I’ve been a working screenwriter for twenty-five years. While I’ve done a few uncredited rewrites on the feature film side, for me movies are just a dalliance. I’ve spent the majority of my career working in television because that’s where my heart lies. I want to work on things that actually get made. And I want to build worlds and characters that can be lived in for longer than ninety minutes. That’s not to say there are fewer constraints in television. In fact, there are many, many more. And that’s part of the fun.

When Lynne and Michael asked me to write an essay for Uncanny, my first question (after “Are you sure?”) was about parameters. I love parameters. Parameters are the essence of television. It’s not simply the fact that we have a set number of minutes to tell a story, there are schedule, budget, and creative limitations as well. And as a showrunner it’s my job to wrangle all of it.

The moniker can admittedly be confusing, but a showrunner is essentially the boss on a TV series. They’re both the lead writer and the producer with the final say. They “run” the writers room, prep, production, editorial, and all the meetings in between. They’re the ultimate decision-maker. I wasn’t built to be a showrunner. I was built to be a writer. I was sold a bill of goods. When I got into this, I didn’t understand what the top of the profession was going to demand of me. It’s not just scripts you’re delivering, it’s also stewardship.

People who choose predominantly solitary occupations probably aren’t the first folks who spring to mind when you think of vivacious leaders. For most writers, managing other people is a skill born out of saying “Oh, just let me do it!” a few too many times while working on group projects in school. Perhaps not a natural fit, but a necessary one if it means executing your vision.

As we all know, being a leader isn’t about giving orders. It’s about inspiring others to action. And that’s something writers can do. The entire reason we got into this is to share our passion. And passion can be contagious. The tricky bit comes when you’re confronted with the high-stress environment of a film or TV set: insane deadlines, long hours, and a production engine that’s constantly chewing up scripts. On top of that, we have to answer to the people whose tight purse-strings we’re using to turn our imaginations into reality.

Which brings me back to parameters. One of the primary responsibilities of a showrunner is to make the best product you can within the constraints you’re given. That may not sound sexy, but people like me get off on it. You think you can throw all these obstacles my way and deter my passion and creativity? Challenge accepted.

When I was told the parameters for this essay were around 1,500–2,000 words, I had no frame of reference for that. Was that a couple paragraphs or a couple pages? My frame of reference for length is a little more unusual. I know if you want to make forty-two minutes of television you need about fifty-one pages of script. I also know that those fifty-one pages translate to a shooting schedule between eight and fifteen days, depending on your budget. And if you’re on a broadcast network schedule, that means six days from the moment you wrap to go from editor’s assembly to locked cut.

E = mc² where E is a beautifully manicured episode of television, m is the never-enough amount of money in your budget, and c is the loudly ticking clock reverberating in your ears. Don’t think about the math too hard, just trust me it works. Unwavering confidence in the face of uncertainty is another key tool in the showrunner arsenal.

I ran a show a few years ago called Counterpart. J.K. Simmons plays a low-level cog at a spy agency in Berlin who discovers the building he works in contains a doorway to a parallel universe. As you can imagine, it was a series that required a huge amount of world-building. Two worlds, in fact. Many of the actors were playing dual roles, which required different sets of wardrobe for each of them. Our art department often had to construct and dress two versions of the same set, both on our stages and on location. We also produced the show on two different continents, which added to the scheduling challenges. And we had to do all of this on a limited budget. We had less than one-third the budget of a series like Jack Ryan, which I wrote for after Counterpart. But if you look at the two shows, you wouldn’t necessarily know that. Why? Because Counterpart was managed so meticulously that every cent spent on it was visible on screen. And that has a lot to do with how it was written.

I call it writing inside a box. I realize that sounds decidedly not fun. But it doesn’t have to be. Writing inside a box means working with constraints in mind. It requires you to exercise different story muscles. I’d even argue that it demands you be more creative, not less. It’s about finding a way to embrace the limitations in a way that doesn’t hamper creativity.

Anyone with experience working in television has learned how to construct episodes not simply as a writer, but as a producer. We’re writing a thing we know we have to make. When you’re writing feature films, the majority of the time you’re not attached to direct or produce it. You write a script and then it disappears into the ether, sometimes for years. You can write outside the box because the box doesn’t exist yet. We can’t do that in TV. We write to a budget, to our sets, to the number of days we have to shoot. We tell a story with an idea of the exact number of set-ups it has to be in order for it to be producible. It’s not easy. But when you’ve been doing it as long as I have, it becomes second nature.

In television, there are different titles a writer acquires based on experience. The order of operations is as follows: staff writer, story editor, executive story editor, co-producer, producer, supervising producer, co-executive producer, and executive producer (who is also the showrunner). These titles are confusing in that they don’t reflect different responsibilities but rather levels of experience. A story editor doesn’t edit scripts, it just means they’ve graduated from staff writer to a higher pay level that reflects a year or more of experience under their belt. But they’re still a writer on a staff, as is every other position listed above. Bumping up a level often means you’re given more responsibilities. A co-executive producer may run meetings the showrunner can’t attend, or steer the direction of the writers room. But what the titles really reflect is how much experience you have writing inside the box. Can you author a compelling story that we can actually afford to tell in the time we have to tell it? As a showrunner it’s a skill you look for when you’re putting a writing staff together and it’s a skill that, when absent, is appallingly apparent.

Most of us learn this ability the hard way. As a story editor on the show The 4400 (the original series), I’d scripted a scene in which our federal agents were shadowing someone nefarious. They were tracking the person in a high-tech surveillance van while another team in the field followed them on foot. As an inexperienced writer, I wasn’t in any of the meetings and didn’t see how the script progressed through the production process in Vancouver where they shot the show. When I saw the cut of the scene in question, our two lead actors were tracking the enemy…by standing on a balcony with binoculars.

This is what happens when you don’t write with production in mind. Production takes its own shortcuts and often in a way that is far less captivating, visually and emotionally, than if you’d written with the confines in mind from the beginning.

I’ll give you another example from the same show where we did it the right way. During season four we found ourselves way over budget. We needed to construct what’s called a “bottle episode”—a story taking place entirely on our existing sets and filmed in one less day than was typical of the series. So we staged an attack on our heroes and their offices by the “terrorist” group who were our series antagonists. Trapping our characters forced interactions and conversations there wouldn’t otherwise have been an opportunity to showcase. Add to that the stress from the attack itself, and we were blessed with a perfect storm to advance the development of our characters and their relationships. It also gave us the chance to have our hero and enemy face off…with a literal wall between them. Any other interaction between the two would’ve resulted in violence, but they were stuck. One couldn’t get in, and the other couldn’t get out. It allowed for a charged moment that would never have existed otherwise.

The episode, made for less money than any other in the history of the series, became a fan-favorite. Back then, as a baby writer, this surprised me. The episode felt so small, so limited in both scope and action. But now I know better. I’ve learned that limitations can be strengths…you just need to know how to write inside the box.