TV Writer Sandra Chwialkowska on Craft, Voice & Career Growth
Posted on: Feb 25, 2025
Photo courtesy of Sandra ChiwialkowskaWhether you’re a fan of high-stakes dramas or gripping mysteries, chances are you’ve encountered the work of Sandra Chwialkowska. From Alaska Daily to Blood & Treasure, The Hardy Boys and Ransom, Chwialkowska has played a key role in shaping these hit shows as a writer and co-executive producer.
Before her success in television, Chwialkowska’s journey began with a Bachelor of Arts in literature from Yale University, which she completed in 2005. A few years later, she was selected as CBC’s Primetime TV Writing Resident for 2009–2010, a prestigious position that laid the groundwork for her rise in the industry.
Recently, we sat down with Chwialkowska to discuss working in foreign countries, dancing between screenplays and novels, and honoring your voice.
Key Insights:
•Trust Your Instincts: Writing for TV taught Chwialkowska that speed can be a gift—her first ideas often made it to the final cut because she didn’t overthink them.
•Find Your Voice: After years of mimicking showrunners, she rediscovered her unique storytelling style by writing a passion project without market constraints.
•On-Set Experience Matters: She emphasizes the importance of emerging writers getting production experience, as it’s crucial for honing their craft.
How did writing and producing enter your world? Did they come together, or was there a progression from one to another over time?
I had always wanted to be a writer for film, TV and novels. That was a childhood dream of mine. After I graduated from college, I worked for a year as an assistant to a writer, thinking that somehow, proximity would bring me closer to my dream. But I realized that, no, you really have to commit to that life. You really have to commit to the writing. I moved back to Canada and did a program at the Canadian Film Centre, which is like a writing boot camp. Through that program, I met my first agent, wrote the samples and scripts I needed, and started staff writing. That’s how my TV writing career started about 14 years ago.
The way television writing works is when you start staffing as a story editor or staff writer, and as you gain experience, then you’re more and more brought into the fold of production. You are brought to the set and interact with all the other departments and actors. And as you gain that experience and those credits, you bring on co-producer or producer titles into your credits because you’re not just writing scripts and contributing to stories in the writers room; you’re also doing boots-on-the-ground producing of your episode or other people’s episodes. So, producing came naturally through the experience of staffing.
Did you face any major challenges when you started out?
On the TV side, the first time I was assigned an entire episode to write was terrifying because I was given a week to do it, which was not a lot of time for someone just starting out. There was a lot of fear around that—I knew my dialogue would be read by the other, more experienced writers in the room. Would my jokes land? It was a police show, so could I handle the procedural aspects? What I learned [is that] there’s a gift in the speed of television—first thought, best thought. You write from a very instinctive place, and a lot of my first ideas or initial thoughts or bits of dialogue ended up in the final cut because I didn’t have time to doubt myself, and that can be really helpful.
In between being a writer’s assistant and becoming a television writer, I also made a documentary. Like a lot of creative people, I [felt] the need to make something. I didn’t have a lot of money—I self-financed the thing. I had friends be my camera operators, [and] it was the sense that if you have the will and desire to make a film or short or any kind of creative project, however much money you have is the budget of the film, and the friends [who] are willing to go with you is your crew. It’s never going to be perfect, but the goal is to make it and to finish it. And the younger you are the better, because you have less to lose.
Reflecting on your career to date, can you identify any pivotal turning points? And if so, how did you or your practice change as a result?
One turning point was a TV show I worked on, shot in Hungary. I was living in Toronto, and that job entailed moving to Budapest—to a country where I couldn’t speak the language. Hungarian is notoriously, if not the most difficult language to learn, one of the most difficult languages. You’re a stranger in a strange land, but you’re going to work every day, producing with a Hungarian crew. That was a big challenge, and I had a real professional growth spurt there because of all those obstacles.
A second turning point was deciding to move from Canada to the U.S. One of the items I needed in my tool belt was a new script, and at the time, I had sort of hit a ceiling creatively where I didn’t feel like there was a market for the kind of show I wanted to write, and I just had a not-so-great experience on a development project. My agent said, “Take three months; write your dream show. Write it for yourself without an audience in mind. Don’t write to the market.”
I took those three months and I wrote the script that I would want to watch, and that ended up opening the door in LA where I met my manager. Through that, I got multiple jobs and development projects because I had tapped into my own voice. What can happen after years of staffing is you train yourself to mimic your showrunner’s voice, and a lot of writers complain of losing touch with their own.
Following this thread, are there any qualities or skill sets you believe will become key for the next generation of filmmakers to develop?
In the television world, there’s been a shrinking in terms of [writers] room size and having writers on-set for production—to the detriment of the industry as a whole and the next generation of writers. So much of what I’ve learned, I’ve learned on-set. I’ve seen my terrible dialogue fall flat as the actors speak it aloud, and only when you bomb can you get better. I’m meeting a lot of emerging writers now who aren’t getting the opportunity to go to set and so are missing out on half of their job title, which is unfortunate because they’re going to move up the ladder and not have those incredibly crucial work opportunities to hone their skills.
