Grey's Anatomy: Grey Matter

From Krista Vernoff, writer of "Into You Like a Train"

Originally posted on 10/30/05

So - you saw last week's episode - written by the always brilliant Shonda Rhimes - wunderkind creator of Grey's Anatomy? Okay, yeah, not only written by Shonda, but written by Shonda as a season finale? Written by Shonda to leave such an impact on you that you would wait for four months, salivating and debating all summer long, then come back in the fall to see how it all panned out? So, imagine my surprise, I mean delight, okay HORROR, when Shonda assigned me to write the episode that followed hers, and would air not four months later, when the audience had had time to digest and process Meredith's brilliant "Pick me, Choose me, Love me" speech - but one week later, when all the drama of that beautiful "season finale" was still utterly fresh in the audience's minds. A tall order, to say the least.

Thank God we have an unbelievably talented writing staff and research staff and a writers' room that forever generates good ideas. That's one of my favorite things about writing and producing hour-long television - that every episode is, in a great many ways, a group effort. Stacy McKee, I think it was, pitched the idea of a train wreck - since that's how Meredith, and pretty much every woman we know, would feel after opening her heart to that degree. And out of a train wreck, there's room for almost any kind of medical story you want to tell…

We'd had a doctor in the writer's room several months before who'd told us about his work on the burn unit. He told us about a pregnant woman who was so badly burned that she couldn't touch or hold her baby which had to be delivered in an emergency c-section. He told us how he'd held the baby to the woman's face - the one area of her body that she could still feel… The image made us cry - and we knew we had to find a way to work that image into the show. The train wreck seemed like the perfect opportunity. I think that's the kind of the thing people don't realize - that sometimes a whole story grows out of our desire to include one single image… When I left the writer's room and went to my office to flesh out that story, my notes said "pregnant burn victim, baby on face." That's it. So the whole best friends having babies together came from many dark hours slamming my head against my keyboard, muttering "heeeeeelp" and "I'm sooo tiiiiired" and "whyyyy meeee" to the bear figurine I keep on my desk which, at three am one particularly horrible night, started to look a lot like it was mocking me and this pathetic notion that I could be a writer for a living… But I digress.

So. The train wreck… We had the pregnant burn victim, and we had heard a story, I think from Zoanne Clack, our brilliant writer/doctor/over-achiever, about how sometimes, when people are bleeding internally, and in shock, they die very quietly. We thought it would be funny to spin it - make the dying woman loud instead of quiet and that's where the character we lovingly referred to as "Chatty Cathy" was born. Eventually, she became "Yvonne," after my friend Yvonne, who whined to me one day that I never name any characters after her. That's another little thing we do, give the characters catch phrases like "Mr. Parkinsons" and "Tumor Lady" when trying to track their stories in the writer's room - and name them later in the script stage. Which brings us to Bonnie and Tom - the impaled couple - who, until the script stage, we referred to as Bonnie and Clyde. (Cause they're stuck together, and bloody and, okay, I think you get it. ) Jim Parriott, executive producer/writer-extraordinaire pitched this idea and when he did, I thought, "Fiiiine, I'll stop whining about having to write the damn train wreck episode that follows the brilliant would-be season finale because holy crap how great is this idea?"

I never did stop whining - But I loved the idea because not only is it medically fascinating and emotionally torturous, but metaphorically - and we're big on metaphor here at Grey's - it's awesome. Derek has been asked by Meredith to choose between the two women he loves. And the doctors are being asked to choose between two patients who are still sitting up talking, laughing, very much alive… At the end, one of them will be dead. Which is, I think, how Meredith feels when Derek says "She's my wife." Also, when Meredith asks at the end of an act "How do you choose which one gets to live" - she still doesn't have her answer from Derek about his other choice - so it's doubly loaded. This is the kind of thing a writer loves. Oh - and in the beautifully directed and edited sequence where Bonnie and Tom are separated, it feels, I think, very similar to how it feels for Meredith and Derek to be separated. And for how it felt for the audience to watch Meredith and Derek be separated. Which I know you hate me for. So all I'll say is this: SHONDA MADE ME DO IT!!!

(P.S. Kip Koenig, another of our brilliant writers, pitched the title "Into You Like a Train" - from a Psychedelic Furs song. Before that, the episode was called "You Oughta Know" after the Alanis Morissette song - and because the theme of the episode is actually about being in the know - because Meredith wants to know what Derek's decision is, and because the doctors don't know what will happen when they pull the pole from Bonnie and Tom, and because Alex didn't know Yvonne was bleeding internally etc. But then Alanis did that weird acoustic cover album of her own music and sold it in Starbucks and Shonda found it upsetting and besides the Psychedelic Furs title is just plain better. The End).

From Eric Buchman, NOT the writer of "Make Me Lose Control"

Originally posted on 10/9/05

January 18, 2005. That's when the writers first convened to outline this episode. There's probably something to be said about a gestation period of nine months, maybe a metaphor to something else that can be conceived, developed, and delivered in that same period of time, but I don't know what that could be. What I do know, though, is that Krista Vernoff wrote this episode, she did so in a very short amount of time, and she did it while simultaneously producing a pilot of her own for ABC. This is the second episode Krista wrote, the first one being "Tomorrow Never Comes" (you might remember it as the episode with the patient with the 70 pound tumor). You'll be hearing from Krista in a few weeks, actually, when her third episode airs. But for now, Krista asked me to say a few words about this episode since she's already very busy at work writing & producing her fourth episode.

The writing of every episode of Grey's Anatomy begins with a theme. Sometimes that theme is dictated by our characters, where they need to be at a given time during the season, and other times the theme is dictated by the types of medical cases we want to include. From the onset, this was to be the episode when Ellis is checked into the hospital, when Meredith finally loses control of her secret. Once we figured this would also be the episode when Cristina's secret surfaces in the most dramatic way possible, the theme of "losing control" crystallized on its own. It was a natural fit since we're still dealing with Richard's loss of control over the hospital, not to mention the complete lack of control Derek has over his situation. Add to that a patient who can't control her own face - the blushing girl - and you've got multiple storylines all strung together by a singular, barely visible thread.

What's most interesting about this episode, though, aren't the changes made early on, during the writing and shooting, but the changes made much later. Of the four first season episodes carried over to season 2, this one probably needed the fewest tweaks to make it fit the beginning of a season, rather than the end of one. But we did continue to work on it, and the most noticeable change actually involves the blushing girl, Kelly. Originally, her story wasn't just about a woman undergoing a complex surgical operation to conquer her blushing problem. The way it was written and shot, Kelly was a hemophiliac with the blushing condition. But she hid her hemophilia from the hospital staff because she knew they wouldn't perform such a risky operation on a patient who could very easily bleed to death.

The story was dramatic. It had an interesting question - at what point do you risk your life just to be normal. It had a twist. But it didn't feel right. The twist complicated the plot, yes, and even offered a great act break (to keep you tuned in during a commercial, to see if they can save her or not), but it didn't add anything to the emotions of the characters. In fact, it made the patient less sympathetic because she essentially lied to the doctors. It turns out the story was more compelling when told straight-forward, without the twist. So in editing, any reference to hemophilia was removed, and the result is a story that feels more genuine in its emotions.

My job with the writers isn't to write. I'm more like an apprentice, here to observe and assist the writers and the writing process. And learn. And that was a great lesson for me - learning that in the world of drama, sometimes less truly is more.