‘We knew from the beginning he [lead character Dominic Da Vinci] would have a drinking problem and we weren’t going to just solve it,’ says Alan Di Fiore, one of the writers on coroner series Da Vinci’s Inquest. ‘He has to deal with that just the way in real life you would not solve someone’s drinking problem in one hour.’

It’s this realistic style that distinguishes writing on Da Vinci’s Inquest from a David Kelley (The Practice, Ally McBeal) production, for example, Di Fiore says. ‘A lot of shows will solve an enormous social problem in an hour. We don’t believe in result-oriented work, or result-oriented performances. The characters’ reactions come out of the moment; what are they thinking now?’

Di Fiore’s work on Da Vinci’s has garnered him three Gemini nominations for best writing in a dramatic series for three episodes of the series.

The process of writing for Da Vinci’s, Di Fiore explains, is both an intense intellectual exercise and an office coffee klatch that should be the envy of many. The writing team discusses the sociological implications of their work, what’s happening in Vancouver, what are the social issues of the day. And they always try to stay one step ahead of the headlines. ‘Mamet says if you want to do a story about a neo-Nazi, well, where’s the story? Everybody knows there are neo-Nazis.’

The writer has been with the show since its inception four years ago. But he’s known he wanted to be a writer since he was 12. It took a while to get here. ‘By the time I was through a couple of years of university I’d done everything from working in a fish packing plant to running a jazz club,’ Di Fiore says.

In the early eighties, he wrote a documentary on the life of Emily Carr, a project that led to a meeting with actor/writer and director Stuart Margolin. For the next several years, Margolin and Di Fiore were rewrite script doctors. One highlight of this mostly uncredited rework was a video called By the Sword with F. Murray Abraham and Eric Roberts. The two also cowrote two original scripts, one of which was sold to Miramax.

‘Every year someone seems to option it, but it never gets made,’ Di Fiore says. The writer’s break came in 1989, when Margolin, in Italy to work on the six-hour miniseries Donna d’onore (Vendetta: Secrets of a Mafia Bride) gave him a ring. ‘We’ve got five weeks to rewrite six hours from page one,’ Margolis told him. The success of that gig led to a stint on Chris Haddock’s first series Mom P.I. ‘At the time [Haddock] said that someday he would be able to put together a really crack writing team.’

Four years ago, the call came from Haddock. ‘Stuart Margolin invited me to the party and Chris asked me to dance,’ Di Fiore says.

The writing process benefits from the input of homicide detectives, police officers and even one of the former chief coroners for British Columbia, all of whom are advisers to the series. ‘Because [Da Vinci] is not a cop or a detective, the stories must follow what a coroner does: he investigates death and he prevents it. We start out with 20 or 30 ideas that we’ll kick around and the ones that survive the onslaught get developed.’

Part of knowing what the right story is, Di Fiore adds, is trusting one’s instincts. ‘There’s a certain amount of writing that is magical. I look for those moments when the story begins to tell me what it wants to say.’