Transcript: 'I'm Working on a Cancer Comedy'

Rob Long on the writer's curse of turning every conversation into a pitch

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

When I was in film school, we used to have to present a few pages every week of our script in progress, to be, I guess the phrase is "workshopped" by the rest of the class.

Once, after I have presented my pages, there was a long pause.

"Anyone want to say something?" asked the professor.

"I like it," said a classmate, hesitatingly.

"Yeah, I like it too," agreed another.

"But isn't there too much dialogue? I mean, all that talking and talking and talking."

"Well, I guess it's kind of talky," I said.

"You know what this is?" another classmate said, suddenly. "This is television. That's what this is."

It took me quite a long time to realize that this was meant as an insult.

And in a way, it was valid: television does tend to be a little talky. Or, as a highly successful and major-award-winning writer I know puts it, "Television shows, like Shakespeare, rely heavily on dialogue." But then, so does life, really. I mean, most of what we do all day is, we sit, we talk. And so when you're thinking about what might make a good television show, it's a good idea to try to come up with characters and stories that lend themselves to fresh dialogue. And who can deliver that dialogue while sitting.