As a first-generation daughter of British and Taiwanese immigrants, Lisa Joy was raised to seek out a career that would provide, above all else, stability. But she loved writing, and wrote for fun throughout her time at Stanford and then Harvard Law School. While studying for the bar, Joy submitted a spec script — a sample script of an existing show — to a friend, who passed it to a TV producer, helping her get a job as a staff writer on Pushing Daisies. Then she became the only woman writer on staff at Burn Notice at the time.

Her latest project, the HBO hit Westworld, about a futuristic theme park of robots that malfunction and start rebelling against humans, which she co-created with screenwriter husband Jonathan Nolan, is one of the most talked-about shows on television. As Joy explains, she’s just writing about the world as she sees it.

I was always interested in writing from an early age, but it seemed so far away and inconceivable, like wanting to be an astronaut or a pop star. So whenever anyone would ask me what I wanted to be, I would say a lawyer or a teacher.

After graduation, I went to work for management consulting firm McKinsey & Company in L.A., specializing in finance and high tech for entertainment companies. No matter how long my day job hours were, I always made time to write. I wrote fiction, short stories, and poetry. I never shared it with anybody. I had a lot of college debt. It’s very difficult to go to a university that is as expensive as Stanford and then blindly follow your passions when they don’t immediately make money out of the gate.

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After two years at McKinsey, I took a job in corporate strategy at Universal Studios. I needed some kind of respite from that. So I started taking UCLA extension classes for short stories and poetry. It was like a gift to myself and it allowed me to indulge in my sheer love of writing.



While I was working at Universal, I met my now-husband Jonathan Nolan at the premiere of Memento [which is based on a short story he wrote]. I would come home at night and work on my own writing, and [he saw] how much it brought a light to my eyes that nothing else seemed to.

After a few years at Universal, I was getting a little bit restless. I had this vision of myself in a cloistered academic environment with a beagle, surrounded by thick-bound books and wearing warm, cozy clothing. I wanted to go to Harvard because it felt like it would be the Hogwarts Academy of law schools. When you don’t have a safety net economically as a young lady, you need to understand the systems around you. You need to be able to understand what’s bullshit and what’s not. Having an understanding of the law is one way of doing that.

And on a totally superficial level, I really loved the movie Legally Blonde. When I got to Harvard, I couldn’t afford the exposed-brick, cozy apartment, but I did adopt a beagle.

Before I went to law school, Jonah — I call [my husband] Jonah — gave me a gift that changed my life. It was a little gift-wrapped box, just the size of an engagement ring. I thought, Oh my gosh, this guy is gonna propose. I’m going to Boston, he’s in California, this seems like difficult timing for getting married. I opened it up and it was a bunch of metal brads that hold script pages together. Then he gave me a card, which was a gift certificate for me to buy screenwriting software for myself. He said, “I see your passion for writing and how hard you work at it. I always believe that having the right tool for a job is half the battle.” He gave me the tool that I needed.

John P. Johnson

While I was studying for the bar in California, I started to panic. Being a lawyer or working as a consultant is a totally good, respectable life, but it didn’t inspire me quite as much as writing did.

During law school, I wrote my first proper TV script. It was a spec of Veronica Mars. I told one of my friends, Michael Green, who is a screenwriter I knew from Stanford, about it. Michael passed it on to Bryan Fuller, who was developing a new show called Pushing Daisies. He brought me in for a meeting. I thought that was my brush with Hollywood.

I passed the bar exam and McKinsey put me in San Francisco on a high tech study. About two weeks later, I was in the middle of running a meeting when I got a call. This guy said, “You just got the job.” I said, “That’s amazing and incredible! It will take a few months or so to finish up with this company, then I can fly back to L.A. and start as a writer.” The guy said, “This job starts tomorrow. If you’re not there, you don’t get it.”

I had to take this leap of faith and it was a little scary for me. But because it was a writing job, I thought, This is it, I can have a passion for my work that I never even dared to dream of. I had to call the partners at McKinsey and quit on the spot.

It was a huge pay cut. I had to pay off the Harvard loans myself. But I could make it work. I just had to live lean. I took on a lot of credit card debt, and relied on my boyfriend [Jonah] a little bit to help me though. He became my husband in 2009.

