Television auteur David Milch, who wrote "NYPD Blue," "Deadwood," "John From Cincinnati," and many other shows, wrote all of those shows orally. That is to say, he didn't ever touch a keyboard or put pen to paper. Instead, he lay on the ground, surrounded by several other writers and interns, and inhabited his characters, reciting their dialogue, which someone else transcribed.
If you've ever heard Milch talk, this method makes sense. He gave a series of talks during the screenwriters strike of 2007 as a sort of ersatz course on screenwriting, which is fascinating, seemingly random and yet deeply structured, like many of Milch's shows. In these talks, Milch mixes jokes, anecdotes from his own life, lessons he learned from his teacher Robert Penn Warren, and dicta such as "Don't think about writing when you're not writing."
