Write On

I kind of feel bad for America’s children, kind of. You see, growing up in my house, the evening news was a given, five nights a week. Dinnertime was always 5:30 P.M. You had to be home, no questions asked. If you were late, you had better have a really good excuse. On school nights, dinner was followed by homework, while starting at 6:00 P.M. my father would commandeer the television to watch the local and national news. At the time, we had four options, and one was PBS in really poor quality.

Writing this makes me realize how much of my youth involved being forced to watch something I did not choose. I am the youngest of nine, which topped out at seven living in the house at the same time during my formative years. I could tell you anything that was happening on Dallas or Knots Landing. I knew who Luke and Laura were and understood when my mother and sisters would talk about them as if they were neighbors. However, when it came to real TV drama, you had to look no further than the news.

My first memories include the much-talked-about clumsiness of President Gerald Ford and the 900-plus people drinking the
“Kool-Aid” in Guyana. The latter, of course, being the image most burned into my brain. I believe at 9 years old, it both frightened and enthralled me. The idea that so many people could let one person direct them to take their own lives was weird and thankfully far away. I don’t recall anyone in my family trying to fully explain the breadth of the scene at the time, but I do remember knowing it was bad.

Throughout the years, my household changed for various reasons and, I should take this moment to point out, never included cable television (to be blamed on my father’s tight wallet). The routine of watching news continued for years to come. I’m sure I didn’t realize then how it was shaping my career path. I learned to be inquisitive. I was even voted biggest gossip in my high school, an honor I wear proudly now as a badge of my journalistic abilities but at the time completely mortified me.

Once I hit college and started hanging around those crazy folks who had CNN and Headline News, I was love-struck. I said, “That’s my calling,” and immediately changed my major from secondary education, never looking back. When they brought the first Gulf War into our living rooms—well, not mine but someone else’s—I was smitten.

I know it makes me sound somewhat old, but here’s why I worry about the kids today. There are so many choices on television. If you meet a family that doesn’t have cable, you’d give them the stink eye. There are few families that sit down and have dinner together and then turn on the TV the way we used to.

Every time a big event happens, e.g., September 11, those of us in the industry think, Well, this is going to change things for good. It wasn’t long afterward that we returned to doing stories about fallen starlets stumbling drunk out of limos with no knickers on and waterskiing squirrels. I blame the attention span brought on by the so-called MTV generation. If I can’t blame that, I have to blame parenting, and if I can’t blame that, I have to blame an oversaturation of “news” on cable TV. It makes me think that someone down the road is going to look back and say, “The first thing I remember seeing on the news is when Lindsay Lohan went to jail.”

Among the many TV ad jingles sadly cluttering my brain since childhood (although useful in trivia contests) is the one that went, “The finest apples from Apple Land/Make Mott’s Apple Sauce taste grand!”

A branchful of the juicy, singing fruit would belt it out at the end of commercials that urged us to use applesauce to accompany meats, slather onto bread, spoon on top of ice cream, spackle drywall, you name it.

The Mott’s commercials were especially meaningful where I grew up because we lived in Apple Land — western New York State, not far from the town of Williamson, where workers at a Mott’s factory have been out on strike since May 23rd.

The job action was started by 305 working men and women, members of Local 220 of the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). Whether they win or lose could play a role in determining the future of organized labor — and the vanishing American middle class.

Mott’s purchases between six and seven million bushels of New York apples every year — more than half of all the apples produced in the state — and has gone through a number of acquisitions and consolidations since Samuel R. Mott, a Quaker who made his own apple cider and vinegar, founded the company in 1842.

Today it’s owned by the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group (DPS), based in Plano, Texas. Ever since the takeover, union members claim, the family spirit at the factory that once included an effective worker-management safety committee, Christmas parties, Easter hams and company picnics has been destroyed. Corporate greed, they say, has marched in with a vengeance.

