First Draft Episode #237: Rebecca Serle
MARCH 3, 2020
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE
Rebecca Serle is a television writer, producer, and New York Times bestselling author of six books, including When You Were Mine , The Edge of Falling, The Dinner List, and her newest, In Five Years, out now. She co-developed the hit TV adaptation of her YA series, Famous in Love.
Sarah Enni: Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Rebecca Serle, television writer, producer and New York Times bestselling author of six books including When You Were Mine, The Edge of Falling, The Dinner List, and her newest In Five Years, out now. She also co-developed the hit TV adaptation of her YA series Famous in Love.
I loved what Rebecca had to say about the dialogue between what is selling and what sparks inspiration in you, the benefit of writing on spec and selling a final product, staying in step with a book, and also I loved her business advice of relying on gut instinct. Everything that Rebecca and I talk about on today's episode can be found in the show notes @firstdraftpod.com.
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Okay, now please sit back, relax, and enjoy my conversation with Rebecca Serle.
Sarah Enni: Okay. Hi Rebecca, how are you?
Rebecca Serle: Hi, I'm so good. I'm so happy to be here. How are you?
Sarah Enni: I'm so good. I'm so excited you could come over. I'm really excited to ask you a ton of questions about all your work.
Rebecca Serle: Please, please.
Sarah Enni: But before we go there, I want to know about you, so I'd love to hear where you were born and raised.
Rebecca Serle: I love that. I was born in Philadelphia, which is where my mom's from, my dad was a lifelong New Yorker. And we lived on the East Coast for the first ten years of my life, in Philadelphia and then Massachusetts. But we started spending about two months out of the year in Hawaii because my dad had quintuple bypass surgery, open heart surgery, when I was two-and-a-half. And sold his business and kind of revolutionized his life in order to maintain his health. So we started spending periods of the year in Hawaii.
I think finally, when I was about ten or eleven somewhere in the beginning of middle school, my parents just said, "Why do we keep going back to the East Coast? We don't even like it there. We should just live here full time." And they moved us and that's where I grew up and went to middle school and high school.
Sarah Enni: Where in the islands were you?
Rebecca Serle: Maui. So right now it's really great because I can return there for 'quote unquote' family vacation, but it's Hawaii, so it's fantastic. But yes, I grew up in Hawaii.
Sarah Enni: That's so interesting. And wow, you've had a whole range of American experiences then, in all of the cities you've lived in.
Rebecca Serle: Right. So I spent my early years on the East Coast, then went to Hawaii, then I went to college here in LA at USC, and then I went to graduate school in New York. And I was in New York for twelve years, I just moved here full time four months ago.
Sarah Enni: Which don't worry, we're gonna get to that for sure. I'm so interested. So I want to know about reading and writing when you were a kid. Were you really involved in reading? Was that like a big thing for you?
Rebecca Serle: Yes. I actually went to a school called Waldorf School and the learning philosophy is very much that children come to different concepts and different markers of education in their own time. So they don't push reading or mathematics necessarily onto the child. It's more about the child's curiosity towards it. So I didn't really read until I was in like the second grade. And my mom says my dad was saying like, "We have to pull her out, we have to put her in like a proper [school]. This is crazy. She's not reading." And of course cut to it, it worked out pretty okay.
So when I was very young, my father did a lot of reading to me. And he is a reader, has always been a reader, loves books, probably reads about two books a week. So he really introduced me to my love of reading and I fell in love with books early, really with him. And then subsequently on my own. And very quickly after, I figured out what a book was and how to read it. I wanted to, not necessarily make books, but I knew that I wanted to write.
Sarah Enni: Oh, interesting. So those two, the passion arrived like together?
Rebecca Serle: Yes, very, very, very early. Very early for me. I mean, I remember entering writing competitions when I was in elementary school. I was really young. And I'm always very fascinated and curious about writers who come to it later and who have had different careers. There are plenty of people who publish later, but they always sort of consider themselves writers.
I'm very interested in people who don't consider themselves writers and never really had a tremendous amount of interest in it, and come to it later, because to me it's so fundamental to the soul of who I am. It really is the essence of me, I really feel it's how I was born. And even if I were pursuing other careers, it's how I identify myself and it was how I identified myself far before I was ever published.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, yeah. I know it's really interesting, but I'm glad that you felt empowered too. Recognizing that you were reading a book and you were like, "I want to be a part of this."
Rebecca Serle: I didn't know that it was a possibility to do it as a job. That came much later. So I didn't know that I could make money doing it. I didn't know I could make it my life, but I knew I wanted to write stories and I wanted people to read them. I mean, I moved to New York and I didn't really know what an agent was. I feel even in college it was very insulated. I was a creative writing and English major at USC and I love to write.
I was in like their advanced fiction workshop there, and I remember my mentor at the time, Marianne Wiggins (National Book Award finalist Evidence of Things Unseen and The Shadow Catcher, and a professor of creative writing at USC) who's a phenomenal novelist, she taught the advanced fiction writing workshop. I was applying to graduate school where I inevitably ended up going to The New School in New York.
And I remember her saying, "What about no more school. What about just doing it?" I remember thinking, "What does that, what does that mean? She was like, "It means publishing." And no one had ever made clear to me... cause I think in college, so much of being an English major was about studying books of the past.
Really, at that time - at that time, I mean oh my God I'm so old - but it was, it was like thirteen years ago. There wasn't a tremendous amount of emphasis on publishing, and how that works, and what it looks like. And it was a lot about literature and books and appreciation of others.
So it didn't occur to me until much later that I could publish books and I thought I could be a published author.
Sarah Enni: Right. Or that that's where this like passion was gonna take you.
Rebecca Serle: Yes.
Sarah Enni: But it's really interesting that you went to undergrad and were writing the whole time. What were you thinking was gonna happen?
Rebecca Serle: I thought I would move to New York. I would get my masters. I ended up working part-time at Penguin. And then I also was at a literary agency reading the slush pile, and I ended up being an assistant there. But I sort of felt like I would work in publishing. Once I started to get a little bit clearer on how publishing works, I figured I would work in publishing. But originally I thought I would work in magazines.
That seemed in my nascent brain to be the closest thing to writing I could get to, because publishing books seemed insane. I didn't know who did that, but it wasn't me. It wasn't an option. So I thought, "Well magazines." And of course at this point, I think it's harder to work in magazines than it is to get a book published.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I did the same thing though. I went and did journalism as a major because I was like, "Oh, well that's feasible."
Rebecca Serle: It felt tangible in a way. Like, "Oh, you do this and then you do this." So that's more where my head was at.
Sarah Enni: Okay. That makes sense. That's so interesting. But you always knew you were heading to New York?
Rebecca Serle: Yes. Always. Always. That was the one thing I was very clear on is that New York was where I was meant to be. I had fallen in love with the city really, really young. I remember when we used to drive from Massachusetts to Philadelphia to visit our extended family, once we moved to Massachusetts. We would stop through in New York and we would sometimes spend a night there or sometimes see a matinee. It was the highlight of my year.
I loved it. And then I knew I wanted to apply to graduate school, and it was like a collapsing of circumstance that The New School, and NYU, and Columbia were all in New York and it was where I wanted it to be. And I was also very much in love with somebody who already lived there.
