I had a pleasure to interview Toni Gallagher on my own personal podcast where I interview various types of creatives. She’s a children’s book author and the executive producer of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and is also known as the godmother of reality TV by many. In this interview, she goes deeper into the best parts about screenwriting and how her experiences changed her as a person. Through this interview, I have learned so much about her on an introspective level and also came to a conclusion that there’s a deeper story to everyone, regardless of whether they are “famous” or not.

Tell me a little bit about your career

The very interesting aspect of my career in addition to writing children’s books is that I have spent over 25+ years making reality TV. So I started as a story editor and worked my way up towards executive producer of all kinds of shows that you may or not know, including Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, along with other awesome reality TV.

How has writing for television helped you write your children’s books?

I have been writing stories since I was a young child and I never stopped writing, I would write TV episodes, and soon fell into the reality TV world. At the beginning, I was thinking about how long this was going to last as a career. But, what is interesting is that, you go out to film the lives of people, so what you have to do is shape the story based on what is filmed, which is often harder than writing a book. This is because you can only choose from what you have filmed already. For me, it really helped me decide what the structure was going to look like and what is going to make it interesting for an audience. This connects to reading when you end a chapter, and you want somebody to continue because they are on the edge of their seats. Lastly, with an episode you need a plot with the beginning, middle, and end that continues episode to episode. All of those things and more can translate into writing a children’s book.

What show did you love working on and why?

I loved working on a show called Bug Juice, we never stopped the kids at camp from doing kids stuff, and we just moved along with them. Capturing every moment, we would later figure out what storyline we wanted for each episode, and since it didn’t have to be chronological, we would always put out whatever episode we wanted to be based on the theme we were going for. And, I am also considering writing a book about summer camp, considering how much I love working on the show.

What advice would you give you to young writers?

I hate to quote the Nike phrase, but “Just do it !” You don’t have to think about growing up to be a writer, you can be a writer now. What’s great about writing is that you don’t really need anything else to do it. All you need is an idea and a place to write. Keep learning and never give up! Keep an open-mind, get peer reviewed, but mainly just write!