I first met Bruce Beal, Local 220’s recording secretary and a member of its executive board at an AFL-CIO meeting in Albany, NY, last week. (Full disclosure: I’m president of the Writers Guild of America, East, a union affiliated with the AFL-CIO.) We caught up again on the phone, just as he and fellow strikers were seeing off a delegation of members headed out to an informational picket at a Dr. Pepper Snapple facility in Illinois.

Beal said he and the other union workers were shocked when DPS — despite a profit of $555 million on sales of $5.5 billion last year — demanded massive contract concessions; among them, slashing wages by $1.50 an hour, the elimination of pensions for new employees, a 20 percent reduction in their 401K’s and a change in their health plan Beal says would force members to pay out of pocket an additional $6000-8000 a year.

In an official statement playing on the region’s economic hardship, the company declared that, “DPS workers in Williamson enjoy significantly higher wages than the typical manufacturing employee in Western New York… As a public company, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group has a fiduciary responsibility to operate in the best interests of all of its constituents, recognizing that a profitable business attracts investment, generates jobs and builds communities.”

Bruce Beal dismissed the DPS argument as “a line of bull… They don’t give a rip about their employees, just lining their pockets is all they’re concerned with.” He points to Larry Young, the company’s CEO, whose salary has risen 113 percent over the last three years to $6.5 million, and says that workers were told that they were nothing more than a “commodity, like soybeans… When we talked about how the company’s demands would cause our members to lose their homes or have their cars repossessed, they looked right at us and said, ‘You are living beyond your means.’”

Beal says the union has heard that other profitable businesses are discussing the strike and saying that if DPS wins, they, too, will demand massive concessions. But as Local 220’s president Mike LeBerth told The New York Times, “Corporate America is making tons of money — this company is a good example of that. So why do they want to drive down our wages and hurt our community? This whole economy is driven by consumer spending, so how are we supposed to keep the economy going when they take away money from the people who are doing the spending?”

Trucks will now be pulling up to the Mott’s factory gate with this year’s crop. Jim Allen, president of the New York Apple Association, said its members will have to cross the picket line: “When apples are ripe, they have to be harvested, and growers will be delivering this year’s apple crop to the Mott’s plant as usual… It is not done as a sign of support or a gesture of disrespect to either side.”

According to Bruce Beal, “Our fight is with the company and not with the farmers. They have to make a living, too.” He urged anyone interested to go the strikers website, www.mottsworkers.org, for more information or to contribute to their Hardship Fund. Others have suggested a boycott of all of the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group’s products, which also include 7 Up, Hawaiian Punch and Canada Dry.

Meanwhile, DPS refuses to come back to the bargaining table and on Monday, August 30, the workers will mark Day 100 of their strike. Maybe they can get the singing apples from those vintage TV commercials to change their tune and learn some good old-fashioned labor songs. Like the one that asks, “Which Side Are You On?”

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Michael Winship is president of the Writers Guild of America, East, and senior writer at Public Affairs Television in New York City.

One of the things I enjoy most about the industry in which I work is the camaraderie. I have friends, and not just the Facebook kind, with whom I have stayed in touch over the years. Many of them were co-workers of mine, which makes me believe there is something inherently social about the television-news business.

Having not worked in any other field, I can only guess that the amount of imbibing done by news employees tops most others’. In my 20’s, so many nights after the 11 o’clock news were spent at local watering holes, where we would expound upon the day’s events. It is a practice that continued well into my 30’s and pretty much to this day. Conversations went something like this: “I can’t believe I saw that dead guy in the street” or “Can you believe the director punched up that camera at that exact moment?” Much laughter would follow one of these two comments, and it was usually the first.

When you break down the root of said socializing, it is not difficult to determine the source. Our job is depressing. If we’re not writing about kids killed in a fire or murdered teens, we’re writing about politics and fraud (often in the same story). It creates a need for an outlet to blow off steam.

