As animation budgets continue to shrink and writers’ rooms become less common, writing teams face unique issues. This was the impetus for writing partners Becky Wangberg and Sarah Eisenberg to start the Writing Teams Subcommittee for TAG’s Writers’ Craft Committee. “There’s confusion about how teams should be compensated,” says Wangberg. “We’ve also found that a lot of people still don’t understand how writing teams work or what value they bring as opposed to hiring two unattached writers.” Here, TAG writing teams answer the most common questions about their job.
What’s your writing process as a team?
Susan & Tilly: Tilly usually does the first draft, then Susan does a big edit, and then we take turns revising back and forth until we’re both happy with it.
Michael & Jeannette: Jeannette writes the first word, Michael the second. Jeannette writes the third, Michael the fourth. And so on… More seriously, we take turns story editing one another, we alternate who gets the first pass at scripts to keep things fresh, and we take turns trying to make one another laugh.
Sarah & Becky: When cracking ideas, we both ideate individually before coming together and talking it all through. Then we write together in the same room. Once we have a strong outline, we split it up. Then we come back together again, find issues, and punch it, which makes for a stronger first pass.
Why should a Showrunner hire a writing team?
Drew & Jacob: I think of a writing team as a little joke factory. There’s already such a shorthand within a team that they can quickly start pumping out jokes.
Alan & Greg: Listen, everyone bemoans how writers’ rooms are pretty much nonexistent now that the industry has moved to this all-freelance model. With a team, instantly a story-breaking session becomes a mini writers’ room. There are more voices, more weird takes, more laughs confirming if a line is actually funny or not. It just makes this whole thing we do more collaborative.
Christopher & Ben: We believe the most important thing anyone can bring to series production is the ability to clearly express the intention behind decisions. Hiring writing teams for your staff is an investment in the communication of your story to the rest of the team. Writing teams have built the muscle of communicating between each other while they workshop their ideas and scripts. They’re not just bringing that to the writers’ room, but also to production meetings, storyboard handouts, voice records, and even the edit bay.
How does working together make your writing stronger?
Alan & Greg: We’ve found that, when writing and editing solo, it’s easy to lose all confidence in what we’re doing. Does this suck? Is that line hacky? Does any of it work? Who even am I? But, when you’ve got someone else working with you—confirming what’s working, stress-testing the story, and challenging your hackiest instincts—by the time we’ve finished our first draft as a team, it’s more like the quality of a third draft of solo writing.
Susan & Tilly: Each of us has strengths where the other has weaknesses, and our drafts have to make both of us happy before anyone else sees it, which means it’s more refined before it goes out than work by a single writer with no outside feedback would be.
Christopher & Ben: We keep each other honest, call out weak spots in the story, and always come in with ideas and the energy to dig deeper in order to find the best possible version of the story. The work we put in at the beginning of the process to slowly and painfully build a strong foundation gives us the ability to move fast later on. We know why we’re writing this project, we know what we want to feel from experiencing the story, and we let that be our North Star as everything else starts to fall apart, which it all inevitably does at some point. Best of all, when a scene or sequence or arc does fall apart on one of us, the other is usually ready to jump in and take their own pass. Plus, because we’ve been writing together for over 15 years, we can say things like “that isn’t funny enough,” and we don’t take it personally. We just get to work.
What was your meet-cute?
Michael & Jeannette: The year was 2307… we were the last surviving writers in a world where the profession was long but destroyed. We were chosen to travel back in time to 2026 to change the tide of the industry and keep writing alive by being a part of a monumental article in Keyframe magazine… But for the mission to be successful, we knew our odds of surviving would only increase if we joined forces as writing partners.
Drew & Jacob: We met in college and hated each other. Years later in L.A. we started working together. (Still hate each other.)
Sarah & Becky: We met on the first day moving into our dorms at Chapman. We lived a few doors down from each other, and we were fast friends who went to Disneyland together every week. After graduating, we moved in together and started working on our own pilot. The rest is history!