Sarah Enni: Oh, that helps! I'd love to hear about The New School. And I read an interview with you where you said that your advice to young writers is to immerse yourself in the industry that you want to be in. And it seems like that was a big part of New York in general. Not only just going to New School and learning about it, but then working at a publisher and an agency. I'd love to just hear about that time. What was it like to learn all the ins-and-outs? And when did you kind of decide to dive in with the first novel?
Rebecca Serle: Yeah, absolutely. I'm starting to do like a little Q&A on Instagram on Sundays and I get a lot of questions about like, "What's your biggest piece of writing advice?" And I really say, "It's to move to New York if you want to work in books or you want to publish books, and it's to move to LA if you want to work in film." I think that proximity is the single biggest factor in success in this business. I think that the reason I'm published is far more, I know the reason I'm published is far more because I was working at a literary agency and I was working at Penguin than it was because I went to The New School.
And that's not a knock on graduate writing programs. And perhaps there is more emphasis on publishing now than there was back then. But I just think having those contacts, getting inside and seeing how the business works, and what pieces are there. When I had a manuscript that I was ready to submit, I knew my agent, my first agent, I knew who she was. She worked at the agency where I interned and I was able to email her and say, "Will you read this?"
So I really think that proximity is paramount if you can get get in that city.
Sarah Enni: It's, it's tough. Right? But publishing's full of people. Just like the entertainment industry here is just full of people that you meet through happenstance, or make friends of friends, and you just are part of a network. That's not a bad word.
Rebecca Serle: No! Yes, absolutely. It's just what it is. We live in a physical reality that moves in large part because of social interaction.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. So up through undergrad and New School, where you pretty much only focusing on short stories?
Rebecca Serle: Yes. Well in college it was all short stories and then in graduate school for the first half. And then somebody gave me the really, really great advice to use the second year of my graduate program and to have my thesis be a novel instead of a short story collection. And I said, "Okay."
So I wrote one. And it's in a drawer where it will remain forever. It was called The Space Between, it should never see the light of day. But I was able to use that time to teach myself. And actually, Sigrid Nunez was my thesis advisor. And I was able to use the time to figure out how to write a book.
Sarah Enni: With help.
Rebecca Serle: With help. I would say it's tricky because I do think for a graduate program it is oftentimes more productive to submit short stories because it's easier for peer critique. When you have a novel, it's harder. You're trying to get large sections, you can't read it all at one time. So I think it's a little bit of a double edged sword. I was very glad that most of the things I submitted to class were short stories. I think it really improved my craft that way.:
But I also think that getting to use the time wisely is key. And I think learning how to write a novel, and try and teach myself in a supportive environment how to do that, was beneficial.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I think that's pretty good advice. If you know, especially going forward, that that's a format that you really want to be in, it's while you're in school. I mean, it's the kind of thing where people leave school and then they look back and they're like, "I had only time to write!"
Rebecca Serle: Exactly. And of course, I think about it now and I'm like, "I had so little time. I was in school, I was interning, I was working, I was doing so many different things." And then I started additionally, on a freelance basis, helping put nonfiction proposals together, which I really loved. I did that for the agency where I worked and it was very satisfying work. And I think if this ever goes south, I would probably pick that up again.
Sarah Enni: Go back to do that?
Rebecca Serle: Yeah, I really enjoyed it. There's something very satisfying about getting to help someone who has something really, really compelling and interesting to say, but who maybe is not familiar with the book in medium.
There's really something very exciting about getting to help them, like usher that into the world. So I really enjoyed that. But anyway, the point is I was doing so many things, now I think about my life is actually probably more relaxed than it was back then. I do think with writing it's true. Like give a busy person something to do and it'll get done.
Sarah Enni: And it'll get done. Yeah, a hundred percent. So, you were interning while school was going on?
Rebecca Serle: Yes.
Sarah Enni: And then worked at Penguin full-time after?
Rebecca Serle: The internship was actually at Penguin. And then I was in school at The New School and then I was working at a literary agency. So the literary agency, it was an internship. And then it was a part time assistantship and then I became an assistant at the agency.
Sarah Enni: Were you an assistant agent?
Rebecca Serle: At the time it was a fledging agency, so it was really just all hands on deck. So it was a little bit of everything. It was really delightful. They're an incredible, incredible agency now. Foundry Literary and Media who represent some of the world's best writers. But yeah, I was kind of their first intern, so it was fun. I got to do a lot of different things and work for a lot of different agents and kind of pitch-hit wherever it was needed.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. It's almost like a start-up environment.
Rebecca Serle: Yeah, a hundred percent it was a startup environment. I mean, really it was a construction site the first year. So they were physically building the offices. They were building the business. So it was fun. It was a very interesting time.
Sarah Enni: So you are trying a novel at the end of the - is The New School just two years?
Rebecca Serle: Two years.
Sarah Enni: Okay. You use your second year to write a novel, then you're working at the agency. Did you ever have thoughts to get that first novel published?
Rebecca Serle: Mmm, this is a really great question. Yeah, I probably [pauses] yes, I had someone read it, but I was trying to edit it to a place where I felt maybe it could be something that I would be comfortable showing someone. And then I got the idea for my first book. And then I think at that point I said, "This is something..." The concept of my first book, it's a young adult novel called When You Were Mine. And it's a modern retelling of Romeo and Juliet from Roslyn's perspective, Romeo's ex.
So it was sort of like, "What if the greatest love story ever told was the wrong one." And I knew that unless I botched it drastically, at the time this is 2010, that was gonna sell. Having worked in publishing, now I had sort of the view from being at Penguin and I had the view from being at the agency and I now had some friends from going to young author drinks nights. Part of the immersed yourself in the business you want to be in. I had a sense of what was happening in YA, and I thought, "Unless I really botch this, I think I could get a book deal."
So I wrote that book and then yes, I reached out to my first agent, an incredible woman named Mollie Glick who had worked at Foundry. And she read it and she loved it. And here we are. But yeah, I think I pivoted once I had that idea from the thesis novel.
Sarah Enni: Was the book that you wrote previous to that, adult or young adult? The first one that you wrote in school.
Rebecca Serle: It was adult.
Sarah Enni: That's so interesting to me.
Rebecca Serle: And I really think, this is not to say I didn't get tremendous pleasure out of my young adult career. I very much did and do. But the space that I'm in now is where I really belong, and it does feel like a return to form in a lot of ways for me.
Sarah Enni: It's really interesting that you kind of took... it's like the loop track or the scenic hike. Right?
Rebecca Serle: Completely. Completely. I know here we are reading magical realist adult novels, which is very much where I started. And actually, a publication wanted me to write a short story that'll be out in a few months, and I was looking up my old short stories that I had. They were the first things I ever had published too, in tiny, tiny, small literary journals. That's another thing I would say. I think there are probably, sadly, literary journals would probably be more so more in 2008, 2009 than they are now, and I think they were probably better funded.
So I don't know the landscape as well as I did back then, but I mean I submitted daily to every tiny publication I possibly could. And most of them, I mean, I think some of them don't exist anymore. But I did everything so that when I had a book I could say, "I was published in the Raleigh Quarterly, I was published..." In whatever they were. I got a lot of satisfaction out of being published, of course.
