The Pilot Project, Act 1: Meeting the Collaborator

On the birth of an idea, the creative process, and the gift of friendship

Hello everyone… A huge thanks to our paying subscribers for your support of STILL!

Admittedly, my paying-subscriber-only content has been lacking lately as I’ve been busy with other projects (launching The Way Home, onboarding as a hospice chaplain, creating my free How to Make Your Mind eBook, and the prison meditation initiative I’ll tell you more about soon!).
It is my intention to get more regular in this department in the next couple of months—stay tuned—but for now I wanted to get this in your inbox… a three-part series reflecting on the process of co-writing a TV show pilot over the past 18 months.

So, readers and free subscribers, now is a great time to give a gift and upgrade your subscription!

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Act 1: Meeting the Collaborator

I co-wrote a comedy TV show pilot last year.

Back in 2022, the idea had already been swirling around my mind for a year or so. It kept coming up. But what did I know about writing a TV show? Besides, at that point, while I had finished my manuscript for The Way Home, I barely had a literary agent and I certainly didn’t have a publisher yet. So I wasn’t yet confident—or, I should say, crazy—enough to dive into another creative writing project.

But I couldn’t shake the idea.
And so it eventually moved into the next phase:
I created a Google doc.

I love Google Docs. It’s where I can dump thoughts, stories, quotes, and memories. Anywhere, anytime. Google Docs was critical for writing my book. It’s how that project went from a tangled mess of ideas to a coherent, published book.

When an idea gets its own doc, it’s almost as if it becomes out of my control. It gets a mind of its own. It starts pulling other ideas into its orbit. It notices things. It makes connections.

From there, the TV show idea snowballed. Soon it had a setting, characters, an arc.
But anytime I tried to get beyond that and start writing scenes, it stalled out.
It was missing something.
It was missing someone.