I’ve taken to not watching the news when I can. Weekends are spent ignoring what’s going on in the world locally and nationally. That is, until Sunday when I need to be in the know for the workweek. Vacations often include watching some news, only to judge its production and talent value. I wish I didn’t even care about that, but it’s easy to critique the job you do when it’s done by someone else who is nameless and faceless.

I imagine the same scenario in newsrooms across the country. A shooting on the south side of Chicago, a fatal fire on Cleveland’s east side, a killer on the loose in suburban Reno. After the news every night in all of these towns, the migration happens. People hop in their cars after the show, pull out of the parking lot and meet four blocks away at their spot. In most of these places, the bartender knows the clientele. Drinks are had, some laughs are shared and eventually everyone goes home.

There are many nights, before I go to bed, that I find myself wondering why I do what I do. I like to say that no one will live or die based on what they see in the news. There will, however, be people who are deeply saddened by it. That does not usually include those of us who are writing it. We’ve desensitized ourselves to the point where we are unshaken despite knowing we should be.

In the meantime, I will continue to show up when I am scheduled to and continue to mindlessly write stories that someone else will see and say, “That’s awful.” And each night as I fall asleep, I will ask for the strength to do it again tomorrow.

I find technology fascinating but I am also terrified of it.  I didn’t even buy a cell phone until years after all my friends had them. The first two computers I ever owned were hand-me-downs, and I quickly killed both within six months. Basically, I had to ease myself into the idea of the “World Wide Web” and have come to discover, at this point in life, it controls almost everything I do. It may in fact eventually be the demise of my industry.

I would say that I first noticed the impact the Web was having on news when our newsroom stopped getting newspapers delivered. The edict was: Get it online—it’s free. I find this to be somewhat annoying in that we essentially may be contributing to the end of newspaper publishing. What I don’t believe is that the general public understands the effect of reading news online rather than picking up a newspaper or turning on the nightly news, be it local or national.

For the most part, we are the source for the news that everyone is reading online. If you go to any news-based website, you will find stories that are links to already-produced news from TV stations, radio stations and newspapers around the world. Meanwhile, the revenue streams for all three continue to dry up because people are no longer tuning in and are instead getting the info they want, customized to their needs, online. Most advertisers are following them. Do you see where this is going?

Let’s pretend that all the TV stations in America stop news operations and newspapers go away because there is no money coming in. Where, then, will most of the news you read online come from? You would be hard-pressed to find any source remaining that is not creating its own stories. Therefore, your news is no longer the journalism that we’ve all come to know, the kind that has been shaping this country for centuries and has been held to ethical standards that today’s Internet is not.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe the damage at this point is beyond repair. I don’t even believe that a disappearance of the concept of journalism will happen in my lifetime. Perhaps if the backers of news were to invest in doing it right online, we could all ride this wave together. I don’t see that happening until someone realizes the amount of money invested in new media needs to be the handled the way television was in its early days.

I will now e-mail this to someone who will post it to a website that I will be able to share with my friends via Facebook. Later I will look at it on my cell phone, which has become pretty much anything but a phone.

Interestingly enough, I started in this crazy business on a technical path. I worked as a shooter and editor in my first job out of college and eventually as a TD, director, chyron op, stagehand, studio camera, boom operator, graphic designer and (please God, never again) a master control operator. Why do I bring you this short history lesson? I’ll get to that.

After holding my various jobs in news production, I eventually slipped, somehow, into the journalism side of things, producing for the CBS affiliate in Youngstown, Ohio. We were number one for murders in the mid to late 90’s, hooray! Gang warfare, Mafia warfare, you name it. It made the job very easy. The old, if it bleeds it leads concept. But I didn’t like it. I was hell bent on changing the world! I wanted more positive news, less negative. I impressed my friends and family. They would say “Oh wow, you are a news producer. How cool”. And it was, for a while at least. Then the fight got old and I, like any good producer, needed a change. So I moved on and eventually landed in New York City.

