susanna Fogel and David Iserson describe it, is anything but that.

In a comprehensive conversation about their careers, Fogel and Iserson deconstruct the notion of a clear, linear career path and replace it with something more honest: a feelance profession defined by volatility, emotional recalibration, and constant reinvention. Their stories offer a grounded account of what it actually means to build and sustain a life as a screenwriter in Hollywood.

The “Breaking-In” Moment – Getting Paid To Write

Susanna Fogel:  I had a writing partner at the time called Joni, that I worked with from ages 22 to 32, just a few years before I met and started working with David. He and I both had spent five years in these demeaning temp and assistant jobs. I was an assistant to an executive, and then for years I was temping just because I wanted to have more time to write.

I temped at a hedge fund and a lingerie company. One day we had written a script and it got leaked to the assistants of Hollywood and ended up on the first year The Blacklist, which I’m sure a lot of screenwriters know about. At the time it wasn’t a thing.

A few months later we were hired to write a teen dance movie in the tone of the script that had been on The Blacklist for the now defunct MTV Films, a division of Paramount.

It was then swallowed up by another competing teen dance movie that Paramount Proper was making based on a article. It was a Footloose style thing. We worked with the late, wonderful, iconic producer Lynda Obst.

We were both broke mid-20s, but it was an incredible day. We thought now everything’s going to be easy, which we were wrong about. But it was easier for a little while.

David Iserson: I worked as a receptionist and an assistant at a production company at Miramax.

I came out to LA to write, but those jobs are all-consuming. I was reading a lot of scripts, but I found that I had no time to write. I was at this fork in the road where I could stick at this, work in development, work for a producer, but I was never going to have time to write.

I quit that job, and out of fear, I wrote my first good screenplay since college. For quite a while, I was trying to get people to read it. That script also ended up in an early Blacklist, but it didn’t get made.

Then I was bouncing around in PA and assistant jobs and short-lived TV shows. I met a staff writer on one of the two TV shows I worked on. I was getting lunch and coffee for a wonderful writer and showrunner named J.J. Philbin. She put me in touch with her boyfriend, who is now her husband, who is the very famous, successful, showrunner, Mike Schur. But then he was an SNL writer who was, was running Weekend Update. And through Mike Schur, I was able to “fax in,” Weekend Update jokes.

I could write five jokes, and then maybe ten, and it expanded. When you get a joke on, if you are a freelancer, you get a check in the mail for $100, at that point from Tina Fey, which is really exciting. I put that check on the wall.

Planning A Career Where There Is No Plan

Susanna Fogel: One of the things about being a screenwriter is there is no career trajectory. You enlist a great therapist to help you try and figure that out over the course of many decades and never quite get an answer.

It is such a rollercoaster. I’ve been writing professionally for almost twenty years. I have become zen about it in the sense that I’ve seen all versions of success and non success.

There’s a sameness to it. After a while, the norm is the lack of predictability. You’re definitely going to have to self-soothe through the moments of instability. I kept my overhead really low, financially speaking. I lived in hovels for years longer than I needed to because there’s no job security and everything’s freelance project to project.

I think anxiety about being able to support yourself is so all consuming and the stress really interferes with the creative process.

The only way you can get out of a hole is to write yourself out of it. If you’re a writer you have to network, meet people, and keep producing material. It’s the only way you can get out of it in terms of having something to sell and emotionally insulate yourself from a feeling of panic.

If you can get into a writing zone, that’s a good place to be. It can keep you sane.

Then once you’ve had enough of a consistent incoming work, you feel you can make a small upgrade in your lifestyle, then you do it. But if you do it before, I’ve just seen it go awry more times than I’ve seen it work out.

The other thing is I think really important and what led to this partnership with David and to this show Ponies, is to really nurture your community with other writers, because a rising tide lifts all boats. People get hired, they hire each other, but also to have people to bear witness to the insanity, vent about it and take walks.

So many creative partnerships that have led to paying jobs have come from those walks, coffees and dinner parties, like the one where I met David.

David Iserson:  I think you have to make your expectations on every project as you’re starting it. If you can meet those expectations, then you can’t be disappointed at the next step.

If you are a new writer and your goal for this script is to get representation off of work towards that. If you get a rep, your expectations are met, even if it’s a bad experience or it doesn’t get made.

You have to try to make peace with your expectations going into it, because there will always be a goal which you are not reaching that you can be disappointed in.

The disappointment is going to be a piece of everything and you have to embrace it even if something wonderful is happening. You have to be thinking about what the next thing that you are going to do to it I mean, I think that writers spend a lot of time thinking about how to break in and less time thinking about how to sustain a career.

I think sustaining a career is a lot about pushing through really hard times and understanding that it is not an arc upwards. It is a constant up and down in which you are starting over and over again all the time.

That is something that you just have to train your brain to deal with because there is not a version of this career where success begets success. You can mentally and emotionally feel good about your work, but you must understand that almost everything is not going to end up the way you want it to.

That is how you can reach some sort of peace and embrace the good moments – the successes.

I speak to a lot of writers who hate writing. I am not that. Certainly a lot of the politics of writing I do not like. A lot of like the notes process I do not like. But I enjoy writing.

Redefining Success Over Time

Susanna Fogel: There’s different chapters where you define success differently. The first chapter is if you can get paid to write. I’m able to work and get paid at the thing I love to do, but I am rediscovering things I’m passionate about and not necessarily asking if it is or isn’t commercial.

I’m rediscovering authentically things about writing and I don’t know whether they’ll get made or not. But even the fact that I’ve opened that portal up in my brain is really exciting because you really get into this treadmill of staying afloat.

Iit’s hard to to take a step back and ask what do I feel like writing about. Forget what the agents will think or what comes of it. Recently I’ve just felt pretty inspired writing. When I don’t feel inspired, it’s pretty depressing.

David Iserson: I pay for my life and the life of my family by doing something creative. That was all I hoped to be able to do, growing up and in college. And that is success.

[More: Ponies: How Susanna Fogel and David Iserson Turned Cold War Espionage Into a Modern Story of Female Friendship]

by Staff Writer

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