I was twenty-one, twenty-two and it was all I wanted. So I very much enjoyed that time. Anyway, so I have all these short stories and I was going back and I was looking at them and I thought, "Wow, this is really what I write now." Which I don't know if that's a [chuckles] I guess that means I haven't really improved all that much.
Sarah Enni: No, but I think that's really fascinating because [pauses], I'm just gonna venture to guess. You are an improved writer. It's just kind of coming back to themes or ways of expressing yourself that have always been there. In some ways, I always find it comforting when I go back and read something I wrote a few years ago and I'm like, "Oh, I still like this. This is still something that's interesting to me." I could maybe write it better now, but I'm still the same person.
Rebecca Serle: I love that. I think that's true. And I do feel that about my work. During the Famous in Love chapter of my life, I remember going back, when it ended, and looking at those books and thinking, not that I thought that they were bad or I could have written them better now, but just that I appreciated them. They're a moment in time.
This sounds, I don't know, it sounds kind of... but I like my work! I like the work that I do. And it's not the best work in the world, and I'm not the world's best author, but I enjoy writing a lot. I really do. I very much enjoy it and I enjoy the work I produce. So it's nice to visit it at different eras.
Sarah Enni: I love that. And it is funny to have this bound, complete object that you're like, "Well, that's two years of my life, my creative life. And it exists." It's very powerful to have something like that. Not everyone is lucky enough to have an object like that. It's very romantic.
Rebecca Serle: Absolutely. It's a huge gift.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Let's talk about, forgive me, I was trying to put them in order and it was hard. So When You Were Mine was first. I love that you had that idea and kind of dove in. And I love both that you had this idea, but it was a little bit off of what you'd been doing before, but that you were armed with enthusiasm and knowledge about the industry to give you the confidence to move forward. I think that's a really great example to set, almost, for people who are maybe gonna try to dive in to something.
Rebecca Serle: That's so nice. I hope so. I think there's this idea that in order to be a true artist you need to push aside any of the business area of it, and I've just never subscribed to that. I think that all of the choices that I make in my career are related to what is working in publishing, or working in TV, or working in film. And I don't consider that to be cheap and I don't consider that me selling out. I consider that to be the fact that I am extremely privileged to work in this business, and I want to continue to be able to do it.
So I'm a huge advocate for picking your head up from your page, or your laptop, or your journal and paying attention to what you see happening around you. Because again, like we said about the social interaction, we live in a physical reality where these things matter. So I think arming yourself with that knowledge is really important.
Sarah Enni: And I feel like we put weird virtue on someone going off in the woods and not having any sense of what's going on. And it's like, "Well, that's actually not the kind of person I want to be." And I loved when I talked to Jenny Han about that. She's such a business woman. She's so forthright about it and she writes beautiful books, but she also knows exactly what she's writing. And I loved hearing her talk about that. And I think it's something we can all be honest about.
Rebecca Serle: Yeah. I think what I really want to impart is that you don't have to sacrifice. I've never sat down to write a book that I didn't want to write because I thought it would sell, ever. There's always an energy and a love there. I came up with the idea for When You Were Mine and I was thrilled, I thought, "Oh my God! I Want to write this story. This is like a great love story. I want to tell it." And also, "I think this is a time in which this would sell."
So I wanna be clear. I'm not advocating for putting your creative ambitions aside in favor of what you think will work. Because one thing that really will not work is just chasing the trend. It's a dialogue between those things. It's paying attention, seeing where the energy is, seeing what's working, seeing what's moving then seeing what's lighting you up too. Because unless something is really sparking in you, it's not gonna spark in anybody else.
Sarah Enni: Yes. And you know, if you're feeling jazzed and interested by an idea, odds are a lot of people are going to too. It's just worth cross-referencing and seeing also, are there already five books out about that? So, it just doesn't hurt.
Rebecca Serle: Yes. It doesn't hurt.
Sarah Enni: Tell me about the process of writing that book as a professional in the world, and what was the timeline from there to Famous in Love and the shift in your life in that way.
Rebecca Serle: So I wrote When You Were Mine from 2009 to 2010. I sold it in September, October, 2010. It came out in May of 2012. And then I believe I sold Famous in Love in 2013. Very quickly started working on the TV show, the pilot. I wrote the pilot in 2014. We sold the pilot at the beginning of 2015 to Warner Brothers and then to Freeform. And then we got picked up in the spring of 2015 and we shot the pilot December of 2015.
So it was five years after I'd sold my first book.
Sarah Enni: That's a really helpful timeline.
Rebecca Serle: Yeah, I was thinking about that like, "Is this true?" But yes, that's true. So we shot the pilot December, 2015 then we got picked up to series that following spring, the spring of 2016. We shot Season One in this spring and summer of 2016.
Sarah Enni: What I love about that is that it sounds long, but I know it was so short. That's pretty quick.
Rebecca Serle: Oh gosh, that's show came together really fast, but it felt like an eternity. When you sell a show and then it's another eight months before you do something, you feel like you're not moving at all. I think this is really important for anybody living life, particularly a creative person living life, to think about. And I will not pretend that I came up with this, but I don't know who did, so bear with me.:
If you look back over the course of one year, you may feel like you don't really accomplish anything. If you look back over the course of five years, you will be shocked and awed by what you accomplished. And the same thing works going forward, right. If you think about what you can get done in one year, it's a little bit like, "Mmm." Think about what you will accomplish in five years, it's a tremendous amount.
And I always try to keep that in mind when I think about my career and all the things I still want to do. That it takes time. It takes time. But every day is time that's going by, so you might as well begin. Cause time's gonna pass anyway.
Sarah Enni: Oh, I love that. I love that a lot.
Rebecca Serle: My friend Lauren Oliver (author of Delirium and Before I Fall) says that a lot like, "Time's gonna pass anyway." And it's really true. Time's gonna pass anyway.
Sarah Enni: I have from a Zine and I forget where I got this Zine, but it was this beautiful artwork and it just says, "Start now. Start now. Start now." And it's on my desk. Like there's no time like the present. And related to what you're saying, I'm on this kick where I'm using this, it's called BestSelf Journal, and it's a 90 day project planner.
And it's all about like, break it down into what you need to get done on a certain day. And with 90 days it feels like forever, but it's also close enough that you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. And if you're really methodical about it, you can get way more done than you even think.
So it's been a real journey to be like, "Oh yeah. If you just pace yourself. You can do so much."
Rebecca Serle: Oh absolutely. Absolutely.
Sarah Enni: But I don't want to gloss over this whole time period cause I know a lot was going on there. But basically I'm just curious about working at the agency and writing When You Were Mine by night, is that how that happened?
Rebecca Serle: I think it was in the mornings. It's so funny, you look back and you're like, "What was the time like? What happened?" But yes, I think it was a lot of mornings and it was a lot of nights. And I think at some point there I began to take on a more freelance role in the agency, it was less full-time. It was still a little bit in the office, but it was less, and I was moving more into working on those nonfiction proposals. Which I continued on to do a little bit after I sold my first book, when I sold When You Were Mine.
