How do you tell 22 hours of stories about seven characters in hour-long servings, interspersed with dense medical details, and manage to keep the largest audience in television clamoring for the next new episode?
If you are the writing team that supplies the scripts for NBC's "ER," you more or less "make it up as we go along," as one of the show's writers put it.Despite what appears to be an elaborate plan for the interwoven events that unfold over nine months, very little about "ER," the most popular show on television, is planned more than a month or so in advance.
"We really don't work out where the season is going," said Lydia Woodward, a co-executive producer and one of the head writers. "We're really not sure at all."
Not sure what is going to happen to Greene and the lawsuit over the death of a patient in childbirth? Not sure whether Carter will become a surgeon? Not sure whether Lewis will adopt her baby niece? Not sure whether Hathaway will continue her relationship with the paramedic? Not sure which patients live and which die?
"We know bits and pieces," Woodward said. "But we don't necessarily know where it's all going. There is no grand plan. It's a lot of mini-plans. Last season, the only thing we knew when the season started was that Hathaway was not going to marry Taglieri. This season, we knew even less."
The show's stories were hashed out several months ago by the show's team of six or seven staff writers. The process begins with story meetings, where the writers occasionally argue over plots and character decisions ("I can't tell you how many hours of conversations we had over what Lewis would do with the baby"), includes the incorporation of medical information supplied by researchers who scour journals and newspapers for real-life cases, and winds up with the lives of the show's seven main characters summarized on an erasable story board.
"Last year, we attempted to plan about eight episodes at a time, and we found that was too much," Woodward said, "because by the time we got to the fifth episode, we'd either told more of the story than we wanted to, or we hadn't told it fast enough. So this year, we said we're not going to do that."
Instead, the writers tried to put together the elements of no more than five episodes at a time, knowing even these would play out differently as the season progressed.
"We sit in a room, and we put 1 through 5 up on the board, and we start thinking about character arcs." ("Arc" has become a favorite slice of writer jargon in Hollywood. Even actors use it now to describe a range of changes a character goes through.)
The thinking starts very generally, Woodward said: "What do I want to do with Greene? What do I want to do with Hathaway? What do we want to build to halfway through the season? And then we start filling in the board. And it's interesting when you get toward the end. You look back up there and say, `Oh, we were going to do that?'
"Maybe 60 percent of what we planned is realized. The rest is completely forgotten. Sometimes we look at the board and say: `What were we thinking? That's the worst idea that's ever been written down. Somebody get up there and erase it!' "
The writers check the board to see how stories have progressed before they sit down to write. They may know they are in the middle of a three-to-five episode story featuring a guest star, as earlier this season, when Red Buttons played a doting husband with a terminally ill wife.
"When we planned out shows for February," Woodward said, "we knew that arc would end in episode 14. So when I wrote that episode, I knew I had that dramatic high point."
The highly changeable process is welcomed by the writers, she said. "I think it's really healthy to bring as much freshness to the show as possible, because it makes the process closer to life. None of us knows how an episode in life is going to end up. You don't know what you're going to be doing a year from now."
"ER" is Woodward's fourth dramatic series. She said that her first two experiences, on "St. Elsewhere" and "China Beach" (she also wrote for a short-lived series called "Angel Street"), involved completely different writing processes.
" `St. Elsewhere' had a much more formulaic approach," she said. "They had four story lines per episode: One humorous, one personal, one medical and one I can't remember." In contrast, "China Beach" was very freewheeling for the writers.
Though only two of the show's writers are doctors, the others have learned to incorporate medical procedures and jargon into every script.
"The medical stuff is not really as hard as it might appear from the outside," Woodward said. "The researchers collect stories, anecdotes, what have you. We fill in the blanks in a script with material they give us. We've found you couldn't make up anything that hasn't happened."
The writers themselves visit hospitals to "pick up the lingo," Woodward said. "Once we pick the medical stories, the doctors on staff fill in the information about how to treat the trauma. They write out the terms ahead of time, and the writers plug them in. It's all arcane, but suffice it to say, you can throw `CVC, chem 7' into any sentence, and you're OK."