Interview with Gaby Dunn
Gaby Dunn is a writer, and has worn many hats in the past, but primarily defines themselves as a screenwriter and novelist. They also have a podcast with their comedy partner, Allison Raskin, as well as their own podcast, Bad With Money. Dunn is formerly of Florida, and now makes their home with their partner, musician Mal Blum, and dog, Beans, in Los Angeles.
Dunn has written fiction since childhood, but took a brief detour into journalism, which inspired their graphic novel, Bury the Lede. Dunn is known for being very open about their personal life, including their sexuality, relationships, family, and mental health. In the last few months, they have been working through feelings about gender, and have decided to use they/them pronouns. Dunn has also been reckoning with what it is to have a public persona and a history on the internet, and how they have changed during their years in the public eye. They have also been watching a lot of Star Trek. Dunn exists at the intersection of several marginalized identities, being Jewish, bisexual and queer, and their work reflects that life experience.
Gaby was kind enough to speak with me about their current projects, how they write, and what’s next.
You started out in journalism. How did the move to fiction and comedy writing happen?
My dad likes to say that the Bad With Money podcast is still journalism. [laughs] Because I think he wants me to be using my degree. I always loved writing, I wanted to be a writer. I used to write fiction when I was a little kid, and wrote a novel when I was in second grade — “novel” being like fifty pages in a notebook. And I was like, “This is it, this is the great American masterpiece, I’ve done it.”
I got into journalism, because I was very into Superman. I loved Lois Lane. I had gotten an internship at my local newspaper in my town, and I was writing for them. Then I went to school for journalism, mostly because “journalist” was a job that I knew I could get, versus like a fiction writer. Journalist-reporter is a job that you can apply for. And I wanted job security, which is hilarious considering where the newspaper industry went.
I was always writing fiction, and then I started teaching myself screenwriting. I was writing this journalism blog that got popular, and I posted on the blog, “Hey, I wrote a pilot script, is anyone interested in reading my fiction?” And a couple people were. One was an executive at Nickelodeon, and one was an agent, and so I sent it to them and the agent repped me, and the executive later hired me on a sketch show.
It was this weird 2011 timeframe where Tumblr was big and there were only a few people on it, and so if you had a popular Tumblr it meant something. It sounds very nostalgic now, like having a Tumblr made you a big deal. Everything I did was for free. I had a day job, and I also did these interviews [for the blog] on the weekends, and at night, and I updated my personal blog and everything. It was a ripe time for personal writing on the internet, people were really into it. YouTube was just starting to become really confessional, and Girls was on TV. It was a prime moment for spilling your feelings on the internet.
How has your writing process changed over the years? You’ve got such a broad catalog of works, and you’ve been writing professionally for a decade.
Yeah, more than that. I think I’ve gotten better at script writing; I’m completely self taught. In the beginning, I bought this book that was essentially Screenwriting for Dummies. I sat down and watched a bunch of sitcoms. I was kind of timing that stuff out, figuring out the rhythm, and then I started doing that for other shows. I wrote spec scripts: I wrote one for The Big Bang Theory, I wrote one for New Girl. I still sort of do that now. I wanted to write an original script for a procedural, so I basically watched all twelve seasons of Bones. I feel very much like a referential person, like I love TV, I love movies. I’m built from pop culture, so it’s sort of distilling all of the stuff I know and putting it into the scripts. I pull from my real life a lot too.
What TV show was most formative for you?
I used to love All That, when I was younger. It was kids being funny and doing sketch comedy, doing absurdist comedy. It’s not telling you why it’s funny, it’s just funny and weird. It trusts that kids are smart. They’ll figure it out, it’s not handed to you, which I very much enjoy.
I watched a lot of Smallville, because I enjoyed the “monster of the week” element of it. During the pandemic, I got very into Star Trek. I’ve watched Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager all the way through.
Honestly, that is a masterclass in how to do a perfectly self-contained episode. I write down notes about episodes all the time. Obviously, you know that it’s popular, but when we started watching it, me and my partner were like “Wait, this is incredible.” It’s just really good and really well-written. I got fully invested.
You’ve done a lot of exciting work. How is writing a graphic novel different from traditional fiction?
Writing the graphic novel was incredibly different, because you have to think of each frame like a director. You can’t write it like a regular script. So, it was a learning curve, because you can’t just say, “She picks up the phone,” you have to say, “She’s holding the phone, it’s midway in the air, now it’s at her ear.” and that’s three different frames. You’re trying to conserve space. You’re trying to get the point across without showing anyone moving, to convey what people are feeling with just one facial expression. I didn’t draw it, but writing it, you have to think of each scene as a picture. So, how do you convey what’s happening, or what someone is feeling, with just a picture? So that was really different.
