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Writers are the kingpins of the soaps. William J. Bell, who writes what the trade calls the "bible"—or twelve-month outline —for Days of Our Lives, and scripts for his own soap, The Young and the Restless, earns more than $1 million a year. Patricia Falken-Smith, Days of Our Lives head writer, takes home $250,000, plus $35,000 just for "thinking creatively." The two senior writers under her make up to $100,000 each. Bell is probably even richer than Agnes Nixon, the writer who has welded Phillips' home truths to such trendy themes as cervical cancer, racial prejudice and drug addiction. Nixon has at one time or another written almost every soap and created two: One Life to Live and All My Children, the thinking man's soap that has a 30% male audience. She is the soaps' crusader: All My Children went to Viet Nam and is now into women's liberation. After considerable tension, a young black couple have agreed to live in different cities for five days a week so they can pursue their different careers as doctor and social worker. Nixon's most memorable creation, however, was a traditional type, Rachel, the Circe of Another World. In 1966, when Nixon arrived at World, the show was in trouble. Within a year she had introduced Rachel as a bewitching homewrecker and one of the soaps' durably popular villainesses.
How does one write a successful soap opera? Characterization is the key to a soap's success. When William Bell first thought of The Young and the Restless in 1973, he had in mind only the poor Foster family supported by a wrung-out mom, and the quartet of well-to-do, glamorous Brooks sisters, mired in sibling rivalry. "I look for things that touch people's lives," he explains. "I'm disappointed if my shows don't produce tears from the audience three times a week." Agnes Nixon defines the difference between daytime and prime-time drama as "the suffering of consequences." There is no time at night to experience the result of foolish actions; during the day, that is all there is to do.
It is not true, as is often rumored, that plots are lifted whole from old Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford movies. "I get plots from my own life," says Falken-Smith, 50. "I've been married three times and been around. Most people I know are living soap operas." Falken-Smith got the idea for the Days of Our Lives artificial-insemination plot from an ad in the San Francisco Examiner offering $10,000 to a woman who would bear a child to a man married to a barren wife.
Soap bibles are increasingly complicated. In the '50s Agnes Nixon wrote five shows a week. "No one could do that today. Characters do not sit around their coffee cups like they used to," she says. The hour-long format "places a 500% extra pressure on writers," says Falken-Smith. Friday is the most important episode of the week; a cliffhanger is necessary to induce viewers to come back after the weekend. On the slower soaps, it is the only day anything ever happens. Falken-Smith often writes Days of Our Lives Friday installments herself; they have recently included a miscarriage, an attempted suicide and a disappearance.