Good characters the reader cares about combined with an intriguing plot. Do those two and you've got it made.
I always overwrite - really awful, long bits of script - and then I trim it down to the bare bones and then add a little bit to colour it in. At the end of all of my stories, I test for wordless comprehension. So I remove the text and see if it works by itself. And if it does, I feel that that's a successful story.
I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.
Sometimes if you tell me what a story is about in just a few sentences, I can tell you if it's going to be a success.
All love stories rest on the leads, and if they work, the show works, and if they don't, the show won't work, no matter how good the writing is.
I thought I was going to be known for my humor. But then I had an idea for a story, which was absolutely not humorous. But, of course, that's the one that sells and becomes big.
The goal is to write a story that you're proud of and hope the fans like it as well.
The characters created cannot just be a mouthpiece for the writer. When you look at a piece of writing, and it's genuine and it doesn't feel like every character is just a mouthpiece for the writer, but that they've been created in such a way that they're expressing an idea that a writer wants to get across, that's when a story succeeds.
