Dr. Robert Garner is professor of media writing at the School of Radio and Television Arts, Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto.

I was on my way to meet Lisa Melamed, the executive story editor of Sisters, at Lorimar on the Warner Brothers lot. I’d been introduced to Lisa by one of the most talented students I have ever taught, Vickie Reichardt. Vickie had her sample script reviewed by Lisa and her colleague Casey Costello (now with Melrose Place), who both felt the material showed promise.

I passed through security and walked towards the Sisters building. Lisa’s office was all pastels with pictures of her credits on the walls.

At 33, Lisa looks more like 25 and would easily go unnoticed in one of my second-year writing classes. She is attractive, completely unaffected, and when I mentioned how young she looked, her reply surprised me. She said that she was too old for the job she had and that the people she reported to were younger: ‘I came late to writing.’

Lisa was born and raised in Brooklyn. Right after college (where she studied media) she landed a job at Scholastic Productions as an executive. She stayed seven years then decided to make the move to l.a. On the basis of a Roseanne spec script, she was taken on as a vest-pocket client by an agent she knew and admired from her days in New York.

When we spoke, she had been with Sisters for nine months. She talked about the excitement of writing for a show that she respected. She recalled when the agent told her she had a job with Sisters, he apologized for only getting ‘scale.’ Then she found out that scale on a series is $3,500 a week. On top of that she gets $20,000 a script. I asked her what her mother and father thought when they heard that she was making that much money, and she said their advice was, ‘Don’t tell anybody. Keep quiet.’

We laughed at their reaction. There is something heady about that kind of money. ‘What gives you a sense of balance,’ says Melamed, ‘is that you know it can stop at any moment. In this town you can go from making $15,000 a week to the $326 the State of California gives you when you are unemployed.’

The Roseanne spec script initially helped Lisa get a writer’s spot on Brooklyn Bridge. ‘Probably one of the most exciting days of my life was getting Brooklyn Bridge because that was my first network series. After that, it was not fun. It was a tricky situation because the show was such a personal vision to the man who created it, there really wasn’t room for anyone else. I understand that, but it was a little disappointing to be invited along and not get to play.’

Then came the chance of a lifetime. She was interviewed for Sisters, hired on a Friday and started work on the Monday.

‘Everyone’s life out here is like having a lottery ticket with five numbers on it. And you’re waiting for them to call that sixth one and it really begins to feel as though you’re constantly in a contest. You go on these meetings to see if you would fit in on a staff and it’s about your personality; they’ve already read your work. The issue is: `Can we stand being in a room with this woman for eight hours a day?’ `Do we need another short Jewish girl from Brooklyn?’ `Is this somebody we can stand and whose laugh doesn’t make us grimace?’

‘That’s why this year, where I have been writing like a machine, I’m thrilled.’

When asked about using freelance writers, Lisa expressed an opinion common in the industry: ‘It’s incredibly difficult for outsiders to just jump in.’

Lisa recalled two of the toughest days of her life: ‘When I was hired I hadn’t been a viewer of the show, so I spent what I call my prisoner-of-war weekend watching all 22 episodes of the previous season between the Friday I was hired and the Monday I began. That was necessary.’

Lisa describes Sisters’ construction this way: ‘The (hour-long) show has a three-act structure with a, b and c plots. The a story is generally dramatic, although that’s not to say that it can’t have some comic elements. Usually the c story is a comedy ‘runner’ of sorts, and the b story is somewhat less serious or ‘potent’ than the a story.

‘We have general rules that we follow. For example, the a story should have 10 beats (or scenes), the b story should have eight scenes and the c story should have six. We have some latitude with the structure as long as it doesn’t become unrecognizable as an episode of Sisters and what the viewers expect.’

In my classes at Ryerson, students are obliged to deconstruct at least three episodes of a production to find its underlying structure. We’ve found that every show, whether it’s Married…With Children, The Simpsons, Murphy Brown (or even the iconoclastic Seinfeld) has its own underlying and recurring structure. It strikes me as odd that most viewers don’t realize that.

Lisa recalled those first days with the show: ‘The turnaround is very short. I got here on June 1, 1992 and the executive producers and supervising producers had already planned out how the season was going to work, what the main storylines were and how the main characters were going to develop.

