THAT’S SO BERTA

I am pleased to welcome Susan Sherman to Great Thoughts’ Great Authors.  Susan is the author of The Little Russian, her debut novel.  As you’ll see from her post, I look forward to future work from her.

Here’s Susan:

Thank you so much for inviting me on as a guest blogger.  I thought I’d take this opportunity to talk about my history as a sitcom writer, even though I’m a little reluctant to do so.  I’ve been advised not to.  Doesn’t that sound ominous?   A little thought policey.  When I was finishing the manuscript of The Little Russian, I asked a friend of mine, the author of five books, if I should include my television credits in my resume.  She pursed her lips and gave her head a prim little shake and said with a note of  pity:  “People in the literary world frown on television work.”

So there it was.  After that I planned to play it down.  I wouldn’t lie and say I’d been a teacher or a nurse or a social worker, someone who actually helped people, but I wouldn’t make a point of it either.  And yet, it’s funny how many people ask me about it, even really smart people who have no business watching Boy Meets World, Clueless, That’s So Raven or any of the obscure shows I worked on that never made it past the first year.

A couple of years ago I followed my husband up north for a job interview.  Here we were eating dinner in a fancy restaurant with the members of the credentials committee of a fancy hospital.  Seated around the table was a cardiologist, a pulmonologist, a nephrologist and an internist or two.  My husband is an internist.  Mostly I talked to the other wives about farmers’ markets.  But then I happened to over hear the cardiologist complain to the pulmonologist that he couldn’t play tennis with the nephrologist on Saturday morning because he had to watch That’s So Raven with his girls.  With an opening like that I had to step in.  After I explained my dubious past as the show’s co-creator, the evening was mine.  No more talk about admits, hospital stays and cardio cath units.  From then on it was all Raven Simone.

So how did I get from writing about a psychic fifteen year-old in San Francisco to Berta Alshonsky, a young Russian Jewish woman struggling to keep her children alive during the Russian Civil War?  Is there any connection?  Well… Raven could see the future and I bet Berta would’ve liked to.  They both liked clothes.  But I suppose the only real connection is that they both came from my life.  Raven is based on my comedy writing partner, the late Judy Toll and Berta Alshonsky was my grandmother and The Little Russian is her story…with liberties of course.

I wanted to write my grandmother’s story ever since I started writing–way before sitcoms.  But I knew I had to grow up as a writer before I could tackle something so epic in nature.  I was never all that keen to write sitcoms, but I liked the money.  Wouldn’t it be romantic if I could say that the whole time I was working in sitcoms I was planning The Little Russian?  Unfortunately, sitcoms don’t work that way.  When you’re working on a show that’s all you’re doing, from ten in the morning to often three or four in the morning.  All day long you’re breaking stories, writing scripts, rewriting scripts, casting, going to run-throughs down on the stage, giving notes to the director, the actors and wardrobe, and at night you’re taking useless notes from the networks and struggling to find a way to make them work.  There is no room for Russian winters in comedy.

When my stint on the show was over I pitched new shows around without much success.  My heart wasn’t in it.  The frigid winds of Russia were calling.  But I couldn’t just quit.  I worry too much about the future.  I’m a planner.  I love calendars and budgets and long to-do lists.  For a person who hates surprises, TV was my best bet.  That’s So Raven was a huge international hit.  How could I just walk away from children’s programming?  So over the next two years I slithered away, inch by inch, away from the hours, the responsibilities, the crazy personalities, and the money.  Fortunately, I have a supportive husband who doesn’t mind that I traded in an audience of twenty million for twenty.

I’m home now in the world of books and publishing.  I love the work and I have genuine friends.  For a big future worrier, a planner of life down to the last minute detail, coming to the realization that sometimes you just have to step off into the void made all the difference.

 What are you reading and where are you going?