So, I continued to do the cowardly thing. And it was therefore rejected that way, I was humiliated. “And because I finally got to the point where I said to her ‘I love you,’ because that’s what I thought it was when you target somebody for two years. I said ‘I love you,’ and she said the same thing she had been saying the entire time, in one language or another, ‘Please, don’t you understand that focusing on me like this, preferring me like this, liking me like this, I can’t say no to it, and when you do it, it makes me unable to know whether I’m good at my job.’ After that season, I got overt about my feelings after it wrapped. Now I wasn’t in danger of being a bad person. Now it was even less appropriate, after all.
#Dan harmon storywriting full#
I broke up with my girlfriend, and then I went right full steam into creeping on my employee. I want you to look at this, and I want it to sound relatively unremarkable to you because that’s the danger.
I don’t want to explain to you what I’ve learned. “I want you to be the one to examine this, and every step of the way decide for yourself where I’m making mistakes. Lied to her about why I was breaking up with her because I thought that would make having inappropriate feelings for a co-worker appropriate if I wasn’t involved. I just didn’t hear it because it didn’t profit me to hear it, and this was, after all, happening to me, right? After a season of playing it that way, I broke up with my girlfriend, who I had lied to the whole time, while lying to myself. “And so I let myself keep doing it, and it’s not as if this person didn’t repeatedly communicate to me the idea that what I was doing was divesting her of a recourse to integrity. You’re the one who actually is seeing things through that lens. “And so that’s what I continued to do, telling myself and anybody that threatened to confront me with it that if you thought what I was doing was creepy or sexist or unprofessional it was because you were sexist or jealous. Flirty, creepy, everything other than overt enough to constitute betraying your live-in girlfriend who you’re going home to every night, who is actually smart enough and respectful enough to ask you, ‘Do you have feelings for that young writer that you’re talking about, that you’re paying all this attention to?’ and saying to her, ‘No,’ because the trick is if you lie to yourself, you can lie to everybody. I knew I wasn’t doing anybody any favors by feeling these things, and so I did the cowardly, easiest, laziest thing you can do with feelings like that and didn’t deal with them and in not dealing with them I made everybody else deal with them, especially her. I knew that they ran the risk of undercutting people’s faith in my judgement, her faith in her talent, the other writers’ respect for me, the entire production, the audience. The most clinical way I can put it in fessing up to my crimes is that I was attracted to a writer I had power over because I was a showrunner, and I knew enough to know that these feelings were bad news. I really want to be really careful about that language because a huge part of the problem is a culture of feeling things that you think are unique and significant because they are happening to you and saying things like ‘I had feelings for’ and ‘I fell for’ and all these things. He gave me relief, and I hope I was able to give him some in return.” Dan Harmon’s full apology to Megan Ganz People should see the good that can happen when you aren’t afraid to accept responsibility for your mistakes. Then I wrote what I wrote on Twitter, because it felt strange to do the confrontation in the light, but the forgiveness in the dark.
In an interview with The New York Times, Ganz went on to say, “After I listened to his apology, I sent Dan a text to thank him and forgive him without reservation. Because if any part of this process should be done in the light, it’s the forgiveness part. That’s why it didn’t feel right to just accept his apology in private (although I did that, too). Ironic that the only person who could give me that comfort is the one person I’d never ask. But what I didn’t expect was the relief I’d feel just hearing him say these things actually happened. “Yes, I only listened because I expected an apology. He doesn’t just vaguely acknowledge some general wrongdoing in the past.
He’s not rationalizing or justifying or making excuses.
#Dan harmon storywriting how to#
“It’s only seven minutes long, but it’s a masterclass in How to Apologize. “Please listen to it,” she wrote, referring to Harmon’s podcast.
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