Paul Dichter: Stranger Things writer on why the writers’ room isn’t so different from the design studio

0:04It's such an extraordinary experience sitting across a table from super smart people who also love the same things that you love, who hopefully come from different backgrounds and life experiences and points of view, and getting to have that spirited debate. I think the best version of the writers room dynamic is one where people don't agree, where it isn't like obvious that the next thing that needs to happen is this.

0:38I'm an official Stranger Things nerd. I watched the show when it first came out, again when my daughter was old enough, and once more when my son was ready. As a kid of the 80s, the way it captured that particular feeling of freedom, biking with friends through the neighborhood, the movies, and music of the era, struck exactly the right balance of nostalgia, present enough to feel real, but never forced. For that, much of the credit goes to the writers. So we were thrilled to get a chance to talk to one of the head writers for Stranger Things, Paul Dichter. I'd always wondered what actually happens in a writer's room for a show like this.

1:11Are there heated debates, storyboards, and character maps to keep a sprawling plot straight? Well, as we learned in this interview, yes to all of that. And in many ways, the writer's room isn't so different from the design studio. It's a place where creative ideas collide and combine. and when it's working well, it produces something greater than the sum of its parts. Paul shared with us the dynamics of the Stranger Things writer's room, describing the diverse roles from enthusiasts to skeptics that drive the creative teams. He explores the discipline of restraint in using 80s nostalgia and the balance between following systemic logic and knowing when to break the rules for a really good idea.

1:55There's also a lot here about how story structure maps onto design work. The idea that every scene needs an engine, that meaningful change has to register at every level, and that the best creative decisions often come not from defending what you already know, but from sitting with a note that you hate long enough to find out what's really underneath it. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery. And I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our premium subscriber feed. Design Better Premium subscribers enjoy weekly episodes.

2:27That's four episodes per month rather than just two. And all of them are ad-free. Plus, you'll get an invitation to our monthly AMAs with the smartest folks in design and tech. And if you subscribe at the annual level, you'll also get our toolkit, a collection of our favorite design and productivity tools like Perplexity, Miro, Read AI, and more. You'll hear a preview of this episode, but if you'd like to hear the full conversation, please consider becoming a premium subscriber at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. So if you can't afford a subscription, just shoot us an email at subscriptions at the curiositydepartment.com.

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3:21We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

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3:43And now, back to the show.

3:50Paul Dichter, welcome to Design Better. Thank you. Well, we are, I have to say, very excited to have you here. Aaron and I are huge Stranger Things fans. Before we started recording, I don't think I even showed Aaron this, but for my 50th birthday, my son Dash, my 10-year-old son, made this card for me with a Demogorgon on the front. I also have a little Demogorgon crochet thing that my kids got. for me that's back there on the bookshelf. Yeah. I'm wearing the Stranger Things Santa Cruz color. There's all sorts of nerdy Stranger Things fan stuff going on here, which I hope folks don't get too nerded out by.

4:26But we're just really excited to have somebody who actually worked on the show, was deeply involved. Before we get there, though, we want to know a little bit about your backstory and how you got to where you were with the show. So rewind us to Paul from before Stranger Things. And what point did you decide to become a TV writer? and what was your educational background like? So I have a degree in English literature, but I was resistant to the idea that I wanted to be a writer for a long time, even though in hindsight, it was there all along. Halfway through college, I ended up acting in a play in college, which I'd never acted before.

5:05I didn't do it in high school because I was too shy. And I had such an amazing experience doing the play and I ended up studying acting at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago for a summer when I was 19 and thought I wanted to be an actor. While I was getting my English degree, I started pursuing acting a little bit in Chicago. And one of my friends from that Steppenwolf Theater summer program moved to Los Angeles and got cast on Grey's Anatomy. The first season of Grey's Anatomy when it was like the biggest show in the world. And I bought myself a plane ticket to go visit her in LA. It was winter in Chicago.

5:50And I used Priceline because I was so broke. I was waiting tables at a theme restaurant in Chicago. And I Pricelined a ticket to LA and I spent two days in LA and it was 75 and sunny. And I visited my friend and that was it. I was like, I have to move to LA. Someone will tap me on the shoulder and ask me if I want to be on Grey's Anatomy, and I'll say yes, and I'll go from there. And then moved to LA. I was 24 and basically quit acting as soon as I got to town. As soon as I landed, I was like, I can't do this. This is not for me. And then I waited tables for about 10 years, and then I got the job on Stranger Things.