Flash forward or in this case scroll through the years. I held onto my technical know-how along the way, by doing the jobs that I could when not in a union shop. When I ended up with a union gig, I was disappointed that I couldn’t touch the machinery. It took getting yelled at a few times, by someone jaded and in the business for decades, for me to learn. Although I still have issues with the “you can touch this deck but not that one” mentality.

Here’s where I revert to the beginning. All these years later as we see the diminution (it annoys me that I just used this word) of the local news business, my earlier skills are coming back as a blessing. Across the country, TV stations are changing the way they do things. In the once union heavy market of NYC, where I used to get my knuckles smacked with a ruler for touching eject, I am now editing on a desktop. Companies looking for new ways to save money are beating down IATSE and NABET which in turn is forcing the writers and producers to do more with less. I consider myself one of the lucky ones. I have an eye for shooting, when it eventually comes to that and I am sure it will, and I have an eye for editing. I’m now in a shop where producers and writers make their own graphics and we’re not the only newsroom in the number 1 market that is doing so.

I suppose the end result after 18 years is that I am forced to embrace the changes. I hear the scripted phrase “lucky to have a job”, over and over again. I get it. I am lucky to have a job. I am not lucky to be in a position where I am now not only critiqued on the content and writing of a news show, but on the look of it as well. When I made my transition I expected to be judged on writing ability and producing know-how. Now I hear “that video didn’t match the script, what happened?” Or, “that graphic didn’t work with the story”. In essence, the job of a News Writer is becoming quite blurred and the actual writing of it is not the main focus anymore. I’ll expound on that in a later entry. That is unless I find a brand new career between now and the next time I sit down to write one of these.
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Patrick Mason works as a Producer for WNYW FOX 5. Most recently as a producer for Good Day New York. He previously worked as a producer and copy editor for WWOR My 9 and News 12 New Jersey.

More than 40 Guild members learned how to perpetrate ATM and art fraud. No, it wasn’t some Fagin-like school for criminals, but rather, “FBI 103: A Seminar for Script and Screen Writers” presented by the WGAE and WGAE Foundation, along with the FBI Office of Public Affairs. After passing advance background checks and being screened through on-sight metal detectors at the agency’s Manhattan office, the writers learned about procedures and operations from some of the FBI’s top operatives working in Corporate/Securities Fraud, Cyber Crime, Gang Squad and The Art Theft and Jewelry and Gem Theft divisions of the Major Theft Squad.

Not only did the special agents discuss how their departments worked and answer questions, but many of them also shared, and occasionally pitched, interesting case stories. Austin Berglas, of Cyber Crimes, explained the elaborate workings of a major Eastern European backed American ATM fraud case. Dan McCaffrey, the former head of Tiffany’s security, and now an agent dealing with Gem and Jewelry Theft, discussed the extensive crimes of the former 47th Street jeweler, Joel Spigelman. Art Crimes agent Jim Wynne illustrated his talk by bringing in actual forged paintings from FBI cases, as well as the fake provenances which were used to try and authenticate them.

This interesting and informative seminar was obviously beneficial to the many screenwriters researching and writing FBI related projects, but WGAE members learned that this exchange was also important to the Bureau. Our hosts explained that ever since the G-Man days of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI has been concerned with the image or “brand” it presents to the world. If society sees the FBI in a positive light, citizens are more likely to aid agents in their work fighting crime. The FBI representatives explained that while they knew that not all fictional portrayals of their organization would be accurate, they hoped that WGAE writers would depict them positively, as the hard working protectors they are.
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Bonnie Datt is a comedy writer for animation, television, print, stage and the web.

I’m amazed by the questions I’m asked when I tell someone I write for a soap opera.  What’s surprising is that they’re almost always the same questions and never questions I was asked when I wrote for prime time.  The first is, “How far in advance do you write?”  For producers, the answer would probably be, “Not far enough.”  For writers, it’s, “Too far.”  The time between writing the breakdown (the outline from which a script is written) and the air date varies a little from show to show, but generally it’s 10 to 12 weeks.  Producers like as much time as possible to handle the business of putting together a show. But with that much lag time, writers may introduce a new character and write for him or her for nearly three months before ever seeing them on the air.  I’m not sure why this subject piques people’s curiosity, but that’s my cocktail party answer.