I was very used to writing and I was in the habit of writing. And again, I know there's such a tremendous amount of noise out there about writers saying how difficult writing is. And I feel sometimes that it is my job to counter that by saying, "But it's also like really joyful." I really try to cultivate that in myself too, and not fall into the trap of talking endlessly about how hard it is, because it's just gonna make it harder. I try not to do that.
I try to focus on the fact that I really do love creating worlds, and I love time alone like that. And I enjoy putting sentences together. I really do. So I was in the habit of doing it and something I very much enjoy. But yeah, it was happening a little bit in the shadow.
Sarah Enni: In the margins?
Rebecca Serle: Yeah.
Sarah Enni: Famous in Love. I want to approach it because it's such an interesting whirlwind, or that's what it seemed like from the outside. When you got that idea, did it feel different from other ideas that you'd had before?
Rebecca Serle: Yes. How I know that I have something that's worth writing is that it feels to me like, "Why has no one ever written this before? It's so obvious." So I had that feeling on When You Were Mine, tremendously. "How has nobody ever written a story from Roslyn's point of view, a modern retelling of this. It's so obvious." And I had that when I thought of Famous in Love. "How has no one done this before? It's really obvious."
And I also felt when I was writing it that it would make a very interesting television show.
Sarah Enni: Do you actually, let's pause and talk about the origin of the story, cause that will help people listening who might not be familiar with Famous in Love.
Rebecca Serle: Of course. So Famous in Love is a book series of mine that is about a girl who gets plucked from obscurity to star in the next major feature film franchise based on a bestselling book series. So she's like Kristin Stewart in Twilight or Shailene Woodly in Divergent, or Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games and she falls in love with both of her co-stars and sort of this interesting on-and-off screen love triangle ensues.
And I started writing the book at the fever pitch Kristin and Rob on Twilight. And so I felt like something very interesting is happening. And I had also grown up on WB TV. I was obsessed with Joshua Jackson and Katie Holmes on Dawson's Creek. And I remember finding out that they were dating in real life during Season One before a Pacey and Joey got together. But I remember that the romance of the show really took hold for me when I realized that they were... it's a very voyeuristic tendency, right?
It's like, "Oh my God!" We're getting a window into how it is when they're alone together. There's something really compelling about watching two people who you know are having this dynamic offscreen. So I felt that the moment was right and it seemed very interesting to me, and it was something I really wanted to explore. Because not only did I find it interesting in what was happening with Kristin and Rob, but I had been a fan of this particular kind of thing for so long.
So it truly remains the most delightful experience I have ever had writing two books. It felt like writing fan fiction, it was just such a tremendous delight for me.
Sarah Enni: It's interesting too now, thinking of the arc of your career, and we'll get to the adult books and how they're magical. But your young adult stories are taking a typical young adult story, and a little bit turning it on its head. I'm thinking about the Romeo and Juliet story, but from this other subversive angle.
And then what was fascinating to me about the Famous in Love conceit is the like mind bendy, like you're saying, almost fan fiction-y thing of, "Well they're teenagers who were being asked to portray teenage dumb." And then offscreen, they have to kind of cope and actually be teenagers, but also be professional. Like there's so many layers to it. And that's I think why people watching Kristin Stewart and Rob were so taken with this and obsessed with it.
Rebecca Serle: The Kristin and Rob thing was a very interesting example because, well number one, it was just so massive. And also she was so young. She was I think seventeen when they started. So it was a combination of a lot of very interesting things. And I also think that it makes sense that you basically find yourself at the center of a tornado. And the only other person who's there with you is the other person. So it makes sense that you would reach out and grab onto them because you're the only two people in the center of a tornado.
Sarah Enni: And the only two people that can really relate to this experience.
Rebecca Serle: And also, this was something interestingly I learned through making the show and kind of what happened with that. But I often say that I don't have a great ability to tell between excitement and anxiety. They register as the same emotion in my body.
So when I'm publishing a book or when there's a lot of excitement about something, it's not always particularly comfortable to me. I don't really enjoy that that much because it feels like anxiety in my body. And I think that we look at young stars and we think, "What a privileged, luxury life." But I see the real true terror of what that experience must be. And that I was very interested in writing about.
Sarah Enni: Well you were just telling me the story about how it did also feel like it could be a TV show.
Rebecca Serle: It felt like it could be a TV show. And again, I had grown up on teen content like that. And it was also, I mean, at the end of the day it was a show that I wanted to watch. I wanted to see it. And I also really wanted to be the one to do it. Now we have, just over the last three years, we have so many authors getting involved in their adaptations. And I feel a little tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny speck proud of that. Because at the time that I did it, I don't know if an author had ever been the creator of a show based off of their books before.
Sarah Enni: I think in the YA world that had not.
Rebecca Serle: Yeah. In the YA world it wasn't something. And I was met with just a lot of pushback. I had agents and producers and there were a tremendous amount of people who just said, "You're an author not a screenwriter." Which is not something you hear now. Now they're kind of desperate for you to do up your own work cause it's "working", quote unquote.
But at the time, nobody really felt like that was viable. And I got hooked up with my manager Dan Farrah, who's wonderful and who was very encouraging of me. And I wrote the pilot on spec. Cause I knew unless I had it, there was no way anyone was gonna give me a chance. I had to do the work first.
And by the way, let me just stop now to say this is a philosophy on writing that I very much believe in. I have never in my whole career ever sold anything on a partial, on an idea. I have only ever sold both television shows and also books, that have been fully written. And I think that there's this illusion that an idea is the thing, but it's not, it's the execution. And I always feel like I can show you what I can do better in the work than I can in the summary of the work.
And I also feel it is better to write, and to not write under pressure, or to write for a deadline. So I think that that is a piece of advice I also have to offer is that a lot of people like to take, you know, multiple book deals or to sell something on a partial. And I would really try to protect that process as much as you can.
Sarah Enni: That's actually advice that I'm happy to hear, personally, right now. Cause I had a really hard time writing, having sold on a partial. That was very hard for me to do. So I'm like, "Maybe my brain doesn't work that way and it doesn't have to."
Rebecca Serle: And it doesn't have to, it really doesn't have to. I like giving something to somebody and say, "If you want to buy this, then buy this. Don't buy your idea of what this could be. Because that might not be what I deliver and it might not be what I'm interested in delivering."
So I think that if you are a writer, you should feel empowered that your work can stand up for itself better than you can set it up for your work.
Sarah Enni: I love that. There's so many great pieces of advice already, I love it.
Rebecca Serle: There's my call to action, "Just do the work!"
Sarah Enni: So I'm fascinated by this. You wrote the book, you feel like this concept could work as a TV show, "I know it cause I want to see it." Then how did things go in order? Did you write the script and then try to find a manager? Not everyone would be in that position and know how to go about it.
Rebecca Serle: Yes. I had a mentor at the time who hooked me up with Dan, my manager, who then encouraged me to write the pilot and was very helpful in the development of that. So I wrote the pilot and I basically taught myself how to write a pilot. I mean, I guess the same way we teach ourselves how to write books, right? Which is by reading. So I read a tremendous amount of pilots. I studied the Gossip Girl pilot over and over and over again and the OC pilot.
And I also read pilot scripts at different stages. Because I had sold the film rights of When You Were Mine, I had a rights agent in Hollywood. So there was somebody, and also Dan, there was somebody who could give me those scripts. So I found that very helpful to read scripts and to read them at different stages.
