Get Started in Writing for Children by Lisa Bullard

“It’s a brutal, brutal feeling: I’m doing work that I know isn’t good,” he says, shifting into the self-deprecating mode in which he seems most comfortable. With television, once he’s locked into an airdate - in the case of Newsroom‘s second season, July 14 - he has no choice but to deliver, and those very real deadlines have him second-guessing his latest series. There, if the ideas aren’t flowing, he can call the studio and get an extension. The debilitating angst - which Sorkin once medicated with cocaine, resulting in a 2001 Burbank airport arrest between Emmy-winning seasons of his seminal NBC drama The West Wing - might seem better suited for a life in film. “It’ll be my 165th episode of television,” he says, “and I’ve come to realize that it’s only being scared to death that gets it done.” Anxiety is a feeling with which Sorkin, 52, is all too familiar. He’s aware that the holdup is worrisome - for HBO, which is shelling out several million dollars on each episode for his actors, who often are kept waiting until the 11th hour for his scripts and for Sorkin himself, whose reputation as one of Hollywood’s few name-brand writers is wrapped up in the series’ success.

Soon, the cast of The Newsroom, his HBO cable-news drama whose first season was in equal measures praised and pilloried, will need to begin shooting an episode that he has yet to begin writing. “I have no ideas right now,” the Oscar-winning writer confesses once his office door has shut. It’s a mid-April morning at the Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood, and Aaron Sorkin‘s nerves are getting the best of him. This story first appeared in the June 28 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.

Get Started in Writing for Children by Lisa Bullard