TWoP The Second Rob Thomas Interview p1 ff: I've said it before, but if I could have all the time in the world in which we think of a new way for Veronica to get someone's cell phone -- because we don't want to do it the same way every time, we want to think of something new, something that's fun to watch. 'Fun to watch' is something of a watchword around here, because real private detectiving is talking on the phone and plugging away on the computer.

Now I'll say this about the ending of the Dean O'Dell mystery: whereas all our big mysteries so far have been detective, detective, detective, detective, THRILLER in the finale, this one's going to be more of a true parlor-game mystery. We start shooting the finale tomorrow, and it's not going to be Veronica being chased around with a knife.
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CB: So just to clarify, the person who gets credit for writing the episode is starting out with the act structure and everything in place -- he or she is basically just writing the dialogue.
RT: Yeah. And I'm sorry, I even skipped a huge step in there. When we break it in the room, we've got all these dry-erase boards set up, and we have every scene written up on the board and color-coded according to what subplot it's tied to, so you can see the whole episode up on a board. cool. The writer actually initially does an outline that takes a couple of days, and I would say we do remarkably detailed outlines. When I was at Dawson's Creek, our outlines would be roughly eight pages. Here, they're frequently twenty-five. At Dawson's Creek, there would be thirty-five to forty scenes, and here, we typically have sixty. Generally, WB shows, they're just very talky, but with us, there are all these little beats, like Veronica placing a camera in a cubby. That's partly a function of the genre, and partly a pace thing -- I like short scenes. I'm not crazy about three-and-a-half-page talky scenes. So we get the outline approved by the studio and network, and then the writer goes off for two weeks to write the script. As I said, the outline is an incredibly detailed document, and it's really important to me, even though it's my least favorite part of the process in that it's so taxing on my brain. It's easier for me to polish a script than to break a story any day. Any day. That would change if I were doing Freaks And Geeks or Dawson's Creek; detective shows are like great big jigsaw puzzles -- they're tough as opposed to coming-of-age stories, which can be done well or badly, but are consistently easy to break.

A lot of putting out fires is rewriting, and I've thankfully got really good people around me, and whatever happens -- whether it's cast members needing time off, or problems with the crew -- basically, I'm shielded from most of that. We've tried to structure things pretty well so I only have to deal with creative aspects of the show -- the scripts, the cuts, the casting. Fortunately, [executive producers] Danielle Stokdyk and Jen Gwartz take a huge load off here as far as promotions and marketing and dealing with the network about anything non-creative, even though they're both very creative producers and give feedback for all the scripts. But they take a lot of the things that I hate about the job off my plate. And [supervising producer] Dan Etheridge, who's down in San Diego, is just a fantastic right-hand man for me, because we're good friends and share similar tastes, and he's on the set all the time. I wish I could clone him, because he has to split his time between the director who's prepping and the director who's shooting. I can always tell -- if I see something in dailies I don't like, it probably means that Dan was with the prepping director at that moment. huh.

I love television. I love the rhythm of it, I love writing something and seeing it on the air, I love going to work each day; four years and a development deal, it was miserable. In a way, sometimes a month of that sounds really good, just sitting at home doodling on your pilot script would be nice, as opposed to having scripts in production, scripts in post-production, breaking episodes -- it's a crazy job, but there's no better job in show business. I get pretty much final say on script and cut and cast and music, and I really dig what I do.