Sera Gamble
Sera Gamble is the writer and showrunner behind TV pop culture hits You, recently renewed for a third season, and The Magicians, which wrapped its fifth and final one. She is often credited with subverting genres like romance and fantasy, but what Sera does is more radical than playing with someone else's rules: she completely rewrites them.
Until recently, Sera commuted between two writers rooms on opposite sides of Melrose Avenue. We caught up with her in early May while quarantining at home in Los Angeles, where she's been mulling a return to old creative pastimes like writing poetry and playing the flute.
Interview by: Kiki Georgiou
Photography by: Eric Weiss
Photo by Eric Weiss
GAL: How has your lockdown been? Have you written your lockdown King Lear yet?
Sera Gamble: I’ve written the scripts that are due for work. I suppose the best way to think about it is somewhere in there, maybe, I'm writing my King Lear. I'm just not going to think about it, and I wouldn't realize it had been written until a lot later.
GAL: How do you feel about productivity?
SG: I’m not really the relaxed type. I take on a lot of work, and it keeps me pretty bound to, usually, several deadlines at once. That didn't change just because we’re staying home but my attitude towards it has changed a little bit. Without the added structure of running around all day, going to an office, running around to meetings, having to dress a certain way for them, get my hair blown out… time has come back to me and, really, what that has meant is that I'm probably sleeping the correct number of hours a night now. It's interesting for my body to be like, yeah, we actually wanted eight hours a night the whole time.
GAL: We’ve been thinking a lot about failure during this time. Have you learned how to deal with it, and how to keep going?
SG: To be honest, the tone of my inner monologue changes from day to day. Sometimes I'm kinder than other times but, at this point in my life, I'm pretty at peace with the idea that I'm just going to have to fail a certain amount of the time because I have a lot of ambition. If you want to reach for things that are beyond your current capability, every now and again, you're going to stumble, that's just part of the process and, intellectually, I embraced that a long time ago. Emotionally, sometimes it's hard. You want your next thing to be the most amazing thing, you don't want people to say it's bad, you don't want to feel that it's bad. But I want to keep improving as a writer, and in a lot of areas of my life, and the only way to do that is to take a leap.
GAL: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
SG: I knew I was a writer when I was a little girl. I didn't know I wanted to do it for a living, certainly, but I was that girl in class, back in grade school, who would write extra when the creative writing assignment came. I was always writing little stories and poems. It felt incredibly natural, and I never really questioned it. These things don't become complicated until people start to say, are you going to turn that into money, are you going to turn that into fame?
GAL: When did you realize both that it's a job that you can do, and also that you're actually quite good at it? Or rather, you could become really good at it?
SG: If you had stopped me in the street when I was 16 and you had said, “Are you a serious writer?”, I would have said, “Yes, I'm a very serious writer, I write every day.”. I dealt with everything in my whole adolescence by writing about it. I kept a journal, I wrote a lot of poetry. And I went to open mic nights and I performed the poetry and so…
GAL: As a teenager?
SG: Yeah! You know, I was confident but angsty at the same time.
GAL: That’s a good combination.
SG: I remember feeling that when I sat down with my journal to write a poem, my job was to try to find the most perfect turn of phrase that would make someone viscerally feel what I was going through. And so, if I read poems in front of people and saw them having an emotional reaction to it, I would feel like I had succeeded. It wasn't until I was a little bit older that I considered doing it for a living. I didn't know that much about screenwriting or the TV business. I was an actor, writing my own material for workshops and plays. I was getting really strong feedback about it, and one of the other performers that I was working with, Raelle Tucker, approached me and said, would you like to write a screenplay with me? And I was like, sure I have nothing else to do! And it just worked. I felt at home figuring these things out. I was trying everything at that time, and the path just kept encouraging me to take another step.
If you had come to me and you had been like, listen, becoming a genuinely good writer is going to take many years of your life, you can't really shortcut the number of drafts and ideas that you have to push against and the hours and hours of frustration as you're working through it, I might have been like, “No, thank you.” Now that I've written professionally for so many years I realize that it is the thing that I have been the most diligent about in my lifetime. I was a classical musician, and I would sit down to do scales, and I would get impatient and just want to play the actual music, which is why I'm not a professional musician! I didn't have the very particular discipline that you need to become extremely technically proficient. But with writing, I would do whatever was required to try to tell the next story so something just organically happened, I didn't even really think too much about it while it was happening.
GAL: Do you still write poetry and keep a journal?
