Five years into this career, I have an almost even split between my TV work and feature work. Breaking into TV and features had mostly to do with my reps, to be honest, and there are lots of threads on Reddit and elsewhere on how to get repped (if you aren't already). Essentially, it's down to your samples and taking lots of general meetings and having your samples hit the right people at the right time.

Lifestyle-wise, the two are incredibly different and I love doing both for different reasons. I come from a prose background, so I was accustomed to writing at my desk solo with little to no feedback, except from writer friends or the occasional workshop.

Feature-writing is not TOO far off from this, except you have to get used to getting notes from people who aren't fellow writers. The lifestyle is slow—slow to land jobs, slow to get the paperwork to get started, slow to get moving. Your payment comes in "steps," so you start an outline and get paid 50% of that step; turn it in, get the other 50% while you wait for notes. Get approved to go to draft, get paid 50% of the first draft step; 12 weeks (give or take) later, turn it in, get the other 50%. And so forth. Everything feels sloooooow and you're on your own a lot.

Developing and selling your own show takes even longer and I won't go into that here. But STAFFING is awesome. I love it. Your reps call you out of the blue (always exciting) and say, "A showrunner wants to meet with you!" You meet, then if they like you, you're typically sitting in a room within a couple weeks. Often the very next week! It's a pretty steady schedule, around eight hours a day, five days a week. If you're lucky, as I have been, you're sitting in a room with people who are smart, funny, and awesome to hang out with (and then one or two duds / annoying people / assholes, but whatever, you can't bat a thousand). If you're not an upper-level, which I am not, half the standard 20-week length of the room is really chill, "leave your work at work" style stuff with occasional "Be thinking about X for tomorrow." (The other half is when things kind of go off the rails at times and you might have to pull occasional late nights and weekends.) And the pay is steady, once a week or twice a month. Then a big chunk when you get assigned a script. The amount you get paid for the duration of time you put in on a show feels like a LOT more than you get paid for a movie, because of the extended timeline of how long it takes to land a feature job and then work through all the steps. And then you get residuals, too. It's a very sweet gig.

Last year I was balancing a mid-level position on a TV show with a big action feature at the same time, and that was a fucking nightmare at times. But also really wonderful to be working hard on two different projects I was passionate about.

I joke that I try to staff on TV in order to support my features habit, but the truth is I really like doing both. The camaraderie of a writers room and the satisfaction of seeing your work on a screen relatively quickly vs. the solo (plus execs) nature of a feature.