Photo courtesy of Ariel Relaford

Producer and co-host of The SCREAMwriters Podcast, MMA practitioner, and horror-sci-fi-comedy writer Ariel Relaford discovered “screenwriter Twitter” during the pandemic—and it’s a good thing too because what started as searching out random writer-related hashtags eventually landed her representation.

Relaford was furloughed from her day job as a Digital Marketer and decided to look into the Twitter community. What she found was the Final Draft community.

“Kala Guess [Brand & Marketing Manager for the company] reached out to me on Twitter and was like, 'Do you want to do some giveaways? Because you're very active and helpful in this community.' From that, I got a lot of new followers while helping people.”

Ariel started interacting, making friends—which is unsurprising considering her down-to-earth vibe, willingness to exchange script reads, and as Relaford puts it: “Tweeting random shit.” One of those tweets included responding to a Coverfly tweet that asked, “If you could have a dream meeting with whatever company, what would it be?

I replied CAA. And a writer-producer slash showrunner on Grey’s Anatomy saw it and reached out. He was like, ‘I’m repped at CAA. I’d love to give it a read… You’re always helping people on here, you’re partnered up with Final Draft to do giveaways. So I don’t mind potentially helping you.’”

While she was flabbergasted by the random kindness, she took the opportunity to polish her script and send it over. From there, things moved pretty quickly. Within a month, Relaford went from dreaming about CAA to being repped at CAA. “He sent it to his agent—I’m assuming his agent couldn’t take me for some reason—but someone else on the team was like, 'I want a general,' and it went really well." 

Relaford remained active on Twitter where she received a shout-out from another pillar of the writer Twitter community, screenwriter Kyra Jones (Woke, Queens): “I’mma let you finish, but @ArielRelaford’s horror pilot, PARTICIPANT is one of the best scripts I’ve read in years, and I’m a critical ass bitch. It’s giving SQUID GAME meets NINE PERFECT STRANGERS but with a Black woman lead. Brilliant. Rep her or staff her right tf neoooow!!!”

Because of that one tweet, a slew of production and management companies, along with a couple of showrunners, reached out to Relaford.

“I was just like… this is insane,” she recalls. “I was able to use some of that interest and put it behind me when I was meeting with managers. It was such a hard decision, but I ended up going with Gotham. They’re absolutely lovely. Just great humans. We vibed very well and they understood what I was going for.”

Now Relaford is mainly working with her managers to polish her portfolio. “There is interest in my sample—the one that got everyone interested in me. They’re also using that as a staffing sample.”

It’s all rather a dream coming true for the girl who once wanted to be the female R.L. Stine when she grew up.

“Growing up…this is so dorky; I was obsessed with 'Goosebumps' and I wanted to be like R.L. Stine, like the female R.L. Stine. That was my goal when I was a child so I would write little poems and short stories and they're all dark and frickin weird,” she chuckles.

“I ended up getting a degree in English, but I became friends with and would work on a lot of projects with theatre kids. So, minored in theatre production and design—I was always working with people with cameras, and I was like, ‘Oh, cool. Everyone's doing shorts. This is fun.' So I wrote a short at the end of 2019."

Ariel continues, "Not knowing what the hell I was doing, I sent it to my friends who are filmmakers, and they're like, ‘This is really good. You should enter into competitions!’ and I really shouldn't have, it was really crappy,” she laughs. “But I thought, I'm gonna stick with this. This is awesome. I'm gonna be a writer."

What her vast amount of industry experience in such a short time has taught Relaford is, “Engage with other people's content, follow other writers back, offer to swap scripts or read and give notes. I keep hearing that before the pandemic things were not like this...  Find your own spot in the community, but also build your own circle of trusted writers. Because a lot of this [industry] works on referrals.”

When it comes to the writing part, “My advice is, try to write whatever are the loudest ideas in your head and not think about if they're commercial or marketable, or if it's something someone's looking for. If my script that I didn't think anyone was going to see because it's so silly can get me reps and potentially... to be sold or what have you, I think that says a lot about writing whatever the hell you want and not worrying about if it's going to make you money or get you things from it. There'll be a time and a place for things.”

“And thank you Final Draft!” She adds, “Because, it really helped in such an unexpected way. All because we were also able to pump some fun into the community when things were so stressful.”