At the very end of the pilot episode of "Once Upon a Time", there is a moment when our 10-year-old protagonist, Henry, stares out the window of his bedroom at the Storybrooke town clock tower. It’s been frozen since the cursed town came into existence years earlier.

As he stares at it in the wake of the arrival of his mother, Emma, the clock finally comes alive and ticks. Henry smiles. That small moment encapsulated everything the show was about and still is to this day: hope.



We consciously decided that we didn’t want to end the pilot on a traditional “cliffhanger” or “twist” — we hoped there were enough turns in the story to have engaged the audience already. Instead we really wanted to focus on the “feeling” we hoped to leave with our viewers.

In many ways it was a direct descendant of a moment we wrote years earlier on "Lost", in an episode where Hurley found an old VW Bus on the island. The story simply became about starting the van — but it was really about hope. The catharsis Hurley felt, and by extension the audience felt, when the impossible happened and the ancient van revved to life was an important epiphany for us as writers.



Since then we’ve always strived to find a well of emotion in the simplest of moments. For "Once Upon a Time", it has now become our ongoing mantra to keep the show unabashedly hopeful and uncyncial.

To always search in every episode for what we call our “clock tick” moment.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jarettwieselman/the-write-stuff#.mfgXNnGBY