‘The Walking Dead’ Screenwriter Ryan C. Coleman on Perseverance and Setbacks
Posted on: Jan 23, 2025

Ryan C. Coleman is a Chicago-raised, Los Angeles-based screenwriter and author, best known for contributing to the smash-hit series The Walking Dead.
A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, Coleman also wrote for the A&E series Damien, and has recently published his first book, Billy the Kid, about the life of the novel’s namesake.
Here we speak to Coleman about major setbacks, being a decent person and much more.
Was there a particular moment or piece of work that propelled you into pursuing a career as a screenwriter and author?
I grew up like most people, just loving movies—Back to the Future, Young Guns. Then, [in] 1997 [when] I was a junior in high school, Good Will Hunting came out, and there was all this buzz about how [Ben] Affleck and [Matt] Damon had written it. And they just seemed like normal people that I knew. I didn’t know them personally, but they seemed like the kind of people I grew up with—like me and my friends. I was like, “Wow, this is something normal people can do.”
Then, I started getting serious about it. I went to college the next year and majored in film and TV with a concentration in screenwriting. It had always felt like Hollywood was something that famous people did, and Good Will Hunting was the first time I realized not everybody was famous before they did it. So, it was a confluence of loving movies and then seeing two what seemed like normal guys, like me and my friends, making it and being like, “OK, this is possible.”
Did you face any major setbacks when you were first starting out?
I mean, working in the film and TV business, it’s mostly downs, and then every once in a while, you get a little spike of good, right? An example would be when I was working on The Walking Dead. I was the showrunner’s assistant during seasons 2 and 3, and I wrote an episode in season 3 and went to Atlanta and supervised the episode with another writer. When I got back, the showrunner came to me like, “I’ve got some good news for you: you’re going to be a full-time staff writer next season.”
I was like, “This is fantastic. This is wonderful.” Then, three weeks later, the showrunner left the show, and the guy who took over didn’t honor that agreement, and I was sort of asked to leave with the showrunner. So, I was like, “OK, new plan.” So, there was a three-week period where I was like, “OK, I’m going to be staffed on this show, and this is gonna be the next however many years of my life.” And then, two weeks later, boom, gone.
I’ve talked to really established showrunners that I’m friends with, and they all have the same stories. It’s like, “Yeah, it was great, and then there were three years I didn’t work. Then I went great for a few years, and then a strike happened, and I couldn’t get work after the strike.” It’s the same thing. Unless you’re David E. Kelley or Aaron Sorkin or Ryan Murphy or Shonda Rhimes, it’s the same for everybody.
How did you keep your passion alive during the downs?
I guess I get angry. I’m a big sports fan—especially Chicago sports. So, I grew up loving Michael Jordan, and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame speech where he [says], “Then, in second grade, this teacher told me I couldn’t do math, and that pissed me off. And then I didn’t make the varsity squad as a sophomore, and that pissed me off.” And so, there’s a little bit of that. It’s sort of more fuel for the fire.
It also, in some ways, helps you figure out what you actually want to be working on and what your skill set actually is. So, after leaving The Walking Dead, I was like, “OK, what do you want to work on? Well, I like crime, I like thriller, I like Western and I like history. And none of that really sounds like The Walking Dead, so it wasn’t probably the best fit anyway.” It kind of helped hone exactly where my interests lie.
Can you walk us through what your creative process looks like these days?
It generally starts macro, and then I work smaller and smaller and smaller. When I’m starting on a big idea, I’ll generally have a notepad next to me and be half watching a movie—I’ll turn on Heat for the hundredth time. I know everything that’s happening in Heat, so I’m not really paying attention to it, but I’m writing some notes. Then I’ll be like, “What would be the turn at Act 1?” “How do you get from Act 1 to Act 2?” “What’s the midpoint twist that upends the world?” “How do you get to like the final sequence?”
I’m just jotting stuff down. This is very loose, and it’s just for my eyes. Then I’ll sit down at the computer, and I’ll write, and I might get a page. Then I go back and start slowly filling it out, just slowly adding and adding and adding and adding. Generally, it’s starting big like that and then working down smaller and filling it out.