John P. Johnson

Writers’ rooms can be incredible places. You can meet genius people who become friends for life. You can also encounter sexism and competition. Early on, there was another junior writer who pulled me aside and said, “You know, you really shouldn’t talk in a room because you’re just a diversity hire, and no one wants to hear from the diversity hire.” That was tough to hear. I’m half Chinese. Was she saying that’s the only reason I was hired? Am I not supposed to talk? Is everyone looking at me like I don’t belong? Then I realized if you’re a minority of any shape, color, or form, it doesn’t matter. Someone is going to look at you like you don’t belong in any room.



Not long thereafter, [Bryan Fuller] asked each writer to bring in one or two episode pitches. I drafted over 20, then narrowed it down to my 12 favorites. I pitched them all out in front of the room, each one getting shot down, but I kept on pitching. Then I got to the 11th and it worked — and was later my first pitch to make it to the small screen. Being told by that one writer to stay silent had the opposite effect: I figured I had nothing to lose and that feeling was liberating.



Pushing Daisies was on the air for two seasons. After I left, one of my friends from college who was a network exec at USA turned me on to Burn Notice. I joined the writing staff in 2010. I was the only woman on staff.

I was actually drawn to Burn Notice because it was macho. I wanted to take on writing a show people associated with a male voice and masculine action — to show writing a show like that was not just the domain of male writers. There was this thinking in Hollywood that women can’t write men or women can’t write action, or women can’t be funny, or whatever stupidity is in the air in that moment. I felt the same kind of impulse that made me do financial modeling and high tech [extracurriculars] when I was an English major. You say that I can’t do that? Well, fuck you. I’m going to do it.

HBO

While I was still on Burn Notice, I wrote a graphic novel called Headache, which was a retelling of Greek mythology, the Athena story in contemporary times. It was basically my take on Wonder Woman without the tights and the lasso.

I left Burn Notice in 2011 and started to work on an adaptation of Headache for TV. I eventually sold it to a production company. I spent a year developing it. Then they said, “We have a slate full of female protagonists this season. Can you change this to focus more on the male characters?” I was like, “Well, the working title is Athena. So I can’t. It’s just not in the DNA of the show.” In the end, they didn’t pick it up.

Another part of being a woman writer that you’re told by many well-meaning people is that you can’t be a writer and a mother. But I wanted a baby. So when Headache didn’t go, I thought, OK, I’m going to try to get pregnant. I was also unemployed. So I decided to work on my own project. In that time of days spent alone vomiting into a bucket, I developed my first feature film, called Reminiscence. Suddenly I wasn’t a writer for hire, I was a voice in my own right. Right around the time I sold the script [in 2013], J.J. Abrams approached Jonah and myself about doing Westworld.



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He had the rights to it and he suggested telling the story from the robots’ perspective. I was like, My god, that sounds so full of potential. What an amazing world to play in.

Working in TV or film is an all-consuming lifestyle. When you’re both working in the job full-time, you don’t get to see each other that much. He’d be in Europe. I’d be in Florida. Here was this chance to work on something together. And it was a chance to build a world together. There’s something really romantic to me about that.

Jonah and I crafted the world, the characters, the episodes, and everything about it. We brought it in with J.J. and talked to HBO about it. They said, “Good, go write the script.” We wrote the script, and then they said, “Good, go shoot it.” And we did.

The female characters in Westworld are people I feel very close to. It’s a summation of 30-plus years of living as a woman put into fiction. I think in this year, if I wrote a piece where women have no shackles whatsoever, I wouldn’t feel like I was being honest. This isn’t a story that celebrates those shackles. It’s a story that explores them and talks about the need for rebellion. And that’s the kind of story I was interested in telling. I understand that some of those things upset people, and frankly, they upset me too. That’s why I’m writing them.

HBO

I’m an extreme Luddite when it comes to social media. I have no conception of fandom. I spent the majority of my life writing for an audience of one. I am plagued with enough self-doubt and perfectionism that I don’t need to know how other people think I might not be doing. But people have shown me some of the fan art recently, and I was so honored that people would make art inspired by the show.

I’m first and foremost a fan myself. Disappearing into protagonists and characters that I understood — whether it was Willow in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Veronica Mars, or a poem by Billy Collins — makes me feel less alone in the world. For anything that I write to be able to do that to even one person is magical for me.

Get That Life is a weekly series that reveals how successful, talented, creative women got to where they are now. Check back each Monday for the latest interview.

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