MSCL.com

I came out and met with Ed and it was right when he was developing with Winnie Holzman and Marshall Herskovitz the pilot for My So-Called Life. The timing actually worked out to be really great because even though I didn’t have a job right away, I got to meet Winnie Holzman, and when they were shooting the pilot I got to be on set and meet all the actors. It was really sort of like my graduate school, as well as my first job as a writer.

I've learned a lot of great things from Winnie Holzman. I've had a weird career, where I got my first job on My So-Called Life and I was a staff writer or story editor on that show. There were only eighteen episodes of that show and the next show I did was Relativity, which I created. I sort of had this weird leap from being a baby writer to being a show-runner in no time flat. I learned a tremendous amount from Winnie. I was very lucky in that there was a relatively small writing staff on My So-Called Life. Winnie would pull me in when she was rewriting scenes and have me work with her. Sometimes I think she was doing it really just so she would stay awake, but she didn't say that to me. She said she really wanted my input. I've learned so much in a relatively short amount of time from Winnie, just in terms of what the potential is for writing for TV, what you can do with characters, how emotional and honest something can be. It was a really remarkable first job to have and probably changed the course of my career and my future in ways that I still don't quite even comprehend.