‘Casey (Costello, a story editor) got the first assignment and we sat in a room with her for three days and worked out the details of the story. Then the executive and supervising producers decided on the three story lines that would make up that show and Casey went away and had two weeks to do the first draft (a normal writing period). And then we began on my story…’

We talked for a few moments about whether it is a good idea to have students deconstruct existing shows. Lisa thought for a moment, and then said, a little hesitantly: ‘It’s smart to be doing that early because your students will learn the discipline of doing this sort of thing. Everybody has to get that self-indulgent piece of writing out of them. What you’re doing is interesting because it was only when I turned 30 that I felt brave enough to go out there and be a writer. I don’t know what it would like to be 22 and writing for a show. Frankly, I don’t know how wise it would be to try.

‘You know, what you’re asking your students to do (calling established writers for external adjudications) is a bit of a crap shoot,’ Then she smiled, ‘But it seems to be working.’

I asked Lisa if she thought it would be useful to have students team-write some scripts. She liked that notion: ‘We have two teams at Sisters. What you might want to do is simulate a writing staff. Make someone the executive producer, for better or worse, right or wrong…because that’s the kind of situation they’ll face if they’re on a staff in Los Angeles.’

We talked for a few moments about the career-making power of a great speculative script. Lisa, though, had this advice: ‘It’s absolutely true that you should not send a spec script of the show to the same show. They’ll be ruthless with it. As a story editor, you just can’t help it. There’s a proprietary instinct that kicks in. Basically, your spec script can go to any other show of a comparable genre. Some shows become popular as spec show scripts. A couple of years ago it was Northern Exposure; right now it’s Seinfeld.

‘When I did my Roseanne script, I’m sure I contributed to that environmental pollution. When I was interviewed for Roseanne – I wasn’t hired – there were hundreds of scripts in their office. It really makes a difference who your agent is in terms of getting stuff read. You may have a brilliant script, but if it goes to the bottom of the ‘b’ priority pile, it won’t get read. When I was a development exec, I returned a lot of scripts unread to people.’

Lisa said a spec script may tell a story editor more about your abilities than a script that has been televised.

‘Because of the collaborative nature of writing for television, somebody watching an episode does not necessarily know who wrote what. For example, by the time one of my scripts for Sisters gets to the screen, only 40% to 75% of what is in the final draft is truly mine. That’s because the executive producers take it and do whatever finessing is required.’

I asked Lisa if that ‘finessing’ always made the script better. Her response: ‘A lot of stomach lining has been sacrificed to that question. What they end up with at the end of the week may not bear any resemblance to what they started with. That’s especially true in comedic series where the material is written by a team. The strange thing is, your name is still on the script and you may not have written a word of it. But at least everybody is in on the process.

‘I find it very difficult on the rare occasions when we sit down in a room and try to rewrite a script together. It’s agonizing. I would rather have someone say to me, `Here’s what we want you to do. Go fix it.’ There is something excruciating about sitting in a room with a couple of pencils trying to make a scene work.’

She shared with me the way the process works on Sisters when things are ‘ideal.’ She pointed to an empty board: ‘You see that board up there? That is usually filled with squares with scenes on them. For three days the writing staff will sit in a room and work out all the beats to the a, b and c stories. Then we put all the scenes up on the board and figure out in what sequence they should come, what the act break scenes are and what will keep the audience through the commercials.

‘With a staff of professional writers, you’re getting access to a type of brain trust, and there’s something useful about saying the story out loud. That’s particularly true if you’re in a room with people you trust and you can say a stupid thing…out of that idea which didn’t quite work you may think of something else. I find the process is much more dynamic that way.’

When we talked on that sunny Los Angeles day, Lisa didn’t know whether Sisters would be renewed. Even if the show was renewed, she didn’t know whether she would be hired for the new season.

At that moment, at the cusp of her career in television, I asked her how it felt to be writing for over 15 million viewers. ‘It’s pretty exciting. My fantasy is that the people from high school who made fun of me for being artsy and wanting to be a writer will turn on their television set one night and they’re now fat and bald and they will see my credit and they can’t believe it.’

At that instant she looked her youngest. A creative kid from a Brooklyn high school who had caught the brass ring and was living out her dream. And just like a story from Sisters, which has its share of happy endings, the show was renewed for a new season and Lisa was promoted to producer. Even in the hard-driving world of Los Angeles, things can sometimes work out.

In upcoming articles, Dr. Gardner will turn his attention from the hot young writers in Los Angeles to prominent Canadian writers who have been featured at Ryerson Polytechnic University’s Master Writers’ Workshop. First up: Malcolm MacRury, screenwriter of the feature The Man Without a Face.