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Q&A: TV Showrunners Dawn Prestwich & Nicole Yorkin on 30 Years As a Writing Team
Consider this a masterclass on leadership, creative collaboration, and surviving Hollywood
I’ve been a professional screenwriter for more than fifteen years, an experience that has been both creatively satisfying and spectacularly lonely. Every single time I sit down in front of my computer, it’s just me and an empty white screen. No one else knows what goes into every word I wrestle onto the page, the decisions behind them, why they mattered to me. This isn’t the case with all writers, of course. There is a small percentage of us who opt to write in partnership with others. Most of these writing teams do so intending to build a long-term relationship together — such as and , who have been writing as such a team for thirty-three years.
I first met Dawn and Nicole at a Starbucks in Brentwood to discuss a television series I’d created that NBC had recently greenlit. They were part of the writing staff of “The Killing” at the time, which itself was enough to get me excited about sitting down with them — I was a big fan of their work on the series — but it was really who they were as human beings that grabbed me during that first sit-down. For reasons it’s not my place to discuss, they passed on the…
