Jocelyn (above left) lives, works and scribes in Los Angeles, and Ryan (right) is a New York-based writer. Together the Manns siblings make up a unique and talented brother-sister writing team. The duo recently won Season 4 of Filmmatic's Inroads Screenwriting Fellowship competition, and they have been nice enough to give us insight into their background, habits, and winning TV pilot "Time Janitors"!
1) How long have you each been writing?
Ryan: I've been writing seriously for about 4 years, but before that I've always approached any work I have, school or professional, with "how can I make people laugh?" at the forefront of my mind.
Jocelyn: I've been writing, in some form or another, since I was little. I found screenwriting a few years ago in college and never looked back.
2) What screenwriting training have you received?
Ryan: I've taken a few classes at UCB and Gotham Writers but I actually didn't realize I wanted to write for TV (or even that you could write for TV, like, that's a real job??) until I was out of school. So the vast majority of my "training" has been from self help books and the university of Youtube.
Jocelyn: I went to the University of Texas film school and took some screenwriting courses there. We're also both in a few writers' groups and that has been a huge part of our training I think, just to write and get feedback and then rewrite.
3) How long have you been writing together as a team? Is this your only co-authored work?
Jocelyn: We've been working as a team for about three years now. We've got a number of other pilots that we've written together and nearly all of our work since then has been co-authored because we found out we really liked working together.