6:30So there was some in between there. There was this movie that I was obsessed with. this movie You Can Count On Me with Mark Ruffalo. It's a great movie from the early 2000s, and I was obsessed with Mark Ruffalo, and I wanted to be him. And the play that I did in college was written by the same person who wrote the movie, Kenneth Lonergan. And it took me a long time to realize that it wasn't the acting, even though it's incredible, it was the writing. Because I think that I had a block about pursuing writing for some reason. Both my parents are writers that might have something to do with it. Once I discovered writing, Then it took me years and years and years to get good at it.

7:05Really, I'm a slow learner. And I was waiting tables the whole time, the same restaurant in LA. And I had a bunch of other friends. We were all trying to be writers and we all had day jobs. And one by one, each of my friends sold a script or got staffed on a show or made a movie. And I was still waiting tables. And I remember I started dating my girlfriend, a woman I met at the restaurant who's now my wife. And I remember early on saying to her, I'm going to put a clock on this dream. And if I don't make it by the time I'm 30, I'll get a real job. And she said, if you get a real job, I'll leave you.

7:47She said, I don't care how long this takes, even if it never happens. But if you give up on this, I'm out. Which was unbelievable. I was so bitter at the end from waiting tables. I waited tables for many, many years, which I think is an experience everyone should have. But I got very tired of it. I boil it down to, I would go up to a table and I would say, hi, how are you? And someone would look at me and they would say, iced tea. And if they just said, good, iced tea, no problem. But they didn't answer my question. They just went straight to iced tea. And I was so burnt out. And I was turning 30 and it was a whole crisis in my head.

8:24And then once I kind of made peace with the job, from that moment that I realized that I was grateful to have a job that started at noon. And my girlfriend and I were sharing a car. She had a quote unquote real job. So I dropped her off at 830. I found a coffee shop in Hollywood with no internet. And I went there every day from 830 to 12. And I wrote. And that was my film school. I did that for about two years. I wrote three or four feature scripts in the first year. just getting my hours in. And once I kind of accepted that this job that I was so resentful over was actually giving me time to write and enough cash to live and not so much that I felt like I could settle down.

9:08From that moment, it was a very short window until I got Stranger Things. And the way I got Stranger Things is one of those friends who was also a struggling writer in LA was Rots Duffer, who's one of the Dover brothers who created the show. And I read the first draft of that script as a friend because we would give each other scripts to read as we were writing them and we were all trying to make it. And we were house-sitting in my aunt's house and they were at our house the day that Netflix made them the offer to make their show, which was an amazing moment. And right around that time is when I finally wrote a script that was pretty good.

9:51after years and years. And I sent them the script. And Ross took me to breakfast. And he said, Netflix won't let me hire you as a staff writer because you're a waiter with no agent and no resume. So I want to offer you the job of writer's assistant. But I want you to pretend that you're a staff writer because we need your help. And we've never done this before. Is that OK? And I said, yes, thank you for giving me my break. And on Friday, I was at the restaurant going up to people, asking them if I could get them something to drink. And then on Monday, I was in the writer's room and someone came up to me and said, can I get you something to drink?

10:32That show was Stranger Things. That was the first day of the first season. And by the end of season one, I was promoted to staff writer. And I got to co-write an episode that year. And then 10 years later, I'm a co-executive producer on the last season. and it was completely life-changing. That's super interesting. I was very curious how you got in kind of ground level as assistant. And then if you watch the documentary that came out right after the end of season five, you're very prominent in there. Like you're in the writer's room in the mix kind of shaping debate. If any of our listeners who are Stranger Things fans or maybe you didn't get all the way through, if you just go Google Paul's name, the internet has shared understanding that the best episodes, the most powerful turning point episodes, were Paul's.

11:22Paul was like at the center of this. You don't mind me saying that, do you? It's true. I will say that I got very lucky with the writing assignments of which episodes I was given to write. But it was a very small group of people that wrote the show with Ross and Matt, and it was an unbelievable experience to be in this tiny little creative pod inside this huge thing. Take us there. Take us into the writer's room of what that's like. So our listeners, many are pursuing creative endeavors, but maybe they're different. And they don't realize that what you do, writing for a popular TV show, is not so unlike what they're doing, that there's debate and there's conversation and there's taste and there's sort of a feel for what should come next.

12:13What was it like in the writer's room as you were working through, maybe you've got specific stories of points, critical turning points in the narrative where the discussion, the creative debate was particularly heated and you found some pathway forward. It's the only time in my life where my expectations for what something would be were met. And it really was what my fantasy of the job might be turned out to be what the job is. And I think the biggest misconception for people who don't work in this specific industry is that we are sitting alone at the computer writing episodes because 95 % of the job is done collaboratively.

