Serling’s Advice to Writers

As most writers know, ideas often come in a flash of inspiration. You’re reading, or walking, or driving, and … click. A seemingly perfect premise or angle appears in your head.

And all too often, that’s where it dies. We overthink it or overanalyze it to death. Or we get distracted and forget all about it. Rod Serling, however, had a different approach:

The instinct of creativity must be followed by the act, the physical act of putting it down for a sense of permanence. Once you get that prod, that emotional jar, that “I have witnessed something.” Or “I have felt something.” Or “I have seen something.” Or, through observation, “I have been moved by an event.” I think the answer is, “Get it down. Get it down quickly. Write it down.”

Storytelling: Then and Now

He has just released what he calls “a movie full of monsters and blood and gore.” But The Cabin in the Woods director Drew Goddard singled out everyone’s favorite sci-fi/fantasy anthology series for praise in a recent interview with the Twitch film website.

Drew Goddard

Q: Do you think storytelling in TV is better than when we were kids?

A: Well, I mean just look at The Twilight Zone. Those guys were pumping out tons of episodes a year of amazing quality. They would laugh at us today with our 22-episode schedules. Even when the special effects were cheesy, the stories, more often than not, were great.

Twilight Zone, of course, was a labor of love for creator Rod Serling, who worked long days with a very talented crew to ensure that the series offered “extremely polished films,” as he put it. But Goddard has put his finger on another aspect of the series that isn’t always highlighted: It offered not only quality, but quantity.