Lisa Joy Quotes

I've pretty much stopped using a laptop because I'm not line-editing a lot of things anymore.

Well-secured files don't do you much good if you lose them in a fire or hard drive crash.

These things are hard to pin down. We work on a script a bit, then work on a different one.

I don't edit on laptops anymore.

You hate to see yourself do one draft of a script and then have somebody else come back in and change what you've done.

I generally edit quite heavily. In general, there aren't many scenes that are sitting where they sat in the script in the final form.

I'm used to changing a lot of the dialogue. But if I feel like the script is working, I don't want to mess with it.

A lot of times you can lose the MP3s - it's a lot of labor to be finding it again, putting things back up. You gotta back up, back up, back up.

When you decide you want to become a television writer, you naively assume it's going to be like the writers on the old 'Dick Van Dyke Show.' You'll write something and they'll just put it on TV. But what you quickly discover is that American network television is television by committee.

I've written plenty of scripts that sucked.

I have been writing since 11th grade, and have a few features that have almost gotten off the ground. I really want one of my features to come to life.

Sometimes reading scripts is terrible.

I'm in awe of directors like the Coen brothers who can shoot their script and edit it, and that's the movie. They're not discovering the movie in postproduction. They're editing the script they shot.

Lots of shows are written completely in the writer's room. And I wouldn't say 'The Walking Dead' is that way. There are three levels to it. There's us in the room. The writers going off by themselves. And me working with the writers on a finished script.

They're pretty particular about what they show. They certainly edit the scripts and have conversations with the writers about what they are and aren't willing to portray. But the writers and the network are pretty much on the same page.

My characters have to talk, or they're out. They audition in early scenes. If they can't talk, they're given less to do, or thrown out.

Writing on a computer makes saving what's been written too easy. Pretentious lead sentences are kept, not tossed. Instead of sitting surrounded by crumpled paper, the computerized writer has his mistakes neatly stored in digital memory.

I did three or four weeks of work on 'Godzilla;' it wasn't a page-one rewrite or anything like that. The term is 'script doctoring,' is what I did on it.

I wrote a play once called 'Lobby Hero,' which I thought turned out very well, but there's no final version of it. I published the one we produced, but there are seven other versions with different variations sitting in my desk at home.

I listen to a lot of different stuff, from Mozart to Johnny Dowd to Monster Magnet. I don't listen to music while I'm writing a draft, but I do listen to it when I'm revising.

Unfortunately, the back log for writing for 'Walking Dead' is pretty backed up! Usually, we wouldn't see the scripts until the week before - or sometimes even the week of.

There have been times - and not just on 'The Newsroom,' but on 'The West Wing,' 'Sports Night,' 'Studio 60'... - where it was hard to look the cast and crew in the eye, when I put a script on the table that I knew just wasn't good enough.

When I finally finished writing 'Sisters,' I started getting hired for lots of rewrites.

I take time to write my script, if I have more scripts, I will make more movies.

Everything I write in my show is a collaboration with a team.