And then, literally two seconds after that, I got an Audible original series, which was apocalypse fiction. And that was writing a script where you only hear. So, I went from writing something you only see, to writing something that you have to convey only with audio. The graphic novel and the audio project one after the other definitely felt like writing exercise challenges. It’s totally different. In Bury the Lede you have to show everything, but in Apocalypse Untreated you have to hear everything. The way to write each script was just so disparate.
You’ve written quite broadly. What comes most naturally to you? And what’s the most fun and comfortable?
Dialogue. I love dialogue, I love conversations. I like intimate conversations between two people. [My current] screenplay is very much two people figuring each other out. I like flawed people; flawed romance has come up a lot lately in things I’m working on. One thing I’m working on is a murder mystery, and one is a romantic drama. But each one has a kind of intense romance-ish thing that’s a part of it.
Shows where you think everyone’s going to kiss at a certain point — I like where it’s more subtly sexy, instead of “everyone’s fucking.” I’m trying to play with that now in some of my work. Like, if these two characters kiss right now, that would be crazy.
Do you tend to write with an outline, or does it depend on the project?
It depends on the project. I’ve just started very much enjoying outlining. In some places, I really stick to the outline, and in others I deviate wildly. The screenplay that I’ve finished and I’m trying to get made, I outlined it to a T and then wrote from the outline, and that made the actual script writing very painless. Obviously, a lot of stuff changed, but I worked from a pretty meticulous outline.
Apocalypse Untreated had an outline, but I sort of deviated from it. Bury the Lede had a very intense outline. But then, some of my pilot scripts don’t have them, and I just have a picture in my head of what I want. But that was kind of in the past. Lately, I’ve been outlining a lot more, because it’s easier to go, “This goes on this page.” Literally, for the comic, we said “Page one, and it looks like this, page 2, et cetera,” and I wrote it that way.
With the screenplay, I kind of wrote out everything that happens and in what order. That’s like the backbone, and once that’s done, then you go into the actual thing, and you change it and make it good. [laughs]
What kind of environment do you write in?
I’m at my desk, but there’s paper everywhere. There’s paper scribbled on, and stuff on the desk, and then I have a bulletin board that is a bunch of little post-it notes.
My partner comes in and says, “Look at this desk of genius!” I think they’re making fun of me. I tend to have notes in my phone, I write stuff down on the desk, I email myself ideas. I have an office, so I mostly sit in my office.
What is your process for ideas, from inception to writing?
I am very much like, “This is my idea that I have right now, so I’m going to do it.” A lot of the time that amounts to nothing, or just fifty-two pages of a novel. I’m very much a person who comes up with ideas, and then sells them. I don’t wait for writing assignments, really. I was camping with my ex-girlfriend when I came up with this idea for what ended up becoming Apocalypse Untreated. I just wrote up a pitch document when I was inspired, and I sent it to my manager and said, “I don’t know what this is, but here’s this pitch doc.” It was like two pages long.
I’m not precious about what it becomes. With Bury the Lede, it was very true to my experience. At the time, I had just been talking to a comic book company, and I pitched them four or five different ideas and they chose Bury the Lede. I have tons of unfinished documents, I have pitches that have never gone anywhere. I always have tons of ideas, so to me it’s no sweat off my back to be like, “Let me just write up a paragraph of what I think this is or could be.”
I wrote a procedural drama original spec that I just wrote on my own time, and it’s been great because when meetings come up, I have that.
I try to at least put together a little pitch of ideas, and then I try not to be too precious about any one idea. You know, the screenplay could have been anything, but it just so happened that there was an actor looking for something. To me, it feels good to have everything ready. Generally, I try to have things ready to go, with the idea that at some point someone will ask for that.
I enjoy writing, and it is a job, but I enjoy reading scripts and sitting down and writing things. It may not go anywhere, but I would be doing this for free anyway. Sometimes I just write stuff for myself.
What writing advice do you stand behind?
It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be done. The first draft just has to be done. It just has to be finished, and it will be bad, and you can go back and make it good. I meet so many people who are like, “This is my one story.” That’s the only thing you’ve been doing for ten years? Have you shown it to anyone? They’re like, “No.” If it gets made, and it’s bad, that was your one movie. What? That doesn’t make sense to me. You have to keep making stuff. Maybe that’s the people who win an Oscar, and I’m just making The Fast and the Furious, I don’t know.
