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David Milch (b. 1945)

So far this year I’ve been writing about (or around) a way of working that the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once called “the flux.” He was describing what happened when he and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari tried writing together—it was, he said, “like two streams coming together to make a third stream, which I suppose was us.”

I really like this idea, and last time I proposed a method for—perhaps—creating “the flux” in an individual practice. For this issue—well, up until the end of last week I didn’t know what I was going to write about; I figured I’d move onto a new topic. But then an old friend emailed me out of the blue, and in our email exchange he mentioned Deadwood creator David Milch’s writing process, which involves him lying on the floor in a roomful of people and dictating to a typist.

I’ve never actually watched Deadwood—and I’ve maybe seen one or two episodes of NYPD Blue, the show that Milch worked on for seven seasons before that—but who could resist this image of the writer on the floor, dictating to a roomful of people? So I did some digging around, and wouldn’t you know it: Milch’s process actually feels like yet another expression of this idea of “the flux.”

Here’s how it worked on NYPD Blue and, later, Deadwood: Milch would lie on the floor in the middle of a room in the show’s writing trailer, with other writers and producers sitting in chairs around him. In front of Milch would be a computer monitor displaying the script in progress. On the other side of the monitor, a typist sat at a desk (with his or her own monitor), typing the script as Milch dictated it. These writing sessions thus came to resemble a kind of séance, with Milch summoning the voices of the characters, inventing their lines on the spot—and reciting variations of these lines over and over (and over and over) until he arrived at the exact right piece of dialogue.

In his 2022 memoir, Milch described it like this: