First Person Narrative:
Harpur Alumna Michelle Altman `75, Associate Headwriter of "One Life to Live"

The Harpur Hotline had the pleasure of catching up with Michelle "Shelly" Altman who has fulfilled her dream of being a writer. She told us about writing plays, movies, sitcoms, and soap operas, and shared a rare insider's view from behind the scenes at a soap opera. Here is Shelly Altman, from an English major at Harpur College to associate headwriter of the Emmy Award winning "One Life to Live."

I've been interested in writing since I was a child growing up in Brooklyn. I majored in English at Harpur College and was planning on getting a Ph.D. in literature.. The day before I was scheduled to leave for graduate school, I changed my mind said, "I don't want to do this. I want to write."

I found a job as an assistant editor with a sports magazine, but I was also growing interested in performing. I started acting in plays and doing stand up comedy. I realized I wanted to combine my interests and narrowed my focus to writing for the performing arts. My first break came when I started writing with a collaborator, Michael Zettler, and we wrote a play called, "The Amazin' Casey Stengel," which ran in New York City in 1981. It was about the manager of the Yankees and the Mets, who was a very colorful character. The play was nominated for a Drama Desk Award the same year.

My collaborator and I moved on to screenplays. We wrote the film, "Sweet Lorraine," which was produced in 1986. It starred Maureen Stapelton and was based, in part, on my experiences in the Catskills. The film is still available at video stores. Incidentally, Edie Falco of "The Sopranos" was a featured actress in the movie.

Around the same time, we ventured into television. We launched a prime time pilot for CBS, which wasn't picked up, but we got a foot in the door. After that we wrote for many shows on a freelance basis, pretty much anything that was produced in New York City, including several police shows and a new version of "Rin Tin Tin." We were eventually put under contract by a production company and we wrote for "Kate & Allie," which was a fun experience. Between paying jobs, we continued to develop and write new TV shows and screenplays. For me, the important thing was to keep writing.

Suddenly, in the mid 90's, almost all the production companies I worked for left New York City. I found myself in the new position of single mother with 2 small children. I wanted to stay in the city and write. My collaborator had other interests so I, alone, moved into daytime television, which is certainly a mainstay of the New York performing and dramatic arts. A friend of mine, who was an executive at NBC, asked if I had any interest in writing for daytime TV. I had no feelings about it; I was totally neutral. I needed a job, so I agreed to meet a daytime network executive through this contact. The networks are always eager to bring people with prime time and outside experience into the daytime arena. So I did a sample script, kind of like an audition, and the soap opera "Another World" hired me almost immediately.

I found that I loved it! I love what I do, and I think I am the luckiest human being on the planet. There are fewer than 150 soap opera writers and writers often move from show to show after a few years. I started writing for "One Life to Live" in 1998. We won the Emmy for Best Dramatic Series this year for the first time in the show's history.

I am an associate headwriter and work with three others in the same capacity, working with a headwriter to dream up stories for six months to a year ahead of time. We plot out the stories week by week, deciding how we're going to come up with those big Friday cliffhangers. Each of us is responsible for writing one day. Then, after that process is approved by the network and our executive producer, it goes to a dialogue writer who fleshes out the script for the actors.

Actors who have been around a long time may tell us historical things about their characters, which is helpful, but they don't, for the most part, get involved in the script. There's a myth that soap opera writers write for just one character. I hear that all the time, but it's not true. We all write for all characters. We turn out about 250 shows a year. There are no reruns in daytime television.

Our fans do have influence! Our marketing department leads several focus groups and the internet has many groups of fans. If there's overwhelming response among fans to a story, we may adjust it. With negative responses, at least we know people are watching! By and large, we just tell the story we want to tell. The fans will want something like two characters to marry and live happily ever after. It's a nice idea, but not very dramatic. The biggest way our audience says what they like is by turning on or off the TV. Fortunately, our viewers have been turning us on.

"One Life to Live" has broken every taboo. We've done stories about homosexuality, AIDS, interracial relationships, teenage pregnancy, breast cancer – that was actually very daring. We've yet to come up with a topic that the network has rejected for being too controversial. Other TV shows have a more conservative demographic viewership, so they're less likely to tell certain stories. After September 11^th, people were more sensitive to violence on TV, so we were more careful about the stories we were telling. "One Life to Live" was not in the middle of any stories like that, but some other shows had to change stories midstream..

My education at Harpur College was an incredible experience. I find that in daytime television, very often, our storylines are derived from classic literature. We use Dickens heavily, and Dostoevsky. I work with a team of highly educated people and our common knowledge of literature has been very helpful. I so value my education. Professor Vos was one of my first teachers and very inspirational. I learned so much about creative writing and thinking. I studied 19^th century literature with Phillip Rogers. That was the era of highly romantic, gothic tales. We bring a lot of that to "One Life to Live."

I have two sons, ages 11 and 13. I enjoy watching them play sports. I love reading and going to the theater. I love living in New York City and taking advantage of everything that's here: the museums, the parks, the people. I volunteer and teach art in the local public schools in the spare time that I don't really have.

My advice to aspiring writers is to write! When I was getting started, I would take any assignment. I wrote a supplement for a newspaper about air conditioning and heating. The self-esteem of writing something and seeing it published and produced is worth it. Keep your eyes open for opportunities. Read and write.

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Most people consider going to the Himalayas a once-in-a-lifetime experience, however Francis Wu, a professor of geophysics who has been at Harpur College over 30 years, makes it a summer tradition and just returned from his eighth trip. Click here to see photos.

Wu, a renowned researcher of seismology and tectonophysics, which is the study of the movement of Earth's plates, spent 6 weeks in July and August traveling through Tibet with Ph.D. student Dino Huang and a Chinese colleague, Dr. Liu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. He is in the second year of an NSF sponsored project to study mountain building of the Himalayas. (Mountain building is the folding of Earth's crust after its plates collide.) Last summer, Wu and a team of graduate students journeyed to the region to install seismographs, which record ground movement produced by fracturing or rocks under the mountains. 'The signals are recorded locally and the whole computer-based sensing and recording system is powered by solar panels," he explained.

During this recent trip, Wu, Huang and Liu collected data from the stations and checked for any mechanical problems. "We can't afford to send data through satellite and it's not always allowed by the local authorities," Wu said. He will return to Tibet in October to gather more data and arrange for the shipping of the instruments back to the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS), an American academic consortium that puts seismic stations around the world.

Traveling to the Himalayas demands fortitude. If the scenery doesn't take your breath away, the altitude will. Mt. Everest, the backdrop of Wu's journey, is the highest peak in the world. It's not for leisure campers. "One night we slept in a lone building in the shadow of Xixiabangma (5 miles elevation) after a long day of riding in the car and installing a seismic station nearby, we ate instant noodles and went to bed," said Wu,. "We were woken up the next morning by the acrid smoke of a yak dung fire in the stove. We should have seen the five yak patties on the outside wall. Did we mistake them for stars?" (click here to see photo)

"The Himalayas and Tibetan plateau remain a geographically unknown area. Why did they rise so high? How are they supported?" Many scientists from around the world travel there every year to study the roughly 600 by 1200 mile area. "It will take perhaps another few decades before we can unravel much of the mystery."

"But in addition to learning something new about how the Earth works, we saw majestic Everest (called Jolmolungma in Tibet) and many sights that are indescribably beautiful."

Students Cindy Sommer and Lindsay Warren model some of Harpur College's newest clothing