At the turn of the 21st century, New York literati would often shut down attempts to discuss the latest television shows with the sniffy refrain “I don’t even own a TV.” I remember one particular book party at which a cluster of hot young novelists collectively agreed that they wouldn’t mind having their books optioned for the small screen—as long as no one ever got around to making them. TV in those days was still scorned as a distraction factory churning out bland entertainment in standardized 30- or 60-minute chunks punctuated by Pavlovian laugh lines and pre-commercial-break cliff-hangers.

That snobbery gradually turned inside out as the medium evolved from delivering conventional network fare aimed at the broadest possible audience into a vehicle for the much-hyped new golden age. Prestige dramas and idiosyncratic comedies put a premium on nuance and experimentation, on complex characterization and scintillating dialogue. In other words, all the things for which literary fiction is known. So utterly has the literati’s disdain for the small screen dissolved that nowadays novelists are lining up to have their books adapted. If you eavesdrop on any gathering of serious writers, they’re as likely to be discussing Killing Eve or Better Call Saul as they are the latest book by Zadie Smith or Rachel Kushner. Even the University of Iowa is launching TV-writing programs this fall.

“I see everybody talking about TV like they would talk about books,” says Megan Abbott, author of 10 novels (including Dare Me, which she is developing into a series) and a writer on the HBO series The Deuce. “[The writers I know] take the shows they watch very seriously.”

And why not? Peak TV has turned the industry into a monstrous maw starving for writing talent. Last year, nearly 500 scripted series aired on broadcast, cable, and streaming outlets. Netflix alone plans to unleash 700 original series and movies in 2018. This attention overload means that standing out from the pack is paramount.

“You need more writers with a willingness to experiment, more points of view,” says Nick Antosca, who published fiction on small presses before becoming a TV writer and show-runner (currently on Syfy’s Channel Zero and the forthcoming Hulu series The Act, alongside journalist Michelle Dean). The emphasis in the industry has, by necessity, moved toward developing niche appeal rather than broad viewership. “There’s an openness on the part of TV executives to finding strange thinkers,” says Antosca.

Amelia Gray is one of those strange thinkers who is flourishing in the new world of TV. The author of wonderfully eerie, perverse fiction, Gray recently found herself working in the writers’ rooms for USA’s Mr. Robot and the forthcoming Netflix series Maniac. “I am the weirdo,” she says with a laugh of her contributions to Maniac.

Although TV writing draws on some of the same basic skills as fiction does (a head for plot, character development, and crackling but realistic dialogue), the process is wildly different. “Working as a novelist means you are the god of the story,” Gray says. TV writing tends to be a collaborative art in which both the grand arc of the series and the tiny details get forged collectively.

Abbott says that sometimes she comes up with a trajectory for a character that everyone in the room agrees upon, “but you have to keep pushing it to the center of discussion over and over again, or it’ll get lost. . . And once the show goes into production, there are so many things that can make that story line that you pitched not happen,” she continues. “It really brought out my more assertive qualities!”