Dream Job: Writing for a Soap Opera

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As a young boy, Rex M. Best would rush home from school to watch his soap operas.

He would tune in to the mystery serial "The Edge of Night," followed by "Dark Shadows," a gothic soap opera complete with vampires and witches ---- and one of Best's favorites.

"I was totally into that," he says.

Best was hooked.

That deep-seated passion for soaps continued into his adult years, as he dreamed one day of becoming a soap opera scriptwriter.

He embarked on a career in teaching, but serendipity stepped in, and Best got his wish.

Now, he is a scriptwriter for CBS's "The Bold and the Beautiful," writing one episode a week from his cozy Fisher Park townhouse and e-mailing it to the studio. The soap won an Emmy for outstanding drama series this year. Best previously wrote for "The Young and the Restless" for 15 years, winning three Emmys and one Writers Guild of America Award.

This is Best's dream job.

His introduction to soaps

"My mom was a big fan of 'As the World Turns.' It came on at 1:30, and the house would literally stop while she watched 'As the World Turns.' And my sister and I would sit down and watch with her. The thing I liked about soaps were they were this one gigantic middle, you hopefully never had any end."

Big dreams

"I went on to college. In the back of my mind, I thought it would really be so cool to be able to do this but thinking I would never get the chance to do it. I was sane enough and rational enough to know I had to get something from my college degree. I decided to go into the classroom and teach.

"I ended up working in a group home for autistic kids here in Greensboro. I loved it so much that I went back and got my master's in special ed. Loved it, but on weekends and holidays, I would write sample scripts based off soaps I was watching at the time.

"I had a friend from undergraduate school who was working on her Ph.D. at the University of Kentucky at Lexington, and she just happened to become friends with the cousin to Kay Alden, who was co-head writer of "The Young and the Restless" at that time. I had a phone conversation with Kay. They didn't have any openings at the time, but she said, "Let's try it. We'll see where it goes." This was a gracious woman doing a very gracious thing.

So there was just this one fateful moment. I guess I had done six or seven sample scripts, and she called me and said, "This last script you sent is exactly what we want. Do another one like this, and we'll put you on a trial for air." It just so happened at that time, Bill Bell, who created "The Young and the Restless" was creating "The Bold and the Beautiful" for CBS. He was moving two of his writers over from "The Young and the Restless" over to "B&B." And so it created an opening on "Y&R," and so there you go.

The writing process

It's one whole episode (per week). Some weeks I could be assigned Tuesday, some weeks Thursday. You write all characters and all scenes.

We're trying to stay so far ahead because around Christmas, we'll take two weeks off, and again around Easter, we'll probably try to take three or four weeks off. There's not a lot of time off. We'll be writing our Christmas episodes in October. So it's kind of funny putting your head in that space.

The craft of writing soaps

Writing for soaps is a very unique kind of skill. It's as much a craft as it is a talent, because you have to intuit a lot in terms of the kind of storytelling, and you can't be so independently original that your shows don't mesh with the scriptwriter who comes before or after you. The sound, the rhythm, the pacing, it all has to be seamless.

When I first started out, the shows were much more character driven. It gave you a chance to like or dislike them. Now, I don't think audiences necessarily get that because the soaps are so busy moving plot, trying to get somebody clicking on the remote.

Scenes he loves to write

I tend to love to write the really emotional scenes, the love, the romantic stories. I also love to write the comedy part, the camp part; I love the over-the-top stuff. That's really easy and fun to write. The emotional stuff requires really digging in and embedding yourself in the characters and really feeling what they're feeling and being able to translate that to the audience.

Research: from in vitro to vegan fashion

I learned so much on this show. Like, we're doing an in vitro story and you go on the Internet, and you're scouring about the procedures and how all this is done. &ellipses; Especially since the show is set in L.A. and it's with dueling fashion houses. I'm not a big fashion icon so anything, like in the paper Sunday there was an article on vegan fashions, and I'm just scouring that thinking, "I wonder how we can work in vegan fashion?" because we're actually creating a green clothing line with one of the fashion houses.

His favorite soap character

Brooke is really my character I love to write. I love Brooke because she thinks with her heart, not her head. She can justify anything, given that love has motivated her to do it. And I'm going "Brooke, love can't justify everything," but somehow she can make me believe it. I love Bridget. I love those kind of good, decent, moral characters who find themselves in these horrible fixes through no fault of their own.

Getting attached to characters

When I left "Y&R," the period of adjustment was hard for me. It was hard to sit down after you had written for a show for 15 years and you no longer knew what was happening to those characters. It's sort of this withdrawal ---- this addiction you have.

Now I feel very protective and territorial with those characters on "B&B." You learn to love this little group of people that you worked with, that you have in your head all these weeks of a year. You get angry with them. You get frustrated with them. Oftentimes, it's like a puzzle trying to get them out of these fixes they've gotten into.

Killing off a character

I think it's hard. ... The character of Darla when we killed her off, I remember being on the phone that day and just really having a negative reaction to that because I thought Darla was a very identifiable character, and she was kind of the character we love to root for. I did write the show where Darla died. We had the scene between Sally and Darla, and tears rolled when I was writing. I still get misty even when I think about it.

The passion of soap fans

I was reading an article where a girl left home and went to New York to go to either college or graduate school, and she had never been more lonely in her life, but she could always turn in to "The Young and the Restless" or whatever she watched. She knew these characters; it was like she brought some friends with her.

I had a friend who worked with a woman who was so into "Y&R," she actually knew the china pattern that the Abbotts used at their Abbott family breakfast. So I don't know, she called Replacements out here and asked what this china pattern was. I mean, it's just amazing to me.

The end of 'Guiding Light'

I'm really sad because it's an institution. We don't have very many institutions in the arts in this day and age. Since soaps are a uniquely American format from the beginnings of radio over to television, you just hate to see something that's really an icon of Americana go away. I sort of see an era kind of fading.

Why soap operas are timeless

I think it's that we like to peer into other peoples' lives. We may not say it, but we're voyeuristic in our own ways, and we love to know what's going on with somebody.

I think also, soaps have always been in a sense ---- less so in the last number of years -- but they've always been morality plays. Good always won out over evil. No matter how bad this character was, ultimately they got punished. They've sort of gotten away from that now. All of the characters are terribly flawed in a lot of ways. And personally, I sort of like a good moral center to a show.

But I also think a big part of it is also escape. And one thing that we were very cognizant of during this economic downturn -- just to show you how different networks deal with different things -- the feeling on "B&B" was: "Life is hard enough. Let's make it fun and escapist." While another network was telling their writers, "It's economic hard times; we need to show it on our shows." Yeah, soaps in many ways mirror reality, but they mirror it in a much larger, grander way. And I think people still want to see love and romance and escapism&ellipses; sort of that Calgon commercial, "Calgon take me away." And if it steps on reality a little bit, your audience forgives you a little bit.

[browneyes106]

Very good article. It' gives good insight into the business of soap writing and how soap writers get started.