How my writing life began as a friends-to-lovers trope

You know how in friends-to-lovers tropes, it starts as them being best friends for the longest time, and then one day, everything changes? Suddenly like has turned into love, and you’ve gone from friend to beau. That’s exactly how I felt when I realized I was no longer looking at TV as only a fan. I was also looking at it as a writer.

I’d considered myself a writer for years. Still, I could never figure out exactly what type of writer I was until I discovered television writing through watching episodes of The Young & the Restless and The Bold & the Beautiful. Soaps get a lot of flack, but they’re important. The ability to tell a story every weekday and keep it going for decades? That’s spectacular.

As I sat and watched these shows for years, I saw them as a nice weekly getaway for a few hours of enjoyment, but within the last 7 years, I started seeing much more than that. I saw the intricate storylines, the character development, and of course, the endless possibilities. You can kill off Adam Newman (Y&R) twice, then come back years down the line with Adam having had plastic surgery and being completely alive. You can watch Brooke Logan (B&B) marry a man, then his son, and sleep with that son. You accept it all because it’s wrapped up in good storytelling. It’s insane, and 100% amazing all that soaps have managed to pull off over the years, and it’s that kind of stuff that made me want to be a TV writer.

You probably think that’s a little vague. There are several types of TV writers. Fair enough. To be more specific, I want to be a Drama Writer and to be even more specific. I want to write for New and Young adult audiences. Some examples of shows in that category would be Pretty Little Liars, Gossip Girl, The Bold Type, Charmed, One Tree Hill, All American, and so on. I learned I wanted to be a TV writer watching soaps, but I found out the type by watching shows like these. This was the friends-to-lovers trope all over again. Or, in my case, fan-to-writer.

These shows made me laugh, kept me intrigued, and inspired me during the times when I really needed it. They were fiction, and yet they opened an exciting view for a small-town girl like myself. These shows helped me see beyond that, and after a while, they were more than a weekday must-see. They were what made me realize I wanted to do that for others. I wanted to create fun and carefree shows for those who needed that escape. And I also wanted something that most of these shows didn’t have, a cast that looked like my friends and me.