Patricia Hylton Zell

I'm an example of how life-experience pays off. Way back in the mid-1980s, I decided to write a novel about a few characters that I was creating. Since I wasn't a typist (before personal computers), I handwrote my novel on legal pads during a cold winter. The bad news? Because I wasn't a typist, I destroyed that first draft of my novel. The good news? Those characters are now part of the TV series I'm working on--over the years, their stories changed, but most of the characters are pretty much the same people.

In the early 1990s, word processors came on the scene and changed everything for me. My one novel became two novels, the beginning of a potential series of books. I even invested in some feedback on one of the novels, but it soon became evident that I wasn't a novelist because I hated writing long descriptions and because I got bored rewriting the manuscript. So, my characters and their stories ended up in the proverbial drawer.

I dabbled a little in commercial writing, wrote a few articles and non-fiction book proposals, and re-entered the educational world as a tutor and substitute teacher. In 2002, I accepted a job offer to teach high school English--at that point, I only had a B.S. in Elementary Education and a substitute teaching certificate. I was given two years to complete the credit-hours I was lacking in English courses. I did that and went on to earn my M.S. in Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment in 2007.

After my husband passed away in October, 2012, I decided to retire at the end of the school year. As I pondered about what would come next, I pulled my characters and their stories out of the drawer and looked at them over the summer. That fall, I decided to write the stories as a franchise of screenplays (a total of 6 now drafted scripts). Fortunately for me, I had no idea of how much I didn't know--I thought it would easy. (If I had known the intricacies of film-making, I might not have ever started my quest.)

Although I made every effort to learn all I could learn about screenwriting (plus film-making) and then purchased several rounds of coverage for my scripts, I just couldn't break through--the feedback was consistent with the emphasis on the stories being too nice and on there not being enough conflict. Finally, in April 2021, I decided to take a break from working on the screenplays to work on a non-fiction book. By July 1, 2022, I had written, rewritten, designed, edited, and self-published the book.

While I was wrapping up my work on my book, I watched the first two seasons BRIDGERTON and suddenly knew what was wrong with my screenplays. Because I had read and reread (many times) the source novels to the series, I could see how Shonda Rhimes had expanded the storylines of those novels. It dawned on me that my own characters' stories were too big for feature films. When I started thinking of those stories as a TV series, the missing conflict seemed like it would be easy to create. So, I immediately started working to meld the franchise screenplays into a five-season series (8 1-hr episodes per season). Currently, I have the pilot script, a series bible, and four pitch decks.

The series bible includes episode by episode treatments of the first two seasons, a general treatment of the third and fourth seasons, and a breakdown of the beginning, middle, and end of the fifth season.

The decks are "Journeys, The TV Series," "Much Ado About Nothing, The Musical," "Journeys, Production Plan A," and "Introducing Patricia Hylton Zell." The musical is incorporated into the last season of the series where a number of the characters are involved in a community theater production .

By the way, I'm the mother of seven children (the youngest two were born between the legal pad draft and the word processor drafts of the novels), and I also have 13 grandchildren.

My life experience has paid off because I have encountered organic diversity many times over the years: my high school was a great mix of people; my college (Ohio State University) was and is the epitome of diversity; my family was involved with numerous diverse groups while the kiddos were at home; and my classrooms weren't just diverse, but they were also inclusive. My TV series reflects the organic diversity and the inclusiveness that I have personally enjoyed over the years.

By the way, I have never grown bored with writing my scripts. Frustrated, yes, but never bored.