The second question is, “How do you come up with the stories?”  The short answer is, “Every way conceivable.”  Some stories are inspired by news items – a returning soldier coping with post-traumatic stress disorder, a governor hiding his homosexuality, a woman dealing with infertility and surrogacy.  Some stories come from the characters themselves.  Bringing back a character who was once in love with a woman now married to his brother … well, you can see the possibilities.  In some cases the source is literary – take, for example, the story of a power hungry assistant convincing his boss that his wife is having an affair, leading to tragedy.  Does the name Othello ring a bell?

The most common and most baffling question I get is, “So, do you just write for one character and one storyline?”  I have no idea how this myth started but I wish I had a nickel for every time someone asked.  I’ve tried to wrap my head around how it would work.  Imagine that “my character” is a young woman, Mireille.  The story I’m writing is about her search for the man who killed her sister.  An associate is writing for Rico, a doctor finding the courage to love again after a painful event in his past.  A meeting between these characters might go something like this:

MIREILLE
It was you all along!  My sister loved you, she trusted you, but all you ever wanted was to take over
the company.  You killed her, I know that now!  And so do the police.

RICO
Will you marry me?

Actually, everyone on the team of writers for a daytime serial writes for every character in every story.  On any given day there can be three or more overlapping stories and twelve or more characters whose lives intertwine.  Writing for only one character … well, I think that’s called a monologue.
Lately, the question I’m most often asked is, “Will soap operas survive?”  When I started writing for daytime, doom and gloomers told me soap operas would be dead in five years.  That was fifteen years ago.  Granted, there are far fewer soaps now than there were then.  Women are out working, the target audience isn’t home during the day, and with a DVR, it’s no longer necessary to be home when a show airs. There’s competition from hundreds of cable channels.  It’s a rough time for the daytime industry.  But the numerous blogs and websites devoted to soaps, the magazines for daytime viewers and the fan mail we get tell me people still love their shows.  They want continued drama.  They want soap operas.  But that doesn’t answer the question.  When people ask if soaps will survive, I can only say, “I sincerely hope so.”

Some years ago, a Peruvian man who heard I wrote for “One Life to Live” told me he’d learned English by watching the show.  When I started studying Spanish a few years ago, I decided to follow his lead and reinforce my Spanish lessons by watching a telenovela.

I began my foray into this literally foreign territory with a show called “Mundo de Fieras” (“World of Wild Ones”) because it was just beginning and aired at a convenient time in the evening.  I confess I understood very little dialogue in the premiere episode – ¡Ay, caramba! They talked fast! – but I was basically able to follow what was happening on screen.  It was about a struggle between twin brothers (I guessed the smiling one with a loving family was good and the snarling one with the eye patch was evil), and about their love for two women (I supposed the brunette leaving a convent was good and the one with the heavy eye makeup and the long curly blonde extensions was evil). Within a couple of weeks I’d picked up some useful vocabulary, like the oft-repeated embarazada.   I wondered why one female character was constantly embarrassed, and why everyone else kept talking about her embarrassment until I understood that embarazada means “pregnant.”  I wasn’t learning quite as much Spanish as I’d hoped, but I was getting an education.  Though I knew telenovelas differed from American soap operas in that they aired for a finite time, generally six to nine months, and so progressed toward a predetermined conclusion, I discovered that the differences go far deeper.

