Now when it comes to building ecosystems of my own, like creating a world for a TV show, it’s almost second nature. I needed to understand: Who’s the boss here, who’s the alpha, who’s the beta, who’s the bottom dog, what does everybody want, what are all the little interconnections? I needed to be able to pick up on ecosystems fast to be able to have a chance to insert myself.

I had really hard wired, defined black environments and then white environments, and so as I moved around between them it almost became like a game for my own self-esteem and survival. I think I went to eight or nine schools growing up. I changed schools almost every other year. But I think it gave me a really rich understanding of how to look at people and understand people and frankly just code switch change who I am in different rooms to make myself fit.

In some empirical ways it’s worse – there’s less money to go around, it’s more violent, there’s more risk. My childhood was spent straddling the line between a privileged, safe, American life, and you know, the black American life…which is just different. In writing my book I recently drudged up some of these memories: I saw someone get stabbed to death, a lot of my black friends didn’t have food in the kitchen or their houses got robbed. So there were dangers that existed there that most of the people I went to high school with didn’t have to account for. You earn enough to have your picket fence and send your kids to good schools, and frankly if you’re white your life will be pretty safe.įor us, we had all of that stuff but then also we were black. I’m from Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington D.C. What is your background and how has where you’ve come from affected your work? TV Credits: Grownish, and forthcoming TV series and feature films with Spike Lee, Morgan Freeman, and Will Packer How does creating a fictional world for television enable them to see the realities of our own world differently? What truths about humanity must one know in order to construct characters that are real and accessible? We talk to TV writers to better access the ‘us’ in their stories about others. But behind our favorite shows, plotlines, and characters sit the writers of television–the sketchers of our own portraits. We tune in to access the lives of other people, real or imaginary, with the hope of escaping from–or finding solace in–our own lived realities. Television has been one model through which humanity has been presented a reflection of itself. It’s often through seeing our own realities reflected back to us that we are able to process the truths and falsehoods of our lives. TV Writers on What Creating Characters Has Taught Them About the Real World, a Peek Mag series

Black Magic by Chad Sanders