And to watch pilots and also take numerical notes like, "Oh five minutes in, this is where this happens. Seven minutes in this is where this happens. Twelve minutes in." So I remember breaking down the Gossip Girl pilot in terms of actual time, and then trying to map Famous in Love onto that structure.
Sarah Enni: So smart. I love that.
Rebecca Serle: So I write the pilot and that takes me about nine months. It takes me longer than it's ever taken me to write a book. And then we brought it to my agent at WME, David Stone, and he loved it. We knew we were gonna have to bring a bigger producer on board because I had never worked in TV before, let alone created a show. We brought it to a few different producers. Marlene King, who created Pretty Little Liars and really loved it, she came on and then we sold it to Warner brothers.
Sarah Enni: Amazing. It's never taken you longer than nine months to write a book?
Rebecca Serle: No. I write very quickly. So my writing process with books is that I tend to just, not so much get in a hole, but I really believe in staying in step with a book. It's very difficult for me to step away from a project. I can't really get back in. So I'll write 2000 words a day when I'm actually writing a book and my books are not that long. They're about 60 to 65,000 words. And I'll draft a book in about three months.
Sarah Enni: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. That 90 day thing I was telling you about, it's like, "I'm gonna budget for 80K and just really try to make it happen. I'm getting about 1300 a day and it's working. Cause that's what I realized. I was taking these weeks off or giving myself like, "Oh it's too hard. It's too hard today and I'm gonna take a break." And it was like, "Well it's gonna make it ten times harder."
Rebecca Serle: You have to think about it as exercise. If you're a runner, runners know if you take a week off, running one mile is gonna be hard, your lungs are gonna be burning. And this is coming from somebody who doesn't believe in that you have to write every single day. There are swaths of the year in which I do not write. My job has a lot of other requirements and I'm fulfilling those.
But the time in which I'm actively writing is the time in which I am actively writing, which means I am not taking time off. So that works for me. I know a lot of different things work for different people. Some people like to write 500 words a day and they rate every single day of the year. It doesn't work for the career that I want or the lifestyle that I have. Or even just how I've grown to be accustomed to drafting a book.
Sarah Enni: Which is great. Another option out there for people. I so love that you were so self-motivated and propelled with the Famous in Love process, especially to moving it over to TV. It takes a lot of moxie, is that the word I'm looking for? To kind of throw it out there. What was it like to see it start to work and for people to get behind it. I think Bella signed on pretty early.
Rebecca Serle: Yes. Bella Thorne signed on really early. That's another thing I should say, absolutely, is that when we brought it to Marlene, actually I will back up and say, we first brought it to Bella. And she loved it and that was part of how we got Marlene on board, and inevitably Warner brothers, Bella was instrumental. Absolutely. In both packaging it and then also subsequently selling the show. It was exciting.
The pilot of Famous in Love getting picked up I think is the most profoundly exciting professional moment I have ever, probably will ever, have in my career. Not because I won't accomplish other things, but because the first time is the biggest time. After that, even when we got picked up to series, meaning the show would be on the air, it was infinitely less exciting because I knew the parameters of what I was working with and I knew how challenging it was. And at that point it was very challenging. And it wasn't pure in the same way.
When that pilot got picked up and I knew we were actually gonna shoot something, I mean, it was cloud nine. I was so thrilled. And I think it's important to have those moments because the road is challenging. The road is very challenging. Even when you have success, the road is challenging. I would argue sometimes when you have success it gets even more challenging.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. It turns out successful people don't get less busy or burdened.
Rebecca Serle: And life gets more complicated.
Sarah Enni: The other thing that's interesting to me is, you knew proceeding with wanting to write this TV show, would mean almost everything with TV happens out here. Especially like a writer's room would be in LA probably, and not New York. Although sometimes it happens in New York.
Rebecca Serle: More so now. Back then it wasn't as much. I'm acting like it's a million years ago, but this business moves so quickly that really, honestly, six or seven years ago, at the time that we are putting this together, there weren't a ton of writer's rooms that were other places.
Amazon wasn't making shows. It was different. So yes, it was a very LA run... It was, obviously still is, predominantly an LA run business.
Sarah Enni: And you knew that you wanted to be a part of the writing process. You're a creator. Did you always know you wanted to co-executive produce as well?
Rebecca Serle: I don't think I had a clue. I think I knew I wanted to write it. I think I wrote it. I think I sold it. And then at that point I really wanted to stay involved and knew it was my show. And on top of that, I didn't know. I mean it was a crash course. And again, I say there was nobody I could call up and say, "Have you done this? Have you never worked in TV and sold a show?"
And I don't say that to pat myself on the back. I say it because it was a very unusual situation at the time. And I think part of the reason it was really challenging is that it was unusual for me, but it was also unusual for every party involved. Nobody really understood how to handle it, and what I should or should not be empowered to do.
So it was very complicated. And so I think I basically just leaned hard in and did not have any idea of what it would mean. I didn't really understand what I was signing up for. I just knew that I had to go like... what do they say? Like foot to the gas. So I did.
Sarah Enni: What do you think it is that made you so sure? What do you think it was that was propelling you through this process when you were carving out your own path so fearlessly? Not without fear, you know? It seems like you really decided to commit to what you wanted.
Rebecca Serle: This sounds really cheesy, but I make all of my decisions based off of gut instinct. I never sit there and think. If I do, I know that I'm doing something wrong. I very rarely sit there and think about the pros and cons of a situation. It's always like, "What is my stomach telling me to do? What is the instinct here?" And I really don't say that to be hokey. That is my actual business advice. It is how I operate. And I think the more that you do it, the more you listen and you make decisions based off of that, the stronger that instinct gets.
And the louder that instinct gets. And mine is quite loud. And so it was saying like, "Just lean in. Do this. Go on this ride." And I think that it became like a rocket ship. And I think at that point you don't really ask like, "What's my seat?" You just get on. Like I just kinda got on and I figured the rest would sort of figure itself out.
But yeah, it felt right. In the beginning, it really felt right.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. So what I started to ask was, you were signing up to not only come to LA, but the other thing is writing for a TV show couldn't be more different of a process than writing books alone by yourself in an apartment. What was it like to have such an abrupt lifestyle change? And how did you find that experience?
Rebecca Serle: Yeah, and it was. I don't think that I, again, I didn't realize. I didn't really understand that it would mean that I had to come to LA, although I probably should have. We did ten episodes, so at the period that I was back and forth between New York and LA, that period was about four years. It was for shorter periods of time. It would be like for four months. And then at the point that we did Season One, it was about for eight months.
I think that after about six years of being very young, like still in my twenties, publishing books full time and working alone, I was ready for collaboration. I was ready to be in the room with other people. I was ready to hear other voices, I was ready to go to work. I wanted something that was outside of myself. I had spent a large period of my very young years being very isolated.
So I was excited about that. And I very much enjoyed that. It was a very challenging thing to let go of something that I had had full ownership of, and I really struggled with that. I think it's challenging, as a writer, to let your work go and to let other voices and other opinions into it.
I meet writers all the time who are selling work and who are like, "I'm cool with it, I'm cool with it." And I say to them like, "There will come a point in which you're not." And that's not a bad thing. It's okay. It's like giving your child away. It's hard. It's meant to be hard. If it's not hard something is not quite right.
