The hierarchy plays out in the writers room, and you, as a staff writer, need to know your place.
I dress up cute sometimes to go to work, but TV writers don't! They just go however.
When you work in a writers room for a showrunner, you serve that story, and you serve that showrunner. I don't think it should be called writing; I think it should be called rendering content. Because you are there to render the content that is agreed upon in the room, and you're serving the voice of the main storyteller, which is the showrunner.
When I got to 'Looking,' I didn't know that you could write stuff and they would put it on TV. That was that experience. My boss was Andrew Haigh and he came from film; he had never done TV. It was his first TV show, and he was running it. And I think he was like, 'Write it, and we'll put it on.' It was lovely.
I have been watching male programming all my life. And I'm completely interested in it. Like, I love 'Breaking Bad' and I like 'Game of Thrones.'
Sometimes, when I was the only person of color in a room, you had to defend all the people of color everywhere.
The thing is about 'Vida,' we're telling a very simple family narrative. There's nothing fancy about it.
Putting on makeup before work is a meditative exercise. It incites me to think about how I'll tackle my day.
You can't visit Guanajuato without going to the mummy museum.
Write about your experiences! When I moved to L.A., I didn't have any friends, and the office janitor was the person who I saw the most. He would always come in at around 10:00 P.M., and I would still be at my desk, so I wrote a play about a first-year TV writer and the friendship that she developed with the janitor. Our stories matter.
Nothing against resorts or Cancun or Carlos 'n Charlie's, but Guanajuato is different. If you want history, culture, and peace, it's perfect.
I'm interested in people's darkness - and humor in the darkness.
I'm not literary, and I'm not academic, and I don't think like a poet, so my stuff will never be like that.
I'm not a good business person when it comes to my writing.
I know people seek me out to be their mentor, and I've chosen a few people I'm really invested in and nurturing their career and their aesthetic and just their person.
I get a lot of emails of scripts and pilots, and they want me to give feedback, and sometimes I can't because it's so many.
Spanglish is very natural. It's however it comes out. But there are a few patterns that all of us, especially Mexican-American writers, just noticed in how we utilized Spanglish. It comes out of necessity when you can't find the next word. You go to whatever language will serve you best.
