Before Shawn Ryan ’88 became the award-winning writer and showrunner behind hit shows like The Shield and The Night Agent, he was a Middlebury College economics major who had never written a word of fiction. That changed when he took a playwriting course with professor Doug Anderson, who convinced him to pursue writing.

This past October, Ryan visited Middlebury to share the story of his 18-year journey from Anderson’s student to Golden Globe winner as part of the “Purpose and Place: Voices of Middlebury” event during the campus launch of For Every Future: The Campaign for Middlebury. In the talk, he weaves personal experience with advice for anyone seeking a career in writing.

Watch Ryan’s talk above, or read the full transcript below. 

Transcript

“Your scene was really good. I think you have a talent for this. I’m teaching a playwriting class next year, and I really think you should take it.” These were the words spoken to me by my theater professor Doug Anderson on the last day of classes of my freshman year here at Middlebury in May of 1985.

The assignment in question was we had to write a five-minute scene as our final project for this class and have other students in the class perform it. I had never written anything creative in my life, and when I got this assignment, I knew that he was a produced playwright. He was a big deal, and there would be nothing I could do to impress him. So I figured I wouldn’t try to impress him. I would just write something that me and my friends on the fourth floor of Stewart would find funny and I would just write the way that we talked.

So of course, when he said these words, I was flattered. But I explained that, you know, I had two missions here on campus. I was on the soccer team and I was an econ major. And when I learned that his playwriting class was going to conflict with the beginning of soccer practices, I told him that I couldn’t do it. But I thanked him and, and I went home to Illinois for the summer.

And when I was in Illinois, I had trouble sleeping because I started thinking, how often does someone tell you that you have a talent for something? And being from the Midwest, it felt kind of rude to ignore that. And so I changed my class schedule and I signed up for his playwriting class. And there under his supervision, I wrote my first play and he chose that play and four others from that class to produce the next semester. And I had the opportunity to see a crowd watch the very first thing that I had written.

Now that last line is a lie, because I did not watch with the crowd. I was so nervous and terrified, because this was supposed to be a comedy, that they might not laugh, that I instead sat backstage behind the flats and only listened to the play. Fortunately, they laughed in some places I wanted them to laugh. The Campus wrote a nice review of the play, and I began to think maybe I do have a talent for this.

I got the bug. I quit the soccer team. I changed my major to be a joint economics and theater major. And the next year I wrote a thesis, full-length play. And my advisor—theater professor Richard Romagnoli—offered to direct that play my senior year as part of the official Theater Department program. It was quite an honor. He also convinced me that I should fill out all the paperwork to enter it into the American College Theater Festival awards consideration. And ultimately it did win a couple of awards. And that to me was validation that I did have a talent for this.

Now, part of that award was to take me out to Los Angeles for two weeks and sit in the writers’ room of an NBC sitcom to see how television writers work. Now, this was huge for me because while I love plays, I was raised on TV and I love TV, and if I could write for TV, that would be the dream. 

At that time I was like, I’m gonna stay out there. I’m not gonna move back. And at that time, you would write spec scripts. What that was was you would write your example of a Seinfeld or an NYPD Blue or a The X-Files to show how you could write for TV. And the idea was that after two or three or four of these, hopefully, someone would notice your talent and hire you to write on a show.

Well, this is where my dream took a right-hand turn because now cut to four and a half years later, I’d moved out there when I was 23 years old. I’m now 27, about to turn 28, and I had written 14 scripts and had not gotten a job in the world of TV. And I was living in a studio apartment, the same studio apartment [as] when I was 23. And to save money, I always had at least one, if not two or three roommates in the studio apartment. Basically, I was living in a dorm room at age 27. The only difference is a dorm room will be cleaned and aired out every May. There, there was no such cleaning happening in this apartment.

I knew that this life wasn’t sustainable. I was on the verge of giving up my dream. I took a practice LSAT to see if I was maybe lawyer material. I considered moving back to Illinois, but I decided that I wanted to try one last thing before I gave up on my dream and made that decision. What I did was I did have a manager who would send my scripts out to people. And I went to him and I said, “You know, I really think my writing is good enough to be working in TV, but apparently, I’m the one that thinks that because no one is hiring me.”

I said, “Will you do this for me? Will you give me a spec script from another writer that you represent where that writer is getting a lot of job offers and work off that script? Because I wanna see what that script has that I don’t.”

And I read that script that he gave me. And what I realized was the best parts of that script were not necessarily better than the best parts of my script, but every single line on every single page was exactly what it needed to be. And I said to myself, “You know what? I’m gonna write a couple scripts now and I’m gonna make sure that they’re the absolute best I can be.”

And I wrote one comedy and one drama, and I applied a new rule to these. When I thought I was done with them, I would reread them except, I would reread them as if my greatest enemy was reading them, trying so hard to find fault with anything. And then once I identified those faults, I would fix them. And then that’s the draft I would give to my manager. Well, it did wonders because I did get jobs from those two scripts first on an animated kid’s show, and then I got the dream, I got hired onto staff of a CBS drama.

Now, a few years later, I’m a working writer, but I’m a low-level working writer. But a few years ago, I’d written a pilot that would become known as The Shield on FX, and FX wanted to make it. Again, it’s the dream, it’s amazing. But I reread the script and I thought, you know what? This can be better now. They were ready to go forward with it. And I took a big chance because I said to them, I wanna rewrite it because I think I can make it better. 

Now if I had rewritten it into something they didn’t like, they could pull this offer and not make the pilot. But I thought there were characters I could improve upon. I thought the names of the characters that I had just chosen at random didn’t work. So I did things like going through the phone book to find the perfect names for characters. And to tell you how long this took me, it took me to the Vs and Ws for Shane Vendrell and Claudette Wyms, and Dutch Wagenbach. When we had filmed the pilot in the editing room, I would make a rule to myself that if anything feels slightly off, I will not leave this room until it’s fixed. So sometimes it would take three hours of me and the editor working together to make a three-second clip work properly.

Now, we got very lucky. The show did very well. It got a lot of accolades. Our lead actor, Michael Chiklis won the Emmy for best actor that year. And we found ourselves nominated for a Golden Globe for best drama. And we went to the Beverly Hilton amongst all these stars. And we were up against The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The West Wing, and 24, which were all shows that I adored and revered, and was so confident that one of them would win. I did not prepare anything. We did win. The Sex and the City ladies announced our victory from the stage

We’ve been told beforehand, all us slummy TV people in the back where all the film stars were in front that, you know, hurry up there because you’re not getting much time and there’s a ticking clock. And so we rushed up there. I slammed into Hugh Grant’s chair, almost knocking him onto the ground and rushed up and really didn’t say anything coherent because I really didn’t think we were going to win. The next day, one of the trades talked about how the show and me in particular were overnight successes. And I kind of laughed because it had been 18 years since Doug Anderson told me that I had a talent for this. And I had written more than 35 TV scripts in that time, and it didn’t feel like an overnight success.

Now, I believe that everyone has a talent for something, and I learned, and it took me a while, that talent is a trap because talent alone can make you believe. It can seduce you into believing that good enough is good enough. And what I learned was, it wasn’t good enough for me. And so now when I meet a young writer who I really think has potential, I will tell them, “I think you have a talent for this, but that’s not enough. You have to honor that talent, and you have to maximize talent if you want it to mean anything.”

Thank you.