But I'll be honest, I don't really know how I feel about it moving [forward]. I haven't resolved it yet. I sold another television show. It's based off of Megan McCafferty's (whose newest book, The Mall, is out in 2020) wonderful, incredible Jessica Darling series, which I'm thrilled and so excited about. I was a fan of those books my whole life.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, they're like OG YA.
Rebecca Serle: Yeah, OG YA! I'm so excited, but I have yet to sell another book of mine. And that's not by accident. So I'll be honest in saying I don't have this figured out yet.
Sarah Enni: I think that's fair. That's actually heartening to hear. We're all working through it.
Rebecca Serle: We're all works In progress guys.
Sarah Enni: Yes, but you know, so great that you gained the tools. I mean, adapting then would be fun too, you know? Such a different medium.
Rebecca Serle: Yes. And I'm working on my first adult novel, The Dinner List. I'm about to start adapting myself.
Sarah Enni: For TV or feature?
Rebecca Serle: I think it'll be feature.
Sarah Enni: Cause, I mean, my opinion was the adult work seemed more encapsulated.
Rebecca Serle: Yes. But right now I am very much in a place of wanting to own my material and that may change. Life is constantly dynamic and ever evolving. But I'm still in process on that one. We'll have to come back in a few years, see where I land on it.
Sarah Enni: Lead me to how The Dinner List came about. Cause it's also such a big change. What was the timing like? How did the idea come to you? All that good stuff.
Rebecca Serle: So I had written the first seventy-five or a hundred pages right before Famous in Love got picked up. They just came to me and I was like, "This is really interesting and exciting." And I had been thinking about writing an adult book and I thought maybe I was getting to the point where it was what I wanted to do. So I wrote it. And then very quickly Famous in Love, we sold it and then the pilot got picked up and then we were shooting and I completely forgot about it for three years.
And then I came back to New York after Famous in Love, after Season One, and I was like pretty battered and pretty bruised by the experience of such a different environment. And the work schedule and the grind of it and how challenging it was. And I was really desperate to own something that was mine. And I literally like found the a hundred pages on my computer and sent them to my agent and said, "What do you think about this?"
And she was like, "I think you should write this book." So then I finished it in about three months. So that was sort of how that came about. It was quick, but it was also long. Because by the time I had finished it, I had been writing it for like four years, although for three of them I totally forgot it existed.
Sarah Enni: But there's so much work that goes on in the back. Who knows? You know?
Rebecca Serle: So The Dinner List is about, it's the answer to the question, "If you could have dinner with any five people living or dead, who would they be?" So a woman shows up to her 30th birthday dinner and it's that dinner and Audrey Hepburn is at the table. And her father who passed away when she was young. And her ex Tobias, who she had this decade long relationship with.
So the chapters go back and forth between times of this unfolding dinner, and her love story with this man. And the dinner scenes are... there are six people at this table and they're all talking. And I don't really know if I would've been able to write that had I not spent three years in TV writing dialogue. I mean improving my dialogue and figuring out how to manage multiple people being in a scene.
So it was very valuable to me in terms of writing that book in particular.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Oh that's so, I love that. That's so, so interesting. Life is so funny, but you have this idea for a book that would require that.
Rebecca Serle: Yes, and then you have the experience you need.
Sarah Enni: You end up having that journey and then you come back and see this. Also, what a gift to find a hundred pages of something that you're like, "I still like this."
Rebecca Serle: I know. That's why I'm like, "Keep everything. Keep everything."
Sarah Enni: Oh boy, yes. And back it all up.
Rebecca Serle: Yes, and back it all up.
Sarah Enni: Literally pause this podcast and go back up your files right now [laughing]. What was it like to sink back into an adult story?
Rebecca Serle: Oh, it felt like coming home. It really felt like coming home. I can't say enough about how grateful and thrilled I am to be publishing in the space that I am: Women's Upmarket, Literary, Commercial Fiction. Whatever the qualifiers are that we say for fiction. I just feel so blessed cause this is really, I feel, where my voice belongs. I feel like it's such rarefied air to get to be doing it and I'm just tremendously grateful.
So yeah, it really did feel like coming home. It felt like taking those magical realist stories of my past, but opening them up now as a thirty-year-old woman. And it was just very, very pleasurable. It was really, really nice to come back. And it was also really nice to just come back to the page I had missed it.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. It is nice to control your little universe. It is another concept that is kind of like, "Oh, I can't believe this hasn't been done before."
Rebecca Serle: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I felt that particularly, "This is strange, no one's done it, but I will."
Sarah Enni: So brilliant. It's such a great hook too, just an obvious point of interest. And so interesting to see who this character would have chosen and all that stuff.
Rebecca Serle: It's been really fun too. We did, just in the publication of the book, getting to hear people's dinner lists. So the other thing I should say is that the time in between when I wrote the first hundred pages and when I came back to it and doing the show, my grandmother passed away who was really close with.:
And the concept sort of changed from being something that was kitschy like, "Ooh, you could meet Audrey Hepburn or Barack Obama," to being very personal. Like what wouldn't people give to have one last dinner with the people that they've lost.
And when I've been on tour for the book, and done events for the book, it's been really special to hear people's lists and to see how personal it is. Like "I'd want my mom there because she never got to meet my daughter." Or, "My father who didn't get to meet my husband." It's just been very familial and really nice. And that's been a very unexpected pleasure of publishing this book.
Sarah Enni: Right. The kind of answers that it can be a glib cocktail conversation, or it can be like, "No really."
Rebecca Serle: Really deep, yeah, really deep.
Sarah Enni: And my perspective was that The Dinner List was like a big deal. It came out and people were taking about it and it was really one of those books that was out there and kind of everyone was reading it. And your aunt was reading it. And it was just fun. It felt like a very easy book to talk about.
And that's a really different kind of publishing experience, especially in adult fiction, than is in YA. Or in many other ways. So what was that experience like? Very, even opposite of the TV show, you know, it's a whole other thing.
Rebecca Serle: Yeah, it was really nice. Thank you. It did feel that way. Of course everything is sort of subjective to the moment that you're in. So in the moment you're like, "Why is it not a New York Times bestseller?" Whatever the dumb stuff is that never goes away. But it did feel different, and this phase of my career has felt different. It's been really nice.
And I don't mean this as a knock on my previous work. I wrote my first novel when I was twenty-three-years- old. I was really close to the teen experience of what it felt like to be seventeen and falling in love for the first time. And being heartbroken, which I was at the point that I wrote the book, and all of that.
And then when I published The Dinner List, I was thirty, thirty-one, and I was very in the space of feeling like I wanted to talk about what it feels like to be turning thirty. To be entering a new decade in your life, to be unsure about your love life and the choices that you're making. To have your friends be making different ones. To be married or to be choosing to have children, and to be feeling like your roads were diverging in those ways.
And so it was very exciting for me to get to speak about, because it felt like how I felt about publishing When You Were Mine. I was so close to it. It was so personal. I loved talking about it because it was what I was personally wrestling with. And getting to publish The Dinner List felt that way to me. Like, "I want to talk about what it looks like to be looking for love in your thirties and to be not sure you're gonna find it." And all of those things that I feel like myself and my contemporaries are dealing with at this juncture in our lives.