12:58In this case, for this show, it was six people sitting around a table. There's a few whiteboards. In the first season, we were in a corporate office space on Sunset Boulevard. And after season one, we went to Netflix and asked them to give us the budget for an office. And instead we rented houses and we just turned the living room of the house into our writer's room. Because all you really need is access to snacks and a table. The snacks are very important. But 95 % of the job, like I said, is sitting around as a group talking about story, talking about what the arc of the season is, the arc of the episode, the arc of the scene.

13:44And it's not the case where a writer is in charge of a particular character or even a particular part of the story. It really feels like a collaboration. Obviously, the showrunners are the decision makers, but it's a small group that gets to brainstorm together and voice their opinions and agree and disagree. and figure out what the story is together. And if you spend six months, let's say, writing a season of television, two weeks of that time, you'll be in your office writing an episode. The rest of the time, you are at the table with everyone else, debating, arguing, telling embarrassing stories from when you were in junior high school and trying to figure out what the show is telling you it wants to be.

14:34And it's incredible. It's the best job I've ever had. Tell us a little bit about maybe some of the visual artifacts you created, because you mentioned the whiteboards. I'm sure there was notes and maybe Post-its, but were there ever maps or drawings or sketches that you used to help give a point of view or tell part of the story? Definitely. I mean, once we were deeper into the series, when we had a sense of the geography of not just Hawkins, but locations that we've seen before, part of the fun and the problem solving for a specific scene is to look at the physical space, a map of Hawkins trying to figure out how we're going to get from this place to this other place and how long it might take to ride your bike there.

15:15or if you've got a fight sequence in a hospital trying to figure out where the monsters are going to chase you and where you're going to go and how you're going to slam the door. So all that stuff, it's really fun to look at either the architectural drawings or the location photographs or sometimes by the end of the series, we're on Netflix on the laptop scrolling through an old episode just on Netflix trying to remember, Or, oh, yeah, look, the eight balls in Mike's bedroom, we can use that for this moment. Like, things like that, which became really fun. And sometimes, to be honest with you, you're maybe going on the Stranger Things wiki to verify some information.

15:57Because sometimes you forget a detail or two, but the information exists. And it's possible that you forget a thing or two along the way. Obviously, on season one, as the creature design was starting to evolve and starting to look at drawings of different ideas for what a Demogorgon could be, we would look at them together and they would say, what do you think? Which one do you like? Which is the scariest? Which is so fun. It's so fun to look at ten different monsters and get to weigh in on them. It's the best. You know, it's interesting to me about Stranger Things. as a child of the 80s, much of what I see in the series, it looks exactly like my childhood.

16:41And so there's an incredible attention to detail of the time and place. Because many in our audience are type nerds, they may or may not have caught that the Stranger Things logo is lifted from Choose Your Own Adventure. That is the type. And I recognize that only by feel. And then I'm like, wait a second, is that it? And then I look it up and there it is. There's so much of that where it's built into the fabric. I see a Spielberg ET scene. I see a Back to the Future reference. I see all these different things, but it doesn't hit you over the head. It's like baked into it. You're soaking in it, but it's not overt.

17:24So I'm curious, One, what does the research for the look of these things, like the feel of this, what does that research look like? And then were there discussions about, okay, this is too on the head. Let's dial this back. The show had the most unbelievable craftspeople, production designers, and department heads, costumes, everything, with the most insane attention to detail that makes the writers look like clowns in terms of figuring out those details. But something that might be of interest to you and your audience is, even before the writers' room started on the first season, the Duffers made a lookbook, which was like a visual deck, basically, that they used to sell to show.

18:10And it was in the style of a 1980s horror paperback, and they did it themselves on Photoshop on their computer, And we ended up changing the name of the show to Stranger Things during the writer's room on the first season. And there was a jar in the middle of the table and people were putting name ideas into the jar. I wish I could take credit for Stranger Things, but I can't. But anytime someone had a pretty good name, the first thing Ross and Matt would do is they would put it in that font. And they would look at it on the paperback. And I think you could Google this lookbook. It's out there.

18:45But that instant hit of visual recognition, of seeing the title in that context, was essential to the decision-making for them to pick that name. And I think that Stranger Things worked in that font as a lost Stephen King novel, which was the feeling we were going for, which is really cool and a great way to kind of reverse engineer the feeling we were going for. And then to answer your other question about making sure it's not too on the nose, something interesting about Stranger Things is that most of the creative team, especially on the writing side, we weren't actually children of the 80s.