It’s okay to be corny sometimes. I don’t know how to explain it. There’s room for all kinds of stuff. You don’t have to be an auteur. [laughs] There’s room for all kinds of things. All kinds of things hit people differently and mean a lot to people in different ways. There are silly characters that mean a lot to me. I think sometimes things get discredited because they’re not high-brow.
Be specific. Sometimes people are like, “Nobody is going to get it.” But if you get it, someone else will too. Sometimes, audiences are talked down to in a way they don’t need to be. Even if they haven’t heard of what you’re referencing, they’ll look it up. If they care that much, they’ll Google it. Young people want to feel cool, like they know something that other people don’t, so they’ll look it up. That’s what I did, it’s fine!
What book do you desperately wish you had written?
There’s a lot across genres. It’s hard to be like, The Lord of the Rings. [laughs] I just read Melissa Broder’s Milkfed, and that was gay and Jewish, and it was so perfect and I really loved it. My friend Amanda wrote a book called Wordslut, about linguistics. There’s tons of stuff across journalism too; there’s a book called Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc that’s such a triumph of journalism.
I’m from Florida and gay, so Kristin Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things. Esme Wang has a book called The Collected Schizophrenias, which I think is a really great telling of mental illness. I loved My Sister, the Serial Killer. I appreciate it when it’s like, “This is the only person who could have written this.”
What have you been reading lately? What do you read for comfort?
I’ve been reading a lot of biographies. I read Brian Epstein’s biography, who was the manager of the Beatles. I read I Tina, Tina Turner’s biography, which I loved. Pema Chodron, she’s a Buddhist nun who writes a lot about mindfulness. I was reading a lot about disco for a hot minute; I read Sasha Geffen’s Glitter Up the Dark, [and several other] books about the history of disco. Also Detransition Baby, by Torrey Peters. That was huge this year. That was so necessary in terms of queer literature.
I fell down sort of a music biography/music history rabbit hole. Tina Turner became a full special interest this year. I watched her documentary on HBO. I watched What’s Love Got to Do With It. I got very into music documentaries. I thought I was going to write a book about the music industry, and it’s just one of my projects that’s sitting on my hard drive now.
Favorite living writer? Favorite dead writer?
Oh my god. [sigh] Oh, man. Dead writer? I don’t know. When I was in high school, it was like Oscar Wilde. Living writers, it changes all the time. This is so hard! Because if I say some people, and I don’t say friends of mine, I’m going to feel awful. Torrey Peters really blew my mind this year. I think the ability to write something that might be perceived as controversial, and then be like, “I said what I said,” I really admire that. I think we, as authors, should stop explaining ourselves. The art is what it is, and you can take it or leave it. I think that’s a lovely thing that Torrey modeled for me this year.
What is your goal as a writer, if you could aspire to anything?
To make stuff that makes people feel seen. I would love to write something that has a crazy fandom. [laughs] I would love to write something that inspires a million fanfictions. I think if people start wildly shipping, that’s the biggest compliment. It just means that you’ve built something people care about. Even if it’s just like a small group of people, that would be really cool. Hopefully, my stuff is so gay that the reverse happens and people have to write straight fanfiction. [laughs]
It’s not that big of a deal, they could just kiss. What’s interesting is watching back Star Trek, they’re in the twenty-something century, gender is sort of fluid, but still every character is in a heterosexual-presenting relationship. To me, that’s sad because it really dates it. With science fiction, there’s already aliens! Like, why is gay people such a stretch?
That’s my speech, and I am running for president.
Not just sexuality, but gender. We’ve played with characters changing gender so much, like Mystique from X-Men. All of these characters can change form, and somehow we never engage with what that really means. They only kiss when they’re in one certain gender form. I think gender is the next big thing that needs to be addressed in this genre [dialogue.]
Monogamy is super interesting. In these genre [works], there’s monogamy. In Apocalypse Untreated, not to spoil, there’s a teenage throuple, because it’s the apocalypse! Who gives a shit? I’m queer and polyamorous, and gender is a big question mark right now. So I’m trying to use that as a lens for genre fiction.
You’ve been a sensitivity reader and hired them. Do you think this practice is a necessary evolution in publishing?
I think it’s great. In the case of being hired, and the case of hiring, it was not on the publishers’ dime. It was the [writer] paying. I’ve never had it come from the publisher directly. I’ve also never had it where the publisher really cared if we did it or not. I think as an author — and I consulted for both of Hank Green’s books — I think in that case it’s because he cares. So, it really is up to the author, and that’s kind of unfortunate.
