The Recorder, Greenfield, Mass Friday, September 25,1992
Soap opera writer rules destinies
CHICAGO - Kay Alden's life is a soap opera. Really. As a head writer for CBS' The Young and the Restless," she helped capture its first Emmy for writing this summer. But, more important, she's helped decide matters of life and death, rule entire destinies and change the courses of lives — characters' lives, that is — when real-life circumstances require it. Contracts and storylines often cause characters' deaths or sudden departures from Genoa City, the program's Midwestern setting, she said. Sometimes, a villain becomes so evil he's beyond redemption and must be killed or imprisoned. But death isn't always certain in soap opera land. Like a cat with nine lives, characters can overcome the toughest adversity.
Take the program's David, wealthy Nina's greedy, murderous husband. Nina thought she'd shot him dead, only to team he had undergone plastic surgery, had taken on a new identity and started dating her mother. But David got his just rewards: First, "his surgeon carved the words "KILLER" into his forehead, and later he was fatally smashed in a trash compactor. "Garbage to garbage, we said," recalled Alden.
Some villains are just too delectable to kill. Take Sheila, who apparently died in a fire — only to sneak out alive. She's still playing the same role but is hiding out and creating more havoc on Bell's other soap, "The Bold and the Beautiful," set in Los Angeles. "In Sheila, we had a character people hated so much, but loved to hate," Alden said. "She was not redeemable. .... (But) we didn't want to put her in a mental institution or jail. And we definitely did not want to kill her.
Alden, who writes from her home, faxes her copy to the Los Angeles based program and discusses story lines by phone probably 20 hours a week with the other writers, including creator Bill Bell. She began writing for the 19-year-old program 18 years ago. Alden, 45, said Bell develops most of the story ideas and the writing team helps execute them. "We probably have a story line in mind six months ahead of time," she said recently.
Soap writers occasionally live to regret some story lines The character Victor, for instance, started out as a jealous maniac who locked wife Julia's lover in a basement cell — only years later to turn into a rich businessman and pillar of the community. "When the character of Victor came on the show, I think we hired him for maybe six weeks or six months," she said, noting the writers hadn't expected him to become a permanent, relatively good character. Unlike many of her characters, Alden, the mother of three, has been happily married for 13 years. Alden has enjoyed soaps since she was a child. "Literally, I'd thought since I was very young probably the neatest thing you could really do would be to be a soap opera actress," she said. "Being a writer