Perhaps the biggest difference is that while American soaps are struggling to keep their audience, telenovelas are watched by an estimated two billion people in a hundred countries.  What makes these shows so wildly successful?  From what I can tell by having now watched several different telenovelas, they’re pretty predictable; the star-crossed lovers introduced in the first episode will get together in the last, the villain will be punished.  The “good” characters will find their faith in God rewarded, the comic couple will marry.  There will be some public service message, like on one episode of “Destilando Amor” when every character recycled his or her trash in appropriate bins (yes, seriously).  Why, then, do viewers not only faithfully watch each episode of one telenovela but excitedly anticipate the premiere of the next one?  Is it just a cultural phenomenon?  Is it the structure of the telenovela itself, Dickensian in nature, a serialized drama with a satisfying ending?  Is it seeing the same actors in different roles – a chaste heroine in one show transformed into a murderous vixen in another?  (For example, actor Maurice Benard going from mob boss Sonny Corinthos on “General Hospital” to priest on a new show.)   Is it that telenovelas air not only in the daytime, but also in the evening, when there’s a greater audience at home to watch, both male and female?  Is it the variety these shows offer – one show may be a period piece, one a gritty urban drama, one a bodice-ripper romance?  And is it something American television producers can co-opt?

I don’t have the answer to any of these questions, but as the American soap opera continues to struggle for survival, I think the producers of daytime television might be wise to look toward their cousins south of the border and study the secret of their success. As for me, I’m looking for the next telenovela to watch.  Bit by bit, my Spanish is improving.  But some things need no translation.  Whether it’s an American soap or a telenovela, if two characters are simultaneously embarazadas, there’s a 100% chance those babies are going to get switched.

Eden.  Jax.  Greenlee.  Markko.  Soap opera names; exotic, outrageous, sometimes unforgettable enough to find their way into mainstream American life.  How many 28 year-old Lukes and Lauras do you think there are today?  If you search the internet for baby names, you’ll find tons of websites devoted to soap opera names.

Choosing the right name for a character on a TV show is critical.  It helps define the character’s personality.  The name Slade suggests danger whereas Joey sounds like your good buddy.  Mary’s probably a sweet girl, but Jezebel’s trouble.  When you add someone new to a forty-year old soap opera with a history of roughly 1,000 characters over the years, coming up with an original name can be a challenge.  Over the years, I’ve found my own ways to meet it.  Sometimes I name characters to honor people in my own life.  On One Life to Live, lawyers Alex Cody and Morgan Guthrie were named for my sons.  Their high school directory has provided names like Margay and Grayson and Asher.  For their school’s charity fundraiser, I used to auction off the right to have a one-shot under-five character named for the highest bidder.  When the last winner gave me a really hard time because she didn’t like her namesake’s characterization (even the audience has divas), I abandoned the practice.

Friends and family get a kick out of having their name loaned out to a television character and I’ll confess to some subtle brown-nosing by occasionally naming characters for my children’s schoolteachers.  It wasn’t easy to work names like Ms. Takenaga and Ms. Kasarjian into shows, but it was worth it.

There’s a game in which you can come up with your own soap opera name by combining your middle name with the name of the street you grew up on.  My soap name would be Margaret Huron, not a bad name for a character.  Of course, city dwellers might end up with names like Jake 68th Street or Brianna Central Park West, but it’s still fun.  Try it.

The most baroque way I ever named characters was via a surreptitious game I played with a fellow writer at Another World who by chance had noticed that in several cases if you combined one character’s name with another, they formed the name of a Major League baseball player.  For example, we had a Gary and we had a Carter … hence, catcher Gary Carter.  We had a Joe and a Morgan which together formed second baseman Joe Morgan.  Albert plus Belle made outfielder Albert Belle. Knowing I’m a rabid baseball fan, he shared his observation with me. The next time I had to name a character, I mischievously did so with this in mind, naming him Frank to go with an extant character Thomas, wondering if my co-writer would notice.  He did, and then one-upped me, calling someone Jim to go along with a Palmer already on the show.  Not to be outdone, I made sure our Paul could be paired with a new character, Blair.  No one else knew what we were up to and we kept up this name game for about a year when my partner in crime left Another World for a different show, but not before introducing a Professor Dawson as a companion to a character named Andre.

