The New York Times article

Focus, People! There’s Work to Do
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Writers' rooms are as idiosyncratic as writers themselves: a system of organization has to be devised to keep track of plots and characters. Some writers prefer lots of stress relievers to play with during their usual marathon script-writing sessions; others like to stay as focused as possible. Food — what's permissible, when and where it can be eaten — has to be negotiated. And often the sensibility in the room ends up being reflected on screen in the finished show. Here's a look inside the rooms where the staffs of five of this season's acclaimed series ply their trade.

NO standard dry-erase boards for the three writers of HBO’s “Flight of the Conchords”: James Bobin, who is an executive producer and director as well as writer, said they prefer colored index cards, hundreds of them. “I’m worried I’ll erase something and forget about it,” Mr. Bobin said.

On the 20-foot wall in the writers’ room, he said, is “every idea we’ve ever had in the last six months.” Plot outlines, character arcs, notes about old music videos the writers like and have looked up online. The comedy series, starring Mr. Bobin’s fellow writers Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement as the real-life New Zealand folk parody duo for whom the show is named, “would be impossible to make without YouTube,” Mr. Bobin said. “We spend our entire time iTunes D.J.-ing each other’s lists, doing a ‘Name That Tune’ sort of quiz.”

The room is done up like a gentleman’s club, with an old dining-room table, oil paintings and a sideboard, to make the writers feel at home. When they do get down to actual writing, the process is like a three-way conversation. “Someone has an initial idea, the second person takes it further, and the third person writes it down” in a computer plugged into a large screen on the wall, Mr. Bobin said, adding that the typist changes during the day.

Mr. Bobin said the arrangement resembles the system in his native England more than the American writing room, which has “20 guys in a room all telling jokes at a time.”

“Three is a good number for writing,” he added. “The third person breaks any tension, and there’s always someone who can pick up the slack.”

"Damages"

THE diversions in the writers’ room of the FX series “Damages” are countless: there’s a football, a dartboard, a futon, a television and a golf putter that inspired a scene. But none are louder than Uncle Ralph, the schnoodle rescued from the streets of Brooklyn that belongs to Todd A. Kessler, one of three creators and executive producers.

Uncle Ralph barks at the printer, Mr. Kessler said, which the team members at first took as “a quality-control thing,” until they realized that he barked at every page that came out. “Either we only write bad pages, or it’s in his DNA,” Mr. Kessler said. “He just doesn’t like the show.” Given that the scheming lawyer Patty Hewes, played by Glenn Close, killed a dog in the first season, maybe it’s with good reason.

Uncle Ralph doesn’t seem to object to the dry-erase boards that line the room, however. They reflect “a visual depiction of our minds, and none of us can figure out what anyone else is saying,” Mr. Kessler said.

The walls hold several boards, each containing one episode, which the writers like to see side by side, in case they want to move story lines around. “The worst thing is staring at a blank board or blank screen,” Mr. Kessler said. “It’s much more inviting to start the day responding to something.” Another creator and executive producer, Daniel Zelman, added, “We throw up a lot of ideas, then there’s a lot of erasing and rewriting.”

But the writing team is made up largely of longtime friends and relatives, said Mr. Kessler’s brother, Glenn, the third creator and executive producer. “So there’s great shorthand and great shared experience,” he said.

"House"

THERE is a rule in the “House” writing room: No eating on the pool table. It’s left free for the show’s creator, David Shore, who can be found playing a game with a colleague there nearly every afternoon. The rule is important because the table is a tempting surface in a room that is more a daily lunch spot than the site of writing sessions, for a staff of more than a dozen. Mr. Shore — who is also an executive producer of this Fox series, starring Hugh Laurie as the cantankerous Dr. Gregory House — said the “basic gumshoe-type work” of researching the obscure maladies that form the core of each episode is done by individuals outside the room, as is much of the script writing.

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The writers’ room really comes into play only when it is time to map out the multi-episode arcs of the characters, Mr. Shore said. “Every few weeks we get together in that room and discuss where we are with the characters and where we’re going and options we should go with,” he said. The sessions clarify “little character traits that are coming out with or without writerly help.”

He noted that the staff members take advantage “of those white boards the same way House does” when trying to make a diagnosis. Although they probably wield their markers with more tact than House. The process is “quite amicable,” he said. “We mock each other’s ideas, but good-naturedly.

"Weeds"

IN contrast to the writers’ rooms of other series, the one for Showtime’s “Weeds” is almost Spartan. “We have eliminated most of the distractions from the room,” said Craig Zisk, an executive producer. All the better, in a strike-shortened season, to focus on the work of reinventing this series, about a widowed suburban mother (Mary-Louise Parker) who sells marijuana. (She has just burned down her neighborhood.)

Computers, P.D.A.’s and cellphones had to go. “We were spending too much time text-messaging each other in the room about what everyone else was saying,” he said. And at the beginning of the season, after Mr. Zisk and one of the writers lost weight by cutting out sugar, the staff of nine voted to institute a no-sugar policy in the writers’ room. The sweets were replaced with fruit plates, dried fruit, nuts and energy drinks. “We’re a very focused group,” Mr. Zisk said.

That restraint has its limits. More than any other show he’s worked on, Mr. Zisk said, “Weeds” has a writers’ room that is a place of “no secrets.” The show’s push-the-envelope plotlines and tangled thicket of hidden relationships prompt the writers to share personal business frankly. Because the creator, Jenji Kohan, “is always open to speaking about her life and her family,” Mr. Zisk said, “it allows us to — and she encourages it — as well.”

He added, “It’s definitely freeing and uninhibited in the room, but sometimes you have to catch yourself.”

"How I Met Your Mother"

THE writing crew of the CBS sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” once had a light saber battle in the dark. There haven’t been many other accessories in their room, except for a massage chair that was originally in the “Friends” writing room, said Craig Thomas, a creator and executive producer of the series. “We like to stay as focused as we can,” he said. “We all have personal lives that we like.”

Not that there has been much time for goofing off. Mr. Thomas likens the post-writers’-strike intensity required to crank out 9 episodes in 10 weeks to the Discovery Channel crab-fishing series “Deadliest Catch”: “It feels like a writers’ room. It’s these guys stuck in this nasty boat, and they have to do the job.”

One accessory that Mr. Thomas and his co-creator, Carter Bays, do find necessary, however, is monitors. Each member of the writing team has one, he said, noting that some other shows do not give all the writers monitors because they can be distracting. “We tried that at one point, and we found that everyone was massively confused,” Mr. Thomas said, with the writing sessions turning into a game of “ ‘What page are we on?’ ”

Another constant in the writing room is the bags of salt-and-vinegar potato chips from Canada that the writer and executive producer Greg Malins buys over the Internet. “He’s so excited about them, but they are the worst thing in the world,” Mr. Thomas said. “They hurt your mouth.”