As much as writing for hit TV shows can seem like the dream, Patty Lin shared why she decided to leave the industry in her book “End Credits: How I Broke Up with Hollywood.” Zibby Books held its bimonthly virtual book club on Wednesday, September 27, where they hosted Lin as part of the author’s nationwide book tour. Following a group discussion on Lin’s memoir, attendees had the chance to ask questions about the book.
The book club’s mediator started the conversation by asking Lin for the latest on the writers’ strike. She mentioned how the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers came to a tentative agreement fulfilling the requests of the writers and that she was happy to hear about the recent victory after the studios held out for so long.
“The studios were trying to starve the writers, but the writers were like, ‘we’re used to starving, so we can wait this out,’” Lin said.
To Lin, the television industry proves to have lots of inconsistency and uncertainty, but she said that she wasn’t really planning for the long-term future in regard to her career. It became clear to her that screenwriting was not a stable job. There was always the chance for a show to get canceled or not picked up. Even Lin herself could be fired on a whim.
“I just was so determined to doing a creative job,” Lin said. “I just wanted to so badly use my creative talents in my job because having had a non-creative job where I was essentially doing accounting work at the Letterman Show, I just felt like I was dying a slow death in that job.”
Lin said she is often asked what it was like being the only Asian woman, and sometimes the only Asian person in a writers’ room. She didn’t think about it all the time during her career because growing up around a lot of white people she was used to being an outlier. While trying to survive and make it in the business, she was also busy and didn’t have a whole lot of time to think about her racial identity.
When writing her book, she began to think about her identity more and started to read books written by Asian American authors and heard about their other experiences.
“That’s when I kind of had this lightbulb moment because I would hear that it’s actually very common for people of color who are in fields where they are not well represented to feel a sense of imposter syndrome,” Lin said. “That’s a really common experience and that’s something I felt all throughout my career and I sort of chalked it up to ‘oh, well, I’m a drama writer working in comedy.’ I realized how much being the only Asian person in the room probably contributed to that feeling of ‘I have to work extra hard to prove that I deserve to be there.’”
Since February, Lin has primarily been working on her book and promoting it. She explained that it’s a lot more work than people can imagine. She appreciates getting to be very involved in the publishing process with Zibby Books. Writing this was a fun and transformative experience for her, so she would love to write more books in the future.
She said that her experience as an author was vastly different from what she went through in TV in all the best ways.
“When I wrote for TV, I had to write scripts really really fast,” Lin said. “Sometimes, I’d write a whole script in three or four days. I never liked that. I always found it incredibly uncomfortable to write that fast. I tried my best to, you know, make it good, but it always would have benefitted from more time.”
When writing her book, she was able to make up her own schedule. She did not like feeling pressured to finish her work by a deadline. Creativity is very hard to do on a schedule which was one of the big reasons why she left TV.
The final question for Lin before the book club concluded was what her current favorite TV show is. She said that from the last few months, her favorite right now is Netflix’s “Beef.”
“It’s a show that has everything—comedy, romance, drama,” Lin said. “It’s sad. It’s funny. It’s got plot twists and reversals. It’s got action. It’s so entertaining but also really really deep, like psychologically deep. I love that it tells a story that is both universal but also really specifically Asian.”
Lin said she can’t say enough good things about “Beef” with how it has so much packed into it. She has watched the miniseries twice and said she had been waiting for a show like that her whole life.
After years of writing for TV, Lin now is the viewer. Following her “break-up” with Hollywood, she now takes the opportunity to pursue other interests with the luxury of time and creative freedom.