Renée Broome: working in the Home and Away script department
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What was Renée’s inciting incident that launched her TV writing career?
Welcome to Breaking Screen, a podcast about the Australian screen industry and the creative people within it. I'm your host, Karis Bazaka, and I'm recording this podcast from the lands of the Gadigal people of the Iora Nation, where I'm very grateful to be a visitor and be able to work on these lands. Always was, always will be. Today's episode features Renee Broom, a television screenwriter, script editor, and story producer. Renee is also one of the in-house screenwriters and script editors at home and away. She has written dozens of episodes of the series and helped produce more than 1,000 episodes in her various roles in the script department over the past nine years. The Home and Away Script Department has a very clear pathway, and throughout the podcast, Renee explains each of the roles and what they involve.
Roles including script coordinator, storyliner, script producer, and script editor. Renee also talks to what a typical week for her looks like on Home and Away, key skills she has learned working there, writing advice, and much more. Here's that chat. So we always start the podcast with the same question. Uh, and it's about inciting incidents. So what is the inciting incident of your career?
Oh well this is a fun one 'cause it I had to really go back almost 20 years, right? It's like we're showing our age a little bit here. But I when I was 19 and pretty much, you know, a year or two fresh out of high school, I decided to do a nighter short course, a creative writing short course. And it was just kind of one of those uh six month ones that ran at, you know, at night time and I ended up meeting a really, really amazing woman there who was a production manager at the ABC. Her name was Lou Porter. And she said, Hey, why don't you come and join us over on the Gruen Transfer? And I thought Okay, that sounds pretty cool. I'll give that a crack. And um yes, that was my first ever television job was working for the ABC in production.
And um I got to work with some really brilliant minds because it was co pro' with CJZ. So Andrew Denton and Anita Jacoby was producing at the time. Um and so that was brilliant. And yeah, I feel really really lucky to have that experience.
Oh great. And so what was it that made you go, I wanna do this nighter course and then kind of follow the writing track?
Yeah, I guess growing up I I always really wanted to be a writer. Like I was kind always writing poetry and prose, right? And You know, I actually didn't even believe that you could really make money from having like this as a job of being a screenwriter as a job. So I really thought, okay, well, I can write articles, editorials, maybe go into journalism, that sort of thing. Um, and it really wasn't until I left broadcast journalism and I was working in development over in New Zealand and I was spending a lot of time around weta. And that's when I was getting my hands on some proper film scripts at the time. At the time they were shooting things like Zack Snyder's Superman, they were doing the special effects there.
They had like the Hobbit dailies that, you know, we may or may not sneak into to have a look at. And yeah, once I'd got my hands on like a proper drama film script. I I never looked back. I thought this is exactly what I want to do. I want to be writing TV, I want to be writing movies, and I want to be creating worlds. And so when I came back to Sydney, I actually enrolled in film school at AFTAs and I did two screenwriting degrees. I did screenwriting for series television with Holly Lyons, and I did script editing and development with Matthew Dabner and Gina Roncoli. And I learnt absolutely everything that I could learn there with those amazing teachers. And from that I had springboarded straight into
the land of drama, which is, you know, very different to other s types of writing that I had been used to. So yeah, it was quite a it was a twisty turny journey. But I eventually got there. And then now that I'm here, I'm there's nothing else that like has actually felt like it had fit so well.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What was Renée’s inciting incident that launched her TV writing career?
0:03–4:25
2
How did Renée break into the Home and Away script department?
4:25–8:20
3
What are the different roles in the Home and Away script team and what does each do?
8:20–12:43
4
What does a typical week look like for a script editor on Home and Away?
12:43–17:03
5
What writing advice does Renée give to emerging TV writers?
17:03–21:20
6
What are the biggest creative challenges when writing for a daily soap?
21:20–24:52
7
How does the show structure episodes around commercial breaks and cliff‑hangers?
24:52–29:17
8
What are the ‘minute joys’ Renée collects to stay motivated on tough days?
29:17–33:03
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Breaking Screen
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