Filmmakers can struggle with the “business” side of the job. How have you navigated balancing the art of storytelling with the realities of making a career in Hollywood?
Generally speaking, I’m not sure that I’ve navigated it great. I didn’t have a strategic plan mapped out. I’ve just kept my head down and went where I thought the work was, doing the stuff that interested me and that I thought I would be good at. As far as I know, most of us out here find the business aspect of it as unwieldy and as hard to grasp as everybody else. But that’s probably true for most businesses—I don’t know if that’s specific to Hollywood. I think that’s just specific to being a grown-up. If you have somebody who’s a family member who works in the industry or is prominent, then I’m sure things are much easier. But that’s not my experience, and that’s not the experience of anybody I know.
I remember working on my first job in TV. I had worked in the film side, but I really wanted to work in television. I was a showrunner’s assistant, and I was talking to one of the other writers. And I was like, “I feel like I’m so far behind. I’m 28, and I’m a showrunner’s assistant. You guys are all writers.” He was probably 35 or 36, and he looked me dead in the eye and got real serious. And he was like, “Never tell anybody else what you just told me. Very few people have ‘made it’ at 28. You’re just going to piss people off if you tell [them] that.”
A lot of this is perseverance, and in some regards, that can be a little unfair because not everybody has the ability to slug it out, making $40,000 or $50,000 a year for five or six years before they get their break. But it is what it is. If you’re hitting 30 and you’re still not exactly where you want to be, just know that nobody else is either.
Finally, are there any skill sets or qualities you feel will remain important for writers to possess, even as technologies continue to evolve?
Have a malleable mind. Oftentimes, when we’re reading, we’re going through it like, “OK, there’s a problem here. This part doesn’t make sense.” And then that writer, that author, needs to be open to six, seven, eight different ways to solve that problem, and then figure out which one is best. That takes an ability. Because it’s hard—when you write something, the reason you wrote it down in the first place is that it was either the first thing that came to your mind or it was the thing that you thought was best in the moment. When somebody comes to you and says this isn’t working, this actually isn’t the best thing, you’ve got to deprogram that thought that was ingrained in your head—that this was the right way to do it.
The other thing is—and it’s Hollywood, so this doesn’t hold true for everybody, but it holds true for the people I work with and the people that I choose to surround myself with—just be a nice, decent person. It makes people want to help you. It makes people want to spend time with you. It makes them want to be around you, and access is everything.
And then, going along with being decent, there are a lot of arguments in Hollywood. Whether it’s in a writers room, or it’s a director and a writer, or a director and a producer, there’s a lot of people butting heads and digging in their heels. I think once you realize that everybody is operating from a high level of anxiety, everybody’s feeling a personal amount of anxiety, and that’s where everything’s coming from, it helps you realize that your anxiety is normal and that everybody’s feeling the way you are. It also helps you take a deep breath before you respond to somebody else and be like, “OK, I’m acting out of anxiety. Why am I feeling anxious about this? Why is this causing me internal strife?” It also helps you cut others some slack when you realize that they’re not mad at you; they don’t hate you; they’re just feeling the way that everybody in Hollywood feels. I think 98% of Hollywood runs on anxiety in one way or another.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Special thanks to Ryan C. Coleman and his team at Blackstone Publishing for their time. You can follow Coleman on X (formerly Twitter) here to keep up to date with his latest projects. Check out Ryan’s latest book below:
Billy the Kid: The War for Lincoln County
In 1870s New Mexico, the territory is at a crossroads. The indigenous population is being driven out—and driven down—by the white settlers migrating west after the Civil War. The center of power isn’t the governor, but rather the Santa Fe Ring, a group of wealthy politicians, businessmen and landowners who exercise power through organized crime, theft, graft and murder. Their main source of income is a mercantile store in Lincoln known as the House.
After escaping jail, William Bonney—aka Billy the Kid—is a 17-year-old orphan who’s been on the run for the better part of two years. All he wants is to belong—to find a place he can call home and people he can call family. From orphan to outlaw to killer, this is the untold story behind the legend of Billy the Kid.
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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