Sarah Enni: So I want to talk about In Five Years and how you're simultaneously doing this other career, and moving, and all that good stuff. But let's talk about In Five Years first and get the origin story and the pitch for that book.
Rebecca Serle: Sure. So In Five Years is much like The Dinner List. It's another sort of universal question, and it's the answer to the question, "Where do you see yourself in five years?" And it's about a young woman, Dani Cohen, who's a corporate lawyer living in New York who knows exactly what she wants for her life.
And we meet her on the day of her giant job interview, the place she's wanted to work forever. She nails the job interview. That night she gets engaged to her finance boyfriend, everything's on track. And she falls asleep on the couch that night, and wakes up and lives exactly one hour from 10:59 to 11:59, five years in the future. And she wakes up in an apartment she's never been before with a man she's never met before.
And then she wakes back up in her normal life and thinks that must've been some kind of crazy dream. And four- and-a-half years go by and then she meets the man who was in that hour with her. And the book sort of rabbles her life together to bring her towards that hour. I'm very excited about this book.
Sarah Enni: It's such a fun concept.
Rebecca Serle: Thank you. I'm really excited about this book. I'm excited to start to talk [about it]. Actually this is the first time. This is my first piece of press at all discussing this.
Sarah Enni: I love it! Amazing!
Rebecca Serle: This is really fun. At the time we're recording this, I haven't done anything, so I'm very excited to get to discuss it. It's a book that I'm very proud of and that I'm very excited for people to read.
Sarah Enni: How did this idea come to you?
Rebecca Serle: I really believe that all writers are interested in exploring one or two themes over and over and over again. And the theme that I'm really interested in exploring is fate versus free will. How much is in our control and how much is gonna happen regardless of what we do. That's the fundamental question of human existence that I am very interested in.
So The Dinner List was very much about the fantasy of getting to go back in time and re-litigate the past. And In Five Years is definitely about the fantasy of getting to see what's coming, and how we can see what's coming, but we can't really see what it will mean.
I'm very interested also in the fact that scientists have, I'm gonna butcher this, but scientists have basically proven that the future influences the present. Like they've been able to see that like atoms communicate data backwards. So I have often felt like, "What if the choices that we're making now we're not bringing forth the future, but what if the choices we're making are informed by a future that already exists that's requiring us to act the way we're acting to get there."
There was also a psychic prophecy involved in my life personally.
Sarah Enni: What?!
Rebecca Serle: Yes, there were a lot of very interesting things that brought this concept about. It's something I really wanted to talk about for a long time but maybe didn't totally understand what I was trying to say. And I'm just very excited for people to read it.
Sarah Enni: So the fate versus free will, that also made me think of Jen E. Smith and a lot of Jen's books.
Rebecca Serle: Yeah. We love you Jen!
Sarah Enni: Yeah, Jen's so great. And they're kind of toying with that. And what I love about it is, look at The Dinner List and look at In Five Years. Yes, thematically, they are kind of talking about some similar things, but you can write such different books that are dealing with similar themes. And look at Jen's books are about the same themes and they're so different. I love that it's endlessly replicable.
Rebecca Serle: Every one of my books has been about that. And I would imagine, I mean who knows the future, but I would imagine quite a few more will be about it as well. And I really do think that's true about ideas too. I was actually, Josie Silver's One Day in December, a book I adored, I was reading it recently actually. And there's a twist in the book that is quite similar to a twist I did In Five Years.
I was DM'ing her, I sound like one of the kids, I was DM'ing her on Instagram. Cause she had blurbed the book. So she read In Five Years before I had read One Day in December. And I said, "Oh my goodness, I can't believe we both..." I sort of wanted to tell her, "I hope you don't think I stole..." Cause I didn't.
And of course she was so lovely about it and she said to me the thing that Elizabeth Gilbert says in Big Magic, which is that ideas are in the atmosphere and we can sometimes pluck the same one, but the way that we bring it forth into the world, the way we execute it, the way we tell it, is gonna be our own unique way.
There's so many examples of this happening. You abandoned a project and then your friend comes up with the exact same idea. It's a very sort of magical, curious thing about writing, to me. So yes, even forget the theme, even the same idea, you can do over, and over, and over again and it could be new and interesting.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. And still exciting, you know? How or has your book writing process changed after the TV writing process?
Rebecca Serle: I think that I sort of honed my process more. And I think part of the reason that I've come up with this strategy of doing it in three months and staying in step with it, is because I never really know when a project might go and might require my full attention. So if I have an idea for something, I do want to try to bring it forth as quickly as I possibly can.
Sarah Enni: Does it impact how you actually see the project while you're writing it? Or do you see it as like, "Oh!" Made more visual than you did in the past?
Rebecca Serle: It's interesting. I don't think so. Maybe, and I'm not aware of it. It's possible. But I don't ever write thinking, "This could be a show." When I talk about Famous in Love, it was after I had finished the draft that I thought, "Oh, this could be a very interesting TV show."
I never think about my work in another medium. And in fact I need a period of time. Like The Dinner List came out, or I finished it, let's say two-and-a-half years ago. So it's taken me this long to get to a point where I think, "Okay, I could think about opening this story up and telling it in a different medium."
It takes me time. It's not like an immediate thing. So I never really think about what it could be in another space while I'm working on it. I think my process is in many ways the same. I just think I've probably honed it and made it a little more streamlined as time has gone on.
Sarah Enni: There's so much pre-planning and outlining that goes into movies and TV shows that I feel like even from dabbling in that I'm picking up a lot of skills for breaking story and like recognizing when something's not working way earlier, I think, than I would have otherwise.
Rebecca Serle: That's actually a good point. And I could see that being true. I'm not a huge outliner when it comes to books. I mean, you have to in film and TV, but I don't really do it for books. But I could see that I think you're right in that if something isn't working, I'm aware of it earlier probably.
Sarah Enni: You start to get, like you said, the minutes timing up with certain plots. That doesn't translate one-to-one to novel for sure. I was writing a chapter the other day and I was like, "This chapter is way too long. Nothing is happening in this and I'm gonna need to cut it in half."
Rebecca Serle: Or thinking like, and this is like Hollywood terminology, but thinking like, "Okay, we need an inciting incident now. We can't just have seventy pages where they're hanging out. Something needs to happen and it needs to happen earlier." So yes, you're absolutely right. It has informed my book turns out.
Sarah Enni: [Laughing] I badgered you into it. Like, "Well what about this?"
Rebecca Serle: It's informed them. I revise my statement.
Sarah Enni: So now In Five Years is coming out, I want to know about writing that book and moving to LA and having these other opportunities. What has that timing been? It seems like it's been a period of maybe reorganization of your life.
Rebecca Serle: It really has been and it's a period I'm still in the midst of. So I lived back and forth for about four years while we were shooting Famous in Love. While we were getting the show up and running, and doing the pilot and then doing Season One. And then we did Season Two. And I was a die hard New Yorker. I was there for twelve-and-a-half years. I never thought I would leave. Nobody loved that city like I do. And I found in the last year that I would come to LA and I would end up staying for a lot longer than I thought I would.
