We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Heather Huntington & Danielle Evenson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Heather & Danielle, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
One of the most wonderful things about being part of a writing team (besides you always get two-for-one dinner deals) is that we can rely on each other to bring the other up when one of us is down. There is always someone steering us toward success even in the face of rejection, passed-on pitches, or harsh reviews left on iTunes by our mothers.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
We’re comedy writers (go on — pull our fingers) who work in TV, features, podcasts, video games — as long as it has jokes, we write it. We write edgy and sometimes nerdy feminist comedy with a pop culture bent (like Heather’s scoliosis).
While our home is TV, we have had a lot of success with narrative podcasts telling stories of people you don’t normally see on screen in leading roles — women. We tell stories about older women, single women, pilgrim women, size 10 women, really any woman who would normally not be “the norm.” Or Cliff or Sam or really anyone else from Cheers. That is a very recent reference.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Dedication: The craft of writing is hard. You don’t start out good — no matter who you are – unless you’re Amber Ruffin. She is perfection and we’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. It takes years of dedication, practice, hard lessons learned, and great samples before you’re ready to take out your projects. Pro-tip 1: Also wear pants.
Humility: Then it requires an incredible amount of perseverance and humility to take notes, reshape your stories, and come back to execs with the same amount of excitement and energy that you had for your first draft. Pro-tip 2: The cocaine helps.
Luck: OK that’s not a skill, but you get the point. Once we ran into an exec we knew in an elevator and sold him a project based on a quick, unexpected, actual elevator pitch. If it weren’t for that elevator at that moment (and Danielle’s otherworldly ability to come up with ideas out of literally nowhere), we would have missed the opportunity. Pro-tip 3: Hang out in elevators.
How can folks who want to work with you connect?
We’re always looking for production partners for our podcast series and development opportunities for our television projects. Pants are not a deal breaker.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hrhuntington/
https://www.instagram.com/yaydanielle/ - Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heather-huntington/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielleevenson/ - Twitter: https://twitter.com/boringbabyshit
https://twitter.com/praisecheeses
