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“The cherry on top
does not support
the ice cream sundae.”
— Vince Gilligan, creator of BREAKING BAD.
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Last week I posted about my writing process for a book I was working on, the second in my “Survival Code” series (May, 2027). The deadline was on my mind, a clear line in the sand. A friend asked me how the writing was going and it stumped me.
Was I even writing yet?
I knew I was working, circling the story, reading and thinking a lot, but I wasn’t actually writing. At least, not in the sense we commonly know it, that whole unpleasant business with words on a page.
Yet I knew this was essential to the final product. Possibly the most important stage.
If you are curious, you can click here to find it.
The very next day, I came across this 30-second clip featuring a snippet of Vince Gilligan’s thoughts on writing. He powerfully and simply verbalized something I was dithering about.
I even transcribed it. But first, to be clear, Gilligan is at first talking about writing for the screen, which is why he begins by discussing dialogue, whereas a writer of novels might describe it differently:
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“Oddly enough, people think of writing as dialogue, and to me writing is structure. Dialogue is the cherry on top. The cherry on top does not support the ice cream sundae. It’s a delicious little added thing, but the real storytelling, the real structuring, which is often something in TV we do, all the writers together in a room, working and not actually typing anything, but just talking. Just verbalizing. That to me is the hard part of writing: the structuring, the building of the scaffolding, the skeleton of the story, if you will.” — Vince Gilligan, creator of BREAKING BAD.