SG: Yeah. Sometimes I have to do so much writing for my job that I can't imagine lifting a pen up but I wrote in my journal this morning. For a long stretch, I was on writing staff of someone else's show so it was a more technical writing job. In order to feel a little bit like an artist, every day I would show up, close the door of my office 15 minutes early, and I would write a poem. Maybe I should get back to it in quarantine, a poem a day in quarantine.
GAL: You included one of your early poems in You, right? That's one of the bravest things I have seen - to have something so personal and intimate seen by millions of people.
SG: Oh, thank you. It didn't feel that brave. I had this pile of poems that I wrote back then and it felt authentic because that's what it sounded like when I was working through a relationship that caused me pain back then. But when we started auditioning actresses for the role they would do the scene where they were reciting the poem, and I heard it read by probably 50 people. And that was unexpectedly emotional and rewarding. I feel like, the girl who wrote that poem, we would blow her mind. If we had a time machine and we found her feeling like a fucking mess writing that poem because she was sad, and we were like, just so you know something like 50 million people are gonna hear that on TV, she'd be like, I don't know what Netflix is! That is one of the crazier things about my life as an amateur poet.
Photo by Eric Weiss
GAL: What was the first book that you fell in love with?
SG: Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Actually, even before Grimm, I think it was Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales. I have this very battered copy that I went back to again and again… The Little Mermaid and The Snow Queen. Shortly thereafter I was into Phantom Tollbooth, Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and Narnia, all of the science fiction and children's speculative fiction and it was so delightful to me.
GAL: Do you prefer an actual paper book or are you a device reader?
SG: First of all, I do both. I read book books, paper, and then I also have an e-reader, which I take when I travel. Remember travel? There are certain books that I download because I try not to live in a house that's just piles and piles of books,. But there are some books I just really want to hold.
GAL: Do you read fiction or nonfiction?
SG: I'm pretty eclectic. I have a collection of books of poems and I go back to certain poets over and over and over again. Sometimes I read fiction. I have a friend, Alex Cunningham, she's also a showrunner, she created Dirty John. Alex reads so much and always sends me period pieces with monsters in them and stuff that she thinks I’ll like. She’s always right! I like sociology and I'm fascinated by the science of the brain. I think I have everything Oliver Sacks ever wrote. And for the more ineffable side of the brain I have a lot of Jung, and Marion Woodman, and when you look at my psychology bookshelf that segues pretty quickly into a lot of stuff like Bruno Bettelheim that's about archetypes in fairy tales. That’s where the work that I do intersects.
GAL: Any favorite poets, poetry books, or collections?
SG: Well, Rilke, obviously! I do like the spiritual triumvirate, as I think of them, of Rilke, Rumi, and Hafez. I love Wisława Szymborska, the Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize. I recently have become a huge fan of Tracy K. Smith. I have a lot of Mark Strand, Richard Siken, Adrienne Rich. And then, of course, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I mean, they defined my adolescence. Lately, I've been reaching for Galway Kinnell. At work my job is to be the boss. I'm pretty analytical, and one of my partners at work, John McNamara, lovingly calls me “Cold Russian Bitch” because when everything is falling apart I think rather than feel. There's something about poetry that cuts straight into my soul. I can sit down and read a few lines of poetry out loud and suddenly be weeping. It immediately reaches the most vulnerable part of me, and I always think about this– and I'm hoping I'm not going to get it wrong–but David Whyte called poetry “language against which we have no defenses”. That's how I feel about it. It immediately resets me back to my most human self.
GAL: It warms your cold Russian heart.
SG: It does! By the way, not that Russian hearts are cold. But when we have to get shit done we do get shit done.
“The mythology of Sylvia Plath is so much about her mental state [...]
that it clouds the fact that she was so fucking good”
GAL: You mentioned Sylvia Plath - I love the line from season 1 of You about performing open-heart surgery on a first edition Sylvia Plath! We are all a first edition Sylvia Plath in one way or another.
SG: The mythology of Sylvia Plath is so much about her mental state, her mental illness, her emotional turmoil in her life, her relationship with her husband, and the fact that she died by suicide, that it clouds the fact that she was so fucking good at, like, the age of 20! It blows my mind. If you go back and read her early poems, we're doing her actual talent a disservice by focusing so much on what's a bit sensationalistic about the story. I say that as a woman who was once a girl who was very attracted to that darkness but, as I've gotten older, I realized it potentially detracts from really getting into her work, her literary merit.
GAL: The more I grow up the more I reassess my own opinions and ideas and realize how much of it was formed by, mainly, old white men.