And I also found that my life started to move here, in a way that I'd always used to move in New York. Like the hot spot of my life had moved.
Sarah Enni: The which one?
Rebecca Serle: The hotspot. You know like how in a chain of volcanoes? Like the Hawaiian islands are a chain of volcanoes and the hotspot has moved, which is why the new islands have formed. Please know and be a paleontologist...what is it?
Sarah Enni: [Laughs] A geologist.
Rebecca Serle: But anyway, I felt like the hot spot in my life had moved a little bit. And then I gave myself six months after that. In the span of six months I had an air conditioning thing fall on me and got an eye infection from like the drip of it. And then I got punched in the street by a homeless man. And finally I was like, "It's time for me to get out of here." Like, "It's enough, I need to go."
And it also became increasingly more difficult for me to ignore the fact that the quality of life in LA is really nice. It's really nice. We're sitting in your beautiful living room, there's these lovely bay windows. Like it's really nice. So I moved here four months ago.
I actually, okay, here's what I will say about In Five Years though. I wrote it here at the point in which I was still living in New York, but I was out here for work in the fall of last year. And I don't think I would have been able to move had I not written a book here. Because I think for a long time I wasn't sure, "Will I be able to write in LA?" I didn't know what that would look like. I didn't know if maybe my mojo just came from New York and it wouldn't exist here.
So I think writing In Five Years in LA really allowed me the opportunity to say, "Oh okay, I can live here, I can write here."
Sarah Enni: Okay, that's fascinating on just so many levels. First of them being like, that's so in-line with the book itself. That's so sort of doing a trial run of the life that you're now fully in. And getting the chance to be like, "Oh well I've seen it so I can believe in it."
Rebecca Serle: Yeah. And of course then you get here and it's very different than what you are expecting because that's life, right? Like it's constantly evolving and moving and changing. And I think back again to what we were talking about earlier, you just kind of have to go with that gut feeling. You have to go with that intuition. You got to follow it wherever it leads and you got to keep trusting it.
And then what comes is gonna be what comes.
Sarah Enni: So you got to write In Five Years, but you have a lot of other things going on too. So what precipitated the final move and what are you doing besides book writing at this time?
Rebecca Serle: So I feel like I sort of came to the end of my time in New York and I moved here in August. In Five Years comes out March 10th and then I sold the Jessica Darling pilot to ABC Signature Studios. So we're gonna work on getting that off the ground. And then I'm gonna start adapting The Dinner List. I am not tremendously good at doing multiple things at one time. So even though I have a few things going on, I really do one thing fully and then I'll turn my attention to the next thing and do that thing fully.
My brain doesn't work great multitasking on projects.
Sarah Enni: I think a lot of people think they can, and I don't know if that's...
Rebecca Serle: But I will say you can have multiple things happening at the same time. You can just turn your attention to them more sort of, one thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. As opposed to trying to do everything at once.
Sarah Enni: Right, right. And again, that's like delegating-to-self, or planning ahead. Who is it that helps you determine timing or when is a good time? Do you have people in your corner that are helping you tackle all the things you want to do?
Rebecca Serle: Well, my agent Erin Malone at WME is the most incredible person on the planet and helps me with all that stuff. But again, a lot of it is really instinct. I just finished a new book actually, and I think a little bit of it was because I knew that In Five Years was gonna be quite a bit of promotion work in the second half of the year, and I kind of wanted to have something done. Part of it was just also that this was a story I really wanted to tell.
So it's a balance. She definitely helps with it, but I think a lot of the timing of what we do is what feels right. And then also just when things fall into place, right? Less so with books, with TV stuff just takes a long time. Contracts and there's just so many more moving parts than there are in books. So you're a little bit more at the mercy of the timing of the studio guys.
Sarah Enni: Right. And I think, what a blessing for you, to have something to turn to while that's all the machinations.
Rebecca Serle: Yes. I say this a lot. I do not know what I would do as a television or film writer if I did not have books. I don't know. I don't know. I really don't know.
Sarah Enni: So you've given awesome advice the whole time, but I guess I'd be interested in what you have to say, particularly maybe for someone who feels equally open to writing for TV and film and books. Like if you have any advice for someone coming up who can see themselves doing either thing, what would you suggest?
Rebecca Serle: First I would suggest what I did in the beginning, which is getting to LA. And I think if you want to do TV and books, probably Los Angeles. If you want to work in film, I really do think that LA is the place to be. There are production companies and things that happen in New York. I just think they're harder to find. I really do think it's LA. There's so many people here who work in the business or work tangentially in the business.
There's so many opportunities for social interaction in those spaces. I would really get here and then I would just do some research on what this business is about, and where you might think that you fit in. Despite the fact that I took a very unorthodox path into TV through books. I think there's a tremendous amount to be gained from starting in a writer's room, and starting at an assistant level, and seeing how it works and working your way up.
I know a lot of people who've gained a lot of fulfillment and a lot of incredible skill. I'll be very honest in saying I'm not at a point where I can run a show. Even having my own show on the air, I simply don't have enough years. I don't have enough technical skill under my belt. That's something you can really learn by working your way up in this business.
It's very different than publishing in that there's so many technical, physical realities to production, that I think you need to learn over a period of time. Balancing budgets, all of that. If you want to work in television, I'm a real advocate for starting at that level and getting in and working your way up, and just seeing what it's all about.
What piece of the puzzle you think you fit in, because it might surprise you. Right? That's the thing about television. It's so open and it's so dynamic and there's so many different roles that you might be surprised at where you find you fit. And what you find is interesting to you.
Sarah Enni: I've seen a lot of creative people end up realizing that a producer role totally plays to their strengths.
Rebecca Serle: I see that happen a lot honestly. And vice versa. People who think that they want to produce, it turns out they want to write. But I actually do personally know some writers who started producing and then felt like, "Oh, this is actually where my skill set lies. Putting all these pieces together." Hugely valuable.
Sarah Enni: Like you're saying, turning people's great ideas into a book proposal. There's some element of that.
Rebecca Serle: Oh, absolutely. I think it's really satisfying and very interesting. So yeah, I think those jobs allow you to see the spectrum of different careers and see what you really jive with.
So I think for screenwriting, I'm a very big advocate of that. I think for books, I think getting a peer group, getting people to read your work, who you trust, getting comfortable with feedback, honing your own instincts, watching the market, reading a tremendous amount, reading as much as you can. And then I think when you feel you have something that you're ready to publish, looking in the backs of books that you think are comps and seeing who represents them. And then following their guidelines.
I really don't know how else people, it's such a hack. Like if an agent is any good, they will be, even if they're not, frankly, they will be thanked in the back of a book, "My agent, dah, dah, dah. Thank you dah, dah dah." And then you look them up and you see what their guidelines are and you say, "I loved this work that you represented." And submit to them.
Sarah Enni: Oh, well, thank you for giving me so much time. I really appreciate it. Such a fun conversation.
Rebecca Serle: This is so much fun. Thanks for having me on.
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to Rebecca. Follow her on Twitter @RebeccaASerle and Instagram @Rebecca_ Serle, and follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram) and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).
Hayley Hershman produces First Draft and today's episode was produced and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks to production assistant Tasneem Daud and transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson. And, as ever, thanks to you prophetic time travelers for listening.
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