I wish publishers would care and work that in. I mean, it’s been helpful in the case of minor things. In one of my novels, we had a trans character make a reference to an actor who, unknown to me, had made questionable comments about the transgender community in the past. The sensitivity reader asked if we could change the reference. It shows that you are taking even the smallest steps to understand the community.
There are certain books that purport to be gay, and I don’t think they are at all. You’re never going to find a monolith of queerness. Sensitivity readers will say different things.
Also, Hank didn’t have just me, he had a few others as well. His character in the second book becomes disfigured, and he had a sensitivity reader who had gone through an accident where she was scarred. He had her read the book as well, to get that right. I thought that was really interesting as well — not just race, or gender or sexuality, but something super specific. I thought that was really cool. I hope that sort of specificity keeps happening.
Considering you have a public persona, do you ever worry about pursuing projects that might be considered off-brand?
I worry about my outward persona a lot, especially because it changes so often, because I’m a human being. What I’m interested in, what I care about, and what I want to write about changes all the time. I just don’t feel the need to present any of that other than through my writing now. I’m thirty-three, so maybe that’s just age.
I’m really off social media, because I don’t find it necessary for my work anymore. That’s very lucky for me. I just want to write what I want to write when I feel inspired by it. I don’t feel like I need to get permission.
I realized that I’m giving my thoughts away for free, and they’re better served in my writing. I don’t need to comment on everything that’s happening in the news, I don’t need to comment on the discourse of the day. I don’t need to dunk on whoever the villain of the day is. It just all felt like a toxic waste of time. Like, who am I? I’m not so important that the internet needs to hear my thoughts on the news. It gave me this false sense of self-importance, to the point that I forgot that I am an artist and I can put that into my work. I kind of became disillusioned with the need for myself and for every character I write to be a good person. And if they’re not a good person, then you’re in trouble.
Like I said about Torrey Peters, the work is the work. I think people fall over themselves to explain or apologize. You don’t have to do that. I worry all the time about being misperceived; I think people have the wrong idea about me a lot.
Has the move away from YouTube and toward podcasting and focusing on your writing been engineered to remove yourself from the discourse and let the work take center stage?
Yes. I struggle with the podcast too, because this is the thing about the internet that’s tough. I’ve been on it for a long time. Someone could find something I made or wrote in 2013, but to them they found it today. There’s no timeline, so they’re like, “This is you, today.” And it’s like, no, I barely even know what you’re talking about. I barely remember writing that, but for them it was today. And so that is difficult.
I waded into some discourse on the internet where I shouldn’t have on Twitter, and the way that it got viralized and perceived was that I was like a cis girl YouTuber. And that was really tough for me, because I don’t view myself as a YouTuber. I’m a writer. I’ve sold multiple television shows, I’ve written books, I’m working on films. I feel very past that.
Also, I was, and am, working through some gender stuff, so it was really jarring to have people who have known me for a long time as like, “The Girl from Buzzfeed.” I don’t even know who that is!
It’s been a privilege to have these opportunities afforded to me, but it’s also hard when stuff is painted a way that I don’t recognize. I’m working in TV and I’m working behind the scenes more, and that is a bit more comfortable for me, even though my persona is someone who is loud and likes the attention.
I just hope that [image of me] hasn’t held me back. I think it’ll be fine. I’m moving towards different things.
Are you ever approached for projects that don’t feel true to who, and where, you are now?
All the time. Branded stuff. Stuff that I don’t feel good about, I try not to do. Some stuff I just swallow, because I need to pay rent, but other times, I’m like, “Let me just throw money out the window.” [laughs] Because I don’t feel good about, it, because I don’t feel good promoting it to a queer audience, promoting it to a trans audience, or to young people. I look at the number, and I say “Goodbye, money. See you later!”
What are you working on now, what’s in store for you this year?
I’m working on a TV show that I sold, and I’m working on a film that has an actor attached. We are putting it together and working on it. Both very queer and trans. I’m trying to sort of move away from anything that I don’t feel connected to or that I don’t feel is realistic to my life, and my friends, and my community. I’m still kind of seen in a certain light; it requires more vulnerability. In order to be perceived correctly, I have to keep changing who I am, and I have to tell people about it. That kind of sucks, but hopefully it is helpful to other people.
RACHEL FINSTON is a writer and librarian whose poetry has been published by Indolent Books. Her essays have appeared in Bridge Eight and The Bookends Review.