Writing like it's a 'game of telephone' - Harvard Gazette

"In a seminar room in Farkas Hall, senior Aiyanna Ojukwu stood before a rolling whiteboard lined with index cards, each representing a plot point from her TV pilot episode. The story, as she explained to classmates grouped around a nearby table, follows a high school senior whose life takes a turn after an heirloom - a watch her parents gave her - goes missing."

""I think my original idea was it's a windable watch, and if it gets off time then something bad will happen," Ojukwu explained. "But if you can think of something better, this heirloom doesn't need to be a watch. It just needs to be something that can be lost." Senior Solomey Alemseged had an idea: "Maybe it doesn't tell time, but it tells something else." Ojukwu liked the proposal. "Maybe it shows how out of line you are, like a compass," she mused. "A moral compass," senior Inseo Yeo added."

""I'm a curious person and thus I've worked in a variety of fields. Relatedly, a TV writers room is really about bringing a whole spectrum of experience, personal experiences, ideologies, scholarships, and the multivalent aspects of your personhood, to bear on the story that you are writing collectively with a group of people," said Howze. "To make a television show is to work incredibly collaboratively, and to risk failure really boldly, over and over again in a serialized, recurrent way. It's like any creative practice.""

Students workshop TV pilot concepts in a seminar modeled on a writers' room, using index-card plot points and peer feedback to revise ideas. Projects include a high school senior whose heirloom watch goes missing and subsequent shifts in the object's function through class suggestions. The course emphasizes iterative collaboration, idea exchange, and collective problem-solving across diverse perspectives. Instructor Phillip Howze describes the writers' room as a space to bring varied experiences, ideologies, and personal perspectives to shape serialized storytelling. The class trains students in TV-specific techniques, collaborative mechanics, and bold risk-taking through repeated revisions.

Read at Harvard Gazette