To my knowledge, the fans never figured out where our inspiration came from.  Despite the private intrigue, we always maintained the integrity of the show and the names we created had to work on their own.  To the audience, the characters are people, their names integral parts of who they are. And if people are naming their children for characters I write for, if there are Hannahs and Dorians and Reeds and Sierras out there because people heard those names on their soaps, I’m proud.  Almost as proud as I am of the “A’s” my kids got from Ms. Takenaga and Ms. Kasarjian.

The day I killed Ryan, I started to live again.

The year leading up to the fatal shooting was the most trying time of my life.  The prime time show I’d been writing for was cancelled and the movie I’d been contracted to write scrapped.  The production company with whom I had a development deal shut down and for the first time I was unemployed.  My personal life was worse.  My father had a stroke, a close friend was dying, and my husband abruptly left me for another woman.  My life had become, well, a soap opera.

My heart broken, my pride wounded, my bank account dwindling, I poured out my heart to a friend who was an executive with NBC Daytime.  She responded with what seemed an absurd non sequitur, “Have you ever thought of writing for daytime?”  I laughed, “You mean, a soap?”  She explained that NBC was looking for new blood for their daytime division and thought I might be good for them.  At another time in my life, I would have rejected the idea out of hand. A soap opera?  The genre of baby switches and evil twins?  Where people came back from the dead?  Really?  I’d written for prime time!  I’d had films produced!  I had theater credits!  But now I was a single mom, the sole support of two pre-school aged children and I needed a job.

Prior to that day, I’d never even seen a soap unless I’d passed one on the dial on the way to a PBS station – a snob with no firsthand knowledge of the field.  Still, I accepted an assignment to write a few sample stories for “Another World” and I had to start watching the show.  The first day, I had trouble keeping the characters and the three or four storylines straight.  The next day there was some overlap, but also different characters and other stories.  In a week, I’d seen all the characters in the concurrent stories … and I was hooked.  I wanted to know if the evil countess Justine Duvalier (a dead ringer for the saintly Rachel Cory) was really going to wall up her future daughter-in-law in her cellar.  Was Sharlene’s alternate hooker personality going to ruin her chance at love?  And who was stalking the nurses at Bay City General?   In short, I’d gone from being a snob to being a fan.  I got it now.  I understood that a soap opera can have drama, comedy and tragedy all in the space of an hour.  The characters have developed over months and years and have histories and rich and complicated relationships.  They are friends you root for, lovers you wish for, children you worry for, the family you can count on to be there for you day after day.  Soaps are escapism in the purist form.  Watching “Another World” took me away from my own problems.  Writing for it gave me a whole new life.

I wrote my sample stories and was hired as a staff writer for “Another World.”  I was glad to have a regular job and a steady income and I loved inventing stories, loved getting into the heads of characters and taking them on a journey.  I loved being able to stay in New York and have a predictable enough schedule to spend time with my children.  My bad year was over.

Which brings me to Ryan’s murder.  There are certain “special days” on every soap opera, among them weddings, births and the death of a major character.  Within three weeks of my writing for “Another World,” I was entrusted with the shooting of one such beloved character, Ryan Harrison.  It was an important episode and after I wrote it I was informed that my contract had been picked up, that I would be writing for a soap for the next 13 weeks.  That was 15 years ago and I’ve written for daytime dramas without interruption ever since.  Incidentally, Ryan was really dead when I “killed” him.  Unlike many soap opera characters, he did not come back to life.  I am happy to report that I, however, did.

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Shelly Altman currently writes for ABC’s “One Life to Live.”  Prior to her Emmy Award-winning work in daytime television, Shelly wrote extensively for prime time (“Kate and Allie,” “True Blue,” “Katts and Dog,” etc.) and for film (“Sweet Lorraine,” “The Gnomes’ Great Adventure,” “Jewels of Main,” etc.).