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By Douglas Marland
- Watch the show.
- Learn the history of the show. You would be surprised at the ideas that you can get from the back story of your characters.
- Read the fan mail. The very characters that are not thrilling to you may be the audience's favorites.
- Be objective. When I came in to ATWT, the first thing I said was, what is pleasing the audience? You have to put your own personal likes and dislikes aside and develop the characters that the audience wants to see.
- Talk to everyone; writers and actors especially. There may be something in a character's history that will work beautifully for you, and who would know better than the actor who has been playing the role?
- Don't change a core character. You can certainly give them edges they didn't have before, or give them a logical reason to change their behavior. But when the audience says, "He would never do that," then you have failed.
- Build new characters slowly. Everyone knows that it takes six months to a year for an audience to care about a new character. Tie them in to existing characters. Don't shove them down the viewers' throats.
- If you feel staff changes are in order, look within the organization first. P&G [Procter & Gamble] does a lot of promoting from within. Almost all of our producers worked their way up from staff positions, and that means they know the show.
- Don't fire anyone for six months. I feel very deeply that you should look at the show's canvas before you do anything.
- Good soap opera is good storytelling. It's very simple.
Douglas Marland is considered by many as one of the greatest head writers ever. Marland was a former head writer of As The World Turns, Guiding Light, and General Hospital. He worked as a writer on Another World and co-created Loving. He won multiple Emmy awards and Soap Opera Digest awards. Marland, a former actor, loved daytime. He passed away on March 6, 1993. This article was published in the April 27, 1993 issue of Soap Opera Digest. Thanks to SEW for providing a copy of the article.
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