SG: I think about that a lot actually. There was a time around my late 20s where I was mad about it pretty much all the time. I had succeeded in breaking into the business as a TV writer. I was closely watching the language people used to talk about different people’s projects. I acutely felt that women's work wasn't necessarily defaulted to that same prestigious position as certain men who were considered to be the gold standard of creators in our time. So, for a while, I wrestled with thinking this is very unfair. And it's stupid, and it's robbing us all of appreciating a lot of stuff that shouldn't be seen as ‘other'. As I spent more time working, and as I've gotten a little older, and hopefully more mature, my priorities have changed. I've realized that the thing that our culture is going to lean into, it's not strictly in my control. It's still a patriarchy and a white supremacist patriarchy, and we should all do our part to work on that. I've also realized that doesn't mean that I have to default to those rules. The more I have felt myself achieving mastery of different parts of my craft I've realized I get to choose who I'm speaking to. I don't have to decide that that particular white dude, who was the arbiter of taste in 2020, that he is my default audience per se. So far, I feel like I'm threading that needle okay because there's plenty for dudes in the work that I make. But when I’m at the stage in a project where I'm thinking about who will be seeing it I'm not necessarily picturing that little committee. I'm speaking to a lot of people who are considered ‘other’ and I'm particularly thinking a lot about women when I write.
Photo by Eric Weiss
“I was born into this body and life, it’s the one I know.”
GAL: That's so powerful, to realize that you don't need their opinion and you also don't need them to be your audience.
SG: I work in a medium that reaches a lot of people and gets translated into a lot of languages, and that's very cool. The truth is that there's something for a lot of people in a lot of people's art. I consume stuff that's not necessarily aimed directly at me. I'm not sure if they made Atlanta for me particularly but it's my favorite TV show, I think it's so brilliant, and I don't need it to have been made for me. I don't need them to be speaking to me directly for me to enjoy it and appreciate it and want to see more of it. So, I try to hold myself to the same standard and say you get to pick who you are envisioning and who you're speaking to.
GAL: In your work, it’s clear that you very knowingly subvert established tropes in genres like romance and fantasy.
SG: Subverting and playing with tropes and playing with structure, absent the more political discussion we're having, is something my brain just enjoys doing; turning fairytales upside down, turning Shakespeare upside down. Sometimes all I'm doing is just talking from a point of view that's closer to my own. I was born into this body and life, it’s the one I know. So, if I’m looking at a romantic hero from the perspective of a
woman who might be afraid of him because he might be a violator, and a stalker, and
someone who's willing to do a lot of violence in the pursuit of what he wants it's like, yes, that subverts the trope of the romantic hero. But it also just asks a really simple question which is, if you strip all the shininess away from romantic heroes aren't they a little scary when you imagine them chasing you? It's a little scary.
GAL: Yes! So, how do you refuse to fall into those narratives and how do you control the story?
SG: Well, a lot of that is inner work, and it's work that I'm still doing, I think it's a bit facile to say that we're all being forced to tell stories in some default way. Nobody's gonna argue with you if it feels familiar but those tendencies and the default position that you fall into, it's a position you already learned a long time ago. You learned it when you were watching movies as a child and books and stuff you consumed. We have to ask those hard questions about ourselves. It isn't like I wanted to work on the show You because I have all the answers and I want to teach everybody about toxic masculinity. I was interested in the show because I'm as seduced as the next girl by that kind of archetype, and I was asking myself why at a time in my life where I know better and should be able to see through it, why do I nevertheless find myself rooting for them? Like, precisely one scene after he brains somebody with a hammer why am I still... So, I'm exploring that same thing inside of myself.
Franklin the dog
GAL: Do you have a current favorite reading spot?
SG: I have an L-shaped couch here in my office and if I go right into the V then my dog comes and sits in my lap, and then I just rest the book on top of the dog and that's my favorite.
GAL: We have a friend who has a sanity shelf dedicated to the books she reaches for again and again at a time of crisis or need when she needs inspiration or knowledge or wisdom. If you had one what books would be on it?