19:29We're a little bit younger than the characters from the show. So for us, there was a nostalgia that was filtered through renting Amblin VHSs in our childhoods, renting Goonies, watching that movie and being nostalgic for a version of childhood that was already kind of slipping away in the mid-90s. not for me as much because I was growing up in a small town and I rode my bike everywhere and I didn't have a phone and did a lot of the things that the kids on the show do. But I think part of the reason the show works is that there is some filtering happening through the imagination of the Duffers.

20:11And it's not like a pastiche. I've had this interesting side job since season two of the show, when Netflix started to realize that there was a universe here of stories, people started approaching Netflix saying, can we do a comic book? Can we do a novel? Can we do some merch? And the Dovers started getting all these questions about the story of the universe, and they didn't have time. And so they nominated me to be the liaison between the writer's room and licensing, basically. And so I've been doing that. I'm still doing that. for years and years and years. So I've read every comic book and every novel.

20:53But one of the notes that I've consistently given to writers who are new to the world of Stranger Things is, you don't need to put in this many references to 80s pop culture. It's really not wall-to-wall references because then it starts to feel more like fan fiction, which is totally fine. It's just not what the series itself is. It feels like more the lived-in version than us looking down on what that time was. And I think doing it with a light touch makes a difference. For some reason, it makes me think of the difference between the spaceships in Alien versus the spaceships in Star Wars, and how the spaceship in Alien is old and broken down, and wanting to find that feeling that like, if there's an incredible movie playing in the theater the week that the season is happening, of course we're Googling the date, we're reading out loud all the movies.

21:52We're being intentional about that because we love those movies so much. But we're also making sure that we're not drowning in the references. Yeah. So I think that's the key takeaway that I hope our listeners file in the back of their mind is restraint is so powerful. There's a lot of these references in Stranger Things, and it would have been very easy to become a pastiche, but it never got there. I felt like I'm in that place. I know this time and space, and I'm transported. If it were done too much, it would undermine all of it. And a lot of creative thinkers get excited about this cool idea or this reference, and you can't help but just hit that again.

22:35Hit it again because it's so great. Music's like that, too, where, you know, you want to hit that note over and over again. And you do, and, like, all the power is lost. I totally agree. It feels more universal when it becomes a texture, an incredibly important texture to the series, but that it's okay if you aren't yourself a child of the 80s. it still works for you and it also isn't an overwhelming sensory wash of music, pop culture, toys, material culture. It's definitely more than window dressing, but it was never the central focus in the writer's room. The central focus is always on character and on who these kids are and teens and adults and what they're trying to get and what they want.

23:27And if along the way, you could throw in a never-ending story song, like, do it. Hell yeah. Of course. George Lucas said when all the new Star Wars movies came out and he was sort of trying to grumble without sounding like sour grapes, he said, you know, it turns out Star Wars is a movie series not about spaceships. It's about relationships, which is very true. Like, the spaceships happen to be there, but it's really about relationships. Absolutely. That's all stories. And I think that's probably why the show resonates more than nostalgia for Dig Dug, which is too difficult for a modern audience to play anyway.

24:06Game is possible. That's right. Yeah, I wasted many quarters on that in the supermarket growing up. So speaking of relationships, friendship is one of the core themes of the show. And it's really cool to hear that you were friends with one of the Duffer brothers before the show even started. Friends have conflicts, and I'm sure there were conflicts in the writer's room. Maybe you could talk to us how you navigated some of those conflicts, given that you were friends before and how that played into it. Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting combination of working in the arts and having more of an artist temperament and having a nine-to-five office job.

24:43So it can be an unusual combination platter when you're in that writer's room. because some part of it is still, you know, what are you eating for lunch and where are you sitting? And you're chewing very loud because you spend a lot of time with the same group for years on end. But then a lot of it is really you bring so much of yourself to the storytelling, especially as a writer on a show like this because everything starts from this origin point of feeling like an outcast as a young person and wanting to tell a story where the outcasts are the main characters, are the heroes. And that coming from such a personal place and really inviting people to feel like they can tell embarrassing stories or sweet stories or both about their own lives.

25:32Not that the show is in any way autobiographical, but just the specificity of nerds writing a show about nerds is definitely there. There's tons of conflict. There's a lot of times when you are absolutely convinced that you know what the right answer is, but nobody else agrees with you. And you have to be conscious of starting to be annoying because you keep pitching the same idea over and over again. And sometimes you have to stop. People, I think, sometimes find themselves taking on different roles in that room of the kind of gut check person. Does this feel right? Do you believe this? or the person who is firing off idea after idea after idea.