A Quote by Michael Hirst

First episodes are difficult things to write. — © Michael Hirst
First episodes are difficult things to write.
Giving oneself permission to write to begin with is the first enormous challenge. But you discover that this permission involves a requirement: To write about things that are difficult because they are, in fact, your subject.
I actually come from comics, and I'm big on comics. I was reading 'Walking Dead' from the beginning. Then just being on the show, I was really lucky to work on episodes like 'Pretty Much Dead Already' and 'Clear.' I worked a lot on episodes that I didn't write.
We do 32 episodes a season and will have shot 267 episodes by the end of the ninth season... It's impossible to sell that many episodes in the foreign market.
I find it very difficult not to write in any sort of Sudanese style. With Sudanese music, there are very specific things that happen with the syncopation of the drums, melodies and stuff. And whenever I write, that's always the first thing that comes out, because I grew up listening to it. It's a part of me, so I try to bring that out in the music. I think that you have to be honest with what you do, and that's the most honest thing that I can do, is to write that way.
I've always had a show that went seven episodes or 13 episodes or whatever. And I've never had a show that's gone past a first season. It really is a lot of work.
Ron Moore. He was the guy that on our show and Deep Space Nine wrote the best Klingon episodes. He wrote great episodes in general but he wrote the best Klingon episodes. I always could tell when he was going to write a Klingon episode because he was able to grow a beard really quick and I’d see him with the beard, like a Worf-beard, and I go "Ah, Klingon episode coming up!" and he goes "Oh yeah."
It was a very difficult time, 1984. 'Happy Days' ended. I said, 'There's no way I can be a producer.' My attorney said, 'You'll learn.' The first thing we sold was the 'MacGyver' television series. We shot 139 episodes between 1985 and 1992.
In a script, you have to link various episodes together, you have to generate suspense and you have to assemble things - through editing, for example. It's exactly the same in architecture. Architects also put together spatial episodes to make sequences.
It doesn't take long to write things of which you know nothing. When you write of actual things, it takes longer, because you have to live them first.
Drama is the most difficult of all arts. In it two things are to be satisfied - first, the ears, and second, the eyes. To paint a scene, if one thing be painted, it is easy enough; but to paint different things and yet to keep up the central interest is very difficult. Another difficult thing is stage - management, that is, combining different things in such a manner as to keep the central interest intact.
People have outs for numbers of episodes, usually, written into their contract. Some studios will say, "We're going to let Julia Louis-Dreyfus off of Veep to do three episodes, but not three episodes of the same show." But, that's all business affairs, so I'm talking over my head here.
Every writer writes in different ways, and so some write the music first, while others write the lyrics first, and some write while they are doing other things, and it is just nice to see how other writers are writing.
I feel like some sort of fiction-writing hobo, jumping trains and always hoping I'll find a good place to start a fire in the next town. And I keep having these panicky episodes where I corner my husband and rant at him: 'I don't have anywhere to write! I can't write! I don't have a place to write!'
If you look at 'The X-Files' generally, we did 202 episodes. About 80% of them are not 'mythology' episodes, which tend to be the epic episodes. They deal with the big conspiracies, the search for Mulder's sister. They deal with what I would call the 'saga' of 'The X-Files.'
One of the things I've been most excited by is U.S. television drama. For my money, it's some of the greatest narrative art of our time. Each series is like a 19th-century Russian novel: you need to do a lot of work in the first few episodes, just as you do in the first 50-60 pages of those books.
When I first was on Big Time Rush, the TV show, I did a lot of silly things. Among the first episodes that came out, my buddies wanted to have a viewing party, so we turned it into a drinking game. Every time I did something dumb, we took a shot. We were hammered!
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