As you've co-written a couple of episodes this year, can you tell us about the experience of working with other writers?
I've had the chance to co-write a number of episodes while I've been on Buffy, and in season six I did two in a row. I wrote half of Flooded (with Doug Petrie) and then half of Life Serial (with David Fury). We did those two in completely different ways.
With Flooded, I wrote a draft and then Doug took it and did the re-write on it. And then I took it and did the re-write on that and it went back and forth. [With] Life Serial, Fury took the first half and I took the second half and there was no re-writing of each other's material, we each re-wrote out own. That method works a lot better.
The one with me and Doug where we kept re-writing each other, we both would just throw out the other person's stuff and put our own stuff in there, so it just kept turning into my script, his script, my script and that didn't work as well.
It works better when we're each given our own domain and Life Serial was perfect for that because it was such an episodic episode by nature. We had originally designed it to be written by four different writers, each one taking an act but there were regulations about how many names you could put on a script so we ended up doing it with two writers each taking half. And in general that's how we do scripts when there's multiple credits.
In a previous season I co-wrote Doomed with Fury and Marti Noxon, and we did that by actually breaking a script. Even though there are four acts in a script, we actually broke it into thirds, so one person would stop at the end of a certain scene and the other person would pick up there. We wrote that one in big chunks like that, and that worked out quite well.
