TV Writer Liz Sarnoff Opens Up: How She Broke In, Career Milestones & Insider Tips for Aspiring Writers

Veteran TV writer Liz Sarnoff with TV writing credits including NYPD Blue, Lost, Barry, and Scarpetta, discusses breaking into the business and shares her thoughts on building a successful career in TV writing.

It all began when she wrote a play which landed in the hands of David Milch who created NYPD Blue. My mother had just died and I was in a time of deep grief and writing, I had to figure out how to live the rest of my life and I didn’t know what I wanted to do.

I hadn’t written anything before so I started writing. I wrote that play because I was in a place of grieving. The questions were very universal. The main question of the play was, how do you move forward after something like this? How do you still live? Are you the same person or a different person who goes forward? What do you do to make life meaningful after you’ve just seen it’s so easy to lose?

The play was filled with stuff like that and I think it intrigued David Milch on a level of not really being about anything necessarily, but about intense feelings. I wasn’t trying to write a spec episode of Will and Grace. I was trying to explore things that were torturing me in the moment and that really appealed to him.

It was an insanely lucky thing. David Milch was doing his first show alone after NYPD Blue and would call me in the morning and say, “I’d be ever so grateful if you’d meet me at the studio.”  It was just me sitting with him daily and it was amazing.

David Milch told me, “I’m gonna hire you, you’re gonna be immensely employable. All I’m gonna ask of you is that you give it to someone else. Once you have it, give it away.”

I studied acting in college, but I never worked as an actor. I never got one job, so I stopped doing it by the time I was 25. So writing was a new pursuit for me. It was a case of, “I’m gonna do this and then it’s never really gonna amount to anything.”

David Milch

Evolution Of Writing Approach

And as soon as we were doing that show, I realized it’s just a mindset. It really is a mindset because you feel outside until you’re inside. It’s the feeling of being outside a lot of the time that inhibits a lot of people from moving forward.

If you stick with the work, it’s not an alien thing anymore. That was all I did. I always wanted to write. So, I just wrote.

If you look at life as this experience as humans, as something that’s for our learning, and for our betterment, you tend to have a better time with it than if you feel stuck in something that you did not choose. Once I started writing, it was such a gift that I could do this for a living, having done 35 years of jobs I didn’t like before that. It put me in a place where I lived a much more grateful and considered life.

And I grow with it. Writing is a very growing thing, particularly if you stay with it and really take it on. Write every day, get up every morning and write something. That for me has been the savior of this life for me in a lot of ways.

Neil Cross

Planning A Career

Well, you know, you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans. So, I don’t plan anything, really. I’ve always done whatever seemingly came next. I’ve rarely pursued projects.

I’ve tried to let things come that felt right. I never took any jobs because I thought the show was going to be a hit. It was always what am I going to learn at this job? I knew from David Milch I was going to learn a lot. I had worked with Damon Lindelof before Lost and I knew how to tell a story pretty much better than anyone I knew. I went to Lost because I thought there’s so much more I can learn from him about storytelling, real storytelling.

I took a job on a show Crossbones, because I wanted to talk to Neil Cross about Luther. Mostly I took jobs because I felt like I was getting a second schooling. It was always important to me that the showrunner was somebody that I really felt I could learn a lot from.

That dictated my decision making as I went along. I was never in a rush to have my own show. I looked at it as a massive education.

It’s the same reason why I took Barry. I met Bill Hader and I thought, this guy’s a genius and I’m going to learn all this great stuff from him. And it’s a comedy, which I’ve never done. And it’s going to be amazing. And it was. I learned almost more from Bill than anybody.

And all of these things are what allow you to be able to embrace your own project. But a lot of the times in our business, people get shows when they don’t have a lot of experience. Screenwriting is a career where the mentorship is everything.

Bill Hader

[More: Liz Sarnoff Reveals Inside Scarpetta]

Defining Success

For me, it’s just that I’m writing every day and I like what I’m writing. I can’t ask for more than that.

I really love the show Scarpetta. I really love these books. I knew that they would hold me.

If you don’t love a thing, don’t write a pilot because, you know, I’m five years into Scarpetta and the show hasn’t aired yet. So, you’re going to sit in the silence a lot when you do these things. And you have to be happy writing.

I do the production because I have to. But the writing part of it, I could sit all day and write these stories. I love these characters. We have the Patricia Conrnwell books, which to me is a great benefit.

There’s a lot of writers who don’t write and they say they’re writers. David Milch got up every day and sat in front of his monitor and wrote. That was all he really cared about. It was a good day if he did that.

So, whenever people tell me they’re trying to get on a show because it’s popular, it’s a disaster waiting to happen. You have to go where you really feel you can be used well.

You have to be also working on something where you’re willing to spend your time learning everything about it before you write anything. A lot of writers just want to write something. They don’t really want to learn something. Particularly in pilot writing, it has to be the thing that you know better than anyone else. Why are you doing it? That really speaks to a lot of art.

by Staff Writer

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