Dr. Robert Gardner is a professor of media writing and the chair of the School of Radio and Television Arts, Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto.

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On a gray Canadian winter’s day, Anna Sandor’s life may seem like the stuff of dreams. She’s one of that rare breed, a successful Canadian writer living close enough to Hollywood to be in the game, and far enough on the outskirts of the city to enjoy a suburban lifestyle filled with sunshine. She and her husband, William Gough (also a fine writer), live in a handsome bungalow complete with a pool and enough tropical vegetation to excite the envy of a visitor from the frozen north.

Sandor was back in Toronto this month to accept the Margaret Collier Award at the Gemini Awards for her lifetime achievement as a writer. Mind you, she’s no stranger to awards: they dot the walls of her home. A four-time winner of the Prix Anik, she has also won an ACTRA Award (’86), the Humanitas Prize (’93), and she has received Emmy and Writers Guild of America nominations.

Not bad for someone whose childhood was disrupted by the Hungarian Revolution and who had to make a new life with her parents in Canada.

In 1989, after she and her husband had developed successful careers in Canada, they made the move to Los Angeles. Her Canadian credits included (among others) King of Kensington, Flappers, Hangin’ In, Danger Bay, For the Record and Seeing Things.

In the ’80s she made the transition to dramatic long-form (two hours), and she became an expert in crafting the movie of the week. She is having a remarkable career.

Her script for cbc’s Charlie Grant’s War was a strange precursor of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List; indeed the premise is almost identical.

Credits in the u.s. include Amelia Earhart: The Final Flight, For the Love of My Child (nbc), Family of Strangers (cowritten with Gough for cbs), Miss Rose White (a 1992 Hallmark Hall of Fame telecast on nbc), and Stolen, One Husband (a comedy for cbs also cowritten with Gough).

She’s certainly recognized in the States as a major writer. Good enough to be represented by the William Morris Agency and agents in l.a. and New York.

Sandor is a slight woman who is much younger than I would have imagined (considering all those credits). She is warm, friendly, and – one senses – very strong.

Gough is more laid back. He’s one of the most articulate men I’ve ever talked to. He strikes me as vulnerable: a kind of intellectual innocent in an intensely commercial world. He has some of the qualities of one of my favorite professors of English literature. It doesn’t come as any surprise that he has written critically acclaimed novels about his Cape Breton home.

Sandor and Gough met when he hired her, many years ago, to write one of the shows he was producing for Canadian tv. They often work as a writing team.

Tea is prepared and we begin to talk about the form of the mow. I want to find out if there is a recurring structure to this challenging type of writing.

It strikes me that Sandor and Gough are slightly suspect of any facile consideration of form. Structure may be present, says Gough, but it offers almost infinite possibilities as the story unfolds.

Sandor credits her early Canadian experience with situation comedy as a wonderful training ground in the sheer craft of television writing. She worked with the late Jack Humphries at the cbc in Toronto and discovered that the situation comedy is almost ‘completely structure.’ To that extent, Sandor’s sense of form is innate: it’s in her bones.

The mow is an entirely different creature than the feature film. Features, she says, can be more leisurely and more ‘free form’ in their shape. In television, it’s too easy to tune out if the attention of the audience isn’t commanded immediately.

She points out that the mow has seven acts (the feature has three acts) and that the ‘one-hour break is the most critical point in the story.’

She generally writes a long first act, sometimes as much as 25 to 30 minutes. The producers will often let that happen. After the first act, though, they are likely to be more insistent that there be more act breaks.

The long first act (which is characteristic of her style) allows her to engage her audience. And sometimes that engagement doesn’t have to be through relentless action. Often, says Sandor, there’s an incredible power in the steady development of the narrative. At the same time, however, she feels that the pieces she wrote in Canada are ‘slow.’ Often when she and Gough show their Canadian work to American producers, they’ll say that it is quality material, but it would never ‘play’ in the States.

When she pitches a story (and word is that she’s terrific at presenting an idea), she knows that the producers are interested in how the story starts, what happens at the one-hour mark, and how the story resolves itself.

On their arrival in Hollywood, Sandor says she and Gough used to prepare long, intricate presentations. They discovered, though, that producers want to know what the underpinnings of the story are. In a sense, they’re not interested in all the details.

Frequently she’ll read treatments prepared by other writers and she’ll realize that there is no indication of where the act breaks lie. This, she claims, is really ‘fooling yourself. You have to have a very clear idea of where the act breaks are or you might find yourself in trouble when you start to write the script.

