by Jesaka Long
With Los Angeles being the center of TV production, it’s rare to find an active writer/producer working on an active series who actually lives in Colorado. That’s why we’re so lucky to have Sibyl Gardner, who is currently a freelance writer for the drama “Nashville,” and lives in Longmont. Gardner brings with her a love of our state and deep experience in the TV and film industry, with credits including “Law & Order,” “Diagnosis Murder,” “Judging Amy,” “Profiler,” “Any Day Now,” “Joan of Arcadia,” “Saving Grace,” and “Hawthorne.”
Gardner is sharing her 20-plus years of experience in film and TV in her new Lighthouse class "The Room"—Writing for TV's One-Hour Drama. She designed these eight weeks to give writers interested in the industry a true taste of the realities of being a TV writer. We’re thrilled to have Sibyl Gardner as part of the Lighthouse faculty. She describes herself as a “writer who loves writers” so we know 1515 Race is the right address for her.
What brings Gardner to the Denver area?
In 1991 she was a writer’s assistant, but took a leave to stay in her aunt’s “storage cabin” in the mountains of Colorado. During that time, she wrote every single day. “Colorado is where I found my voice,” Gardner said. After her self-imposed writing intensive, she then got her first staff writer job. She now lives in Longmont with her two kids and has realized her long-held dream of having her own cabin near Estes Park.
“The Room” is a rare opportunity to learn about TV writing at Lighthouse. What can writers who have focused on full-length feature scripts learn from the class?
“TV writing is screenwriting,” Gardner said. You have to think in a visual, concise way—and TV writing is so fast, with deadlines and production. You have to learn to work on deadlines and produce quickly, which is a skill not always taught in screenwriting classes. Writing for television “also teaches you how to be flexible, to put everything in your draft, then take feedback [from the showrunner and fellow writers] and deliver those changes with a new draft. You have to dig in for that rewrite.”
What’s going to happen in “The Room” for eight weeks?
Gardner and her students will study the Netflix original series “Orange is the New Black.” The class will break down the structure and characters of the show and then write their own episode together. Acting as the showrunner, Gardner will assign scenes to class members, who then write their scenes and submit for feedback. By the end of the eight weeks, the polished scenes will be blended together into one complete episode of “Orange is the New Black.” To give her students as much information as possible about TV writing, she’ll also explain (and possibly use) the hierarchy of a writer’s room, with roles such as staff writer, story editor, producer and others. Gardner said this class is designed to give aspiring writers a real TV writing experience so they can make an informed decision about pursuing this as a career.
For anyone interested in Gardner’s class, she says it’s an opportunity to “learn what it’s like to write collaboratively, be in a room and working together, taking ideas and making them better together.”
After several years of working in television production (at fledgling MTV and the New York cable TV scene), Sibyl Gardner moved to Los Angeles to write. She landed a job as a writer’s assistant on the freshman season of “Law & Order,” where she got her first TV episodes produced. She went on to write for shows like “Profiler,” “Any Day Now,” “Joan of Arcadia,” “Saving Grace,” “Hawthorne,” and currently works as a freelance writer for “Nashville.”
Gardner’s 8-week workshop, "The Room"—Writing for TV's One-Hour Drama, starts on Tuesday 8/18.
Jesaka Long pays her bills as a freelance marketing copywriter and has written for companies including Boulder Brands, Starbucks, Nordstrom, and Microsoft. OJesaka’s essays have been published in the Mug of Woe anthology series as well as in online literary magazines and blogs. She won the Aspen Writers’ Foundation Summer Words Isa and Daniel Shaw Scholarship for Memoir and was a finalist for the 2012 Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Nonfiction. Her screenplay “Inklings” was one of four selected as “Featured Screenplay” in the 2014 Portland Film Festival.