It’s hard when you’re an emerging writer to advocate for yourself, because you’re just happy to get the job. It’s really up to the showrunners, the upper-level writers and the studios to see that and advocate for those lower-level writers. I’ve worked with some fantastic showrunners who did exactly that, who said, “Let’s find money in the budget. Let’s fly them up to Vancouver. Let’s make sure they spend those two weeks seeing their work being made firsthand.”
Do you approach your creative process similarly as a screenwriter and author?
In TV, you’re lucky because you’re surrounded by a group of incredibly brilliant, creative people. And you’re all there to solve each other’s problems, whereas novel writing is much more solitary. If you’re lucky, you have one or two close friends who you can talk through a story point, read early drafts and give you feedback. But overall, you’re more or less on your own.
The ways in which they’re similar, especially for me: I’ve worked a lot in investigative storytelling and mystery storytelling, and my novel is a literary mystery. In television, the muscle you’re working is writing toward suspense—cliffhangers, reveals, planting clues. You’re building to a payoff. And similarly, with a novel, every chapter you want to end on a cliffhanger to make the reader want to turn that page.
When I set out to write a novel, I didn’t really have a frame of reference. I obviously read a lot, but the only skill set I had was from television, so I employed the same skills. When I break an episode of TV, I use little index cards on a whiteboard, color coding by character. So, that’s how I broke this novel: I had 13 chapters—sort of like 13 episodes of a TV show.
In the actual writing itself, screenwriting is all about the art of concision. You’re trying to convey as much information as possible, with as few words as possible. A novel gives you room for the interiority of the characters. In a screenplay, everything is driven by action. Even if it’s character-driven, it’s like, “What are we watching on screen?” Whereas, in a novel, the entire chapter can be in the mind of your protagonist. I still want propulsion, but you can inhabit the thoughts of your character in a way that TV just doesn’t allow for.
That’s so interesting. Did your novel-writing experience inform how you then approached writing for TV?
It did—in surprising ways. In the book, I found myself needing to go deeper and deeper into character, into motivation and into the nuances of observation. And so, being steeped in that, coming out of it, I approached television writing much more deeply from character than I had before. It was a great masterclass in character study that I then took back into screenwriting. It was a really cool surprise.
Writing and producing can be rather all-consuming endeavors. Do you have any rules or routines that help you manage this?
I found the novel to be more all-consuming than TV. With TV, I often have two or three projects on rotation, so you can schedule yourself to have staggered delivery dates. With the novel, it was seven days a week for 18 months to arrive at a first draft. I felt a lot of self-imposed pressure—I’ve wanted to get a novel published since my 20s. I remember hearing an interview with the writer Elizabeth Gilbert, and she said her deadline was “I want to get a book published before I die.” Somehow, hearing her say that took the pressure off and allowed me to really figure out what I wanted to say, and how I wanted to say it.
[As to] managing your time in an all-consuming industry? For me, it’s the butt in the chair. It’s organizing your day to bring yourself to your computer or notebook. It’s about creating the ritual and routine of it, even if you don’t feel like doing it. Don’t wait for inspiration to hit you; trudge through. Usually, it takes about an hour, but then you find your stride. For me, it’s ideally finding three hours a day. But even if you can only find 45 minutes, whatever that block of time is to make it a daily habit. You’re going to find that the more you do it, the more you want to do it, and the easier it gets to become consistent with it.
We have a term in the TV world called the “vomit draft,” which is the first draft you write. It’s going to be vomit, so just write it as fast as you can and get it over with. And it’s usually not as bad as you think, but it feels horrible. For me, the goal is just to get to the other side of it, to complete it, and then go back and make it as good as you can.
Special thanks to Sandra Chwialkowska for her time. Chwialkowska’s debut novel, The Ends of Things, is on sale January 14, 2025.
Blurb:
Laura Phillips always wanted to travel the world, but was too afraid to go it alone. So when her new boyfriend, Dave, invites her on a romantic getaway to the remote island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas, she jumps at the chance.
As soon as they arrive at the Pink Sands Resort, Laura and Dave are handed cocktails garnished with umbrellas and led to a luxurious suite. It’s a lovers’ paradise. But when they head down to the pristine beach, Laura notices an oddity among the sunbathing couples: a woman vacationing alone. Intrigued, Laura befriends the woman, Diana, and as they spend time together, Laura finds herself telling Diana secrets she’s never shared with anyone.
But when Diana unexpectedly disappears, Laura suddenly realizes how little she knows about this mysterious woman.
The police suspect Diana may be in danger, and soon Laura herself becomes embroiled in the investigation. Her worries swiftly turn into obsession: Who is Diana? Where did she go? Is she dead? Murdered? As Laura races to find out what happened—and prove her own innocence—she quickly realizes that nothing in this sun-soaked paradise is what it seems, and it’s impossible to know who she can trust. What started out as a dream getaway is turning into a terrifying nightmare…
Tahlia Norrish is an Aussie-Brit actor, writer and current MPhil Candidate at the University of Queensland’s School of Sport Sciences. After graduating from both The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (Distinction, Acting & Musical Theatre) and Rose Bruford College (First Class Hons, Acting), Tahlia founded The Actor’s Dojo — a coaching program pioneering peak performance and holistic well-being for actors.
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