SG: Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke. I give it to people all the time. It was really the only thing I could bear to read when my dad was dying, and it got me through that period, there're really beautiful passages about grief in it. He's got you on everything - love criticism, being professional, but the grief stuff really speaks to me, I could tear up just thinking about some of the lines. It's impossible to believe that he was only 27 when he was writing those letters, he was so wise. I go a lot to short stories to feel inspired and for a little burst of inspiration that grounds me. There's a book of tiny stories called Sum: Forty Tales of The Afterlife by David Eagleman that is one or two pages per story. He's actually a neuroscientist and as an exercise, he wrote a short story each about 40 different conceptions of the afterlife. That always gets my brain moving in the right direction. And then I would say Szymborska, People On A Bridge is a book I read a lot. Before I start a new project, especially a project that is fantasy of some kind or speculative fiction or horror with monsters, I reread Grimm's Fairy Tales to remind me of the OGs! How they lay things out, they're so creepy and spooky. They're so essentially unfair and mean. It's basically cute stories for kids on the surface but underneath it's telling you what to be afraid of. Sometimes you won't agree with what they prescribe but people are punished pretty ruthlessly.
One of my favorite things about my job is I make a reading list for the writers in the writer’s room, and regardless of whether or not it's fantasy like The Magicians, I usually put The Uses of Enchantment on that list because Bruno Bettelheim really gets into how there are paradoxes in those stories that really helps us to process the world as children. He has a strong opinion that we shouldn't only give children stories with happy endings, that little kids not only have a capacity to process the paradoxes and unfairnesses and darknesses of the world, they need stories that show that to us. Because what children really need is to be told the truth, even if it doesn't make any sense. Children know when they're being told the truth.
GAL: Do you have a favorite writer?
SG: No. I can't possibly have one favorite writer. I have a lot of writers that I have all. their books. I think I mentioned Oliver Sacks as one, and Francesca Lia Block, I think I've read all of her. She's a friend of mine but I had read all of her books before I met her and then I was like, oh, you're that Francesca, I've been reading you for years! Neil Gaiman… there are too many!
GAL: I wonder if writing for TV has changed the way that you read fiction or nonfiction or poetry.
SG: It has. It doesn't always because not every book functions the way that TV and film do, but I do have a very well-developed sensor that is like a little antenna looking for the plot. First of all, a book can be many, many things, which is delicious. Scripts have a more well-defined job in terms of telling you a story with a beginning, middle and an end, even if it puts them in a blender and giving you points of view that you're watching through. And then that story is told to action and conflict. The thing that's inside your protagonist is externalized through dialog and behavior that can be filmed visually. This wasn't how my brain worked when I started writing scripts. I loved spending 50 pages, like Nicholson Baker, where he'll spend, like, 150 pages just in somebody's brain on an escalator. Or that short story Bullet In The Brain, where you spend a bunch of time between the time the bullet enters and exits the skull. Brilliant story. I'm a huge fan of Etgar Keret's short stories, I read them over and over again. He's an absurdist and he tells emotionally true stories that are magically realist yet very strange. Writing a book is like living on a different continent than the continent of writing a screenplay, where you have to tell a story that makes sense to a wide variety of people or no one's ever gonna shoot it.
When I first showed up in a writer’s room and they were like, we're stuck, we don't know what happens next and we're not moving till we figure it out, everything inside me rebelled! I didn't want to have to learn structure. My inner teenager was like, fuck structure, but now I've done nothing but structure for 16 years and I'll never go back. Even my poems are different. I can see that Sliding Doors version of my life that was renting a little house in the backyard of somebody's big house in Venice and writing poems and having a day job - she would have turned out a different writer than the one that started running TV shows.
GAL: Is your antenna always working when you're reading something, thinking if you can adapt it, or can you disconnect?
SG: Unfortunately, most of the time it is. I was very lucky to get to go on vacation in December. I haven't traveled for pleasure in a long time but it was our honeymoon and we went to Bali. I bought a couple of books exclusively because they sounded entertaining, and I just wanted to lie around with the beautiful flowers everywhere but they ended up being one or two things that I read that, of course, I called to be like, is anyone making this? Because if I see that it could be good as a show I just go for it. It's hard for me to totally turn that off.
GAL: What three books would you recommend everyone should read and why?
SG: At the end of the day, I want people to read things that entertain them. I would say get a book of Tobias Wolff's short stories or if I was talking to somebody who was a writer but needed help breaking out of their box I would say get Sam The Cat by Matthew Klam because his short stories are so honest in an ugly way. We all know those books that are great just because they're great. We all love To Kill a Mockingbird. But at the same time, books are tools that can open up parts of you. So it depends on who I'm talking to. I would try to recommend something that opens up a little piece of their brain. I would prefer to name books as specific prescriptions.
GAL: You're a doctor.
SG: Trust me, I'm a book doctor.
GAL: I didn't ask you about Franklin but I'm sure he's a wonderful, wonderful dog.
SG: He is!
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