This is the damnedest writing method I've ever encountered. At several points as I wrote and polished Episode 4 I sort of thought I couldn't do it. TV writers work like this all the time? Insane. And yet I did. This is How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Collaboration.I'm the kind of insane writer who won't let a rough draft out to my workshop until I'm pretty sure it won't embarrass me. So sending a rough draft (rough as in "I promise to insert more local color here" rough) to a passel of writers whose work I really, really like was disquieting. But more than that, we'd all met, come up with outlines for the series and each episode, and established the beats. I wrote a draft. And then I got word that some of the beats I was writing to had changed. And the flow of the story had changed slightly and I had to rejigger a couple of scenes, and... I wasn't in charge. I was a participant, but I wasn't the final word and... you are not the boss of me.Then it occurred to me that that's sort of the underlying theme of Episode 4: everyone insisting that the other can't boss them around. Charles fears that if he gives way to Catherine's (reasonable) insistence that she doesn't want Barbara Castlemaine as her Lady of the Bedchamber. He's unable to let her have her way because it might set a dangerous precedent for him. (It's interesting that he lets Barbara cajole, dictate, and pitch scenes to get what she wants... but a mistress, however beloved, isn't the same as a wife and queen).Meanwhile, Catherine comes from a religious and cultural background that says explicitly that her husband is the boss of her. What does it take for her to say No to him? To go against her upbringing, her faith, she has to rally both her love for her husband (love? for her husband? ridiculous!) and her power as a queen. She flexes her wings to tell the king that in this, at least, he is not the boss of her. And Barbara Castlemaine? She adores Charles, fears losing him--and fears to lose him will be lose her everything: status, livelihood, reputation. She cannot let Catherine be the boss of her, or of the man they both love.So there I was, working on Episode 4 v2, setting up the stew of hurt feelings, fear, love, anxiety, triumph that all these people are dealing with... And I realize that my brilliant collaborators put all the tools I needed right out there on the table for me to play with. So far from being the boss of me, they had given me gifts in the most generous way.