‘The structure should always be suggested by the piece itself. You want to make sure that the audience comes back after every break, but the one-hour break is the important one. So you have to find the center of your piece, and by the time you get to the 60-minute mark, you have to have your audience in the palm of your hand.

‘You have to know what your conflicts are and you have to leave the viewers hanging. They (through identification with the hero) have to be out at the end of the cliffeither physically or emotionally.

‘After the first hour mark, you think, `I’ve done half of the piece or more, how do I sustain it again for four more acts?’ That’s always a huge challenge.’

It sounds daunting: capture the audience’s attention with a narrative dealing with a character they care about intensely, and then usher them through a series of seven acts, over two hours, in a way that will compel them to stay with you. Given all the claims on the attention of the modern audience, it seems like an impossible task.

Recently Sandor was offered a stage play to adapt. She enjoyed the material but felt there simply wasn’t enough incident to sustain the teleplay over the necessary two hours. ‘There was one main action, and the rest was talk, talk, talk,’ says Sandor. She turned the assignment down.

But if the first act is long (almost 30 minutes), the last act is ‘maybe seven pages or roughly seven minutes. That’s short. And you have to ask yourself: do you have so much left to say that you have to squeeze it into the available time?’ To the listener, it sounds like a type of intellectual wrestling match.

‘Now a good deal of this is technical,’ continues Sandor. ‘On the other hand you can’t approach dramatic writing purely technically. I’ve never sat down and said, `Okay, here’s act one, here’s act two, and act three (and so on).’ You just kind of write and the structure suggests itself.’

I’m intrigued by that line: ‘The structure suggests itself.’ What that means, I suppose, is that Sandor has internalized the two-hour mow form to such an extent that she can rely almost completely on a type of deep concentration. This allows her to focus on her characters to a degree that – in one sense – permits the piece to write itself.

No wonder the Greeks believed in the Muses. Any talented writer I’ve known fully appreciates that at one point the act of writing is almost automatic. Periodically they come up for air to see if the whole elaborate structure actually works.

Says Sandor: ‘I kind of automatically sense where the act breaks should be.’

For me, it’s craft raised to the level where true creativity and intuition can take over.

She’s firm when she says, ‘You can’t ever let structure dictate totally what you’re going to write. It’s the piece that dictates the structure.’

At the risk of sounding pedantic, I ask Sandor and Gough about that point in most dramatic structures where the hero seems to have lost everything (what Northrop Frye, the great Canadian scholar, called ‘the ritual death’). I also probe the notion that drama often has a moral dimension.

Sandor is clearly uncomfortable with these ideas. In a sense, most of the talented writers I’ve known want to preserve some element of mystery about the creative process.

We talk, briefly, about my conversation with James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News), where he insisted he didn’t know what he was doing when he won multiple Academy Awards for the first feature he wrote and directed. It was his third film (I’ll Do Anything) where one might have assumed that he’d learned a thing or two that got him into trouble with the critics.

Sandor puts it this way: ‘I really believe in the technique and craft of writing, particularly in television and films. But at the same time, if you sit and say, `Okay, the character has to be at a point where she has lost everything,’ it takes the heart out of it.’

She also thinks the notion of having a moral center to the dramatic form would ‘make the whole enterprise tiresome.’

However, when we talk about Charlie Grant’s War, where an ordinary Canadian saves scores of people from the terrors of the Holocaust, she describes how this everyday man acted in extraordinary ways. She also discusses another of her characters who, in an act of unselfishness, steps into the path of a bullet to save someone else. To my mind these are moral acts of heightened proportions.

In all of this discussion, Gough acts like a type of brilliant Greek chorus. He may be the more introspective of the two. He talks, in a convincing way, about the dramatic form as part of the human’s effort to make sense out of existence: ‘To give life meaning.’ Sandor and Gough both appreciate that real life has no shape, no act breaks, and seldom a moral center.

I am struck by the fact that the couple is consistently respectful of each other as we talk about the structure of myth and fable, and why people seem to ‘need’ drama. Clearly they enjoy talking about dramatic form. For all their success, however, they refuse to be prescriptive. When drama works, it is still a mystery; and when it fails – as it so often does – it defies any real analysis.

Beyond form there is another realm. One that Anna Sandor and William Gough seem to have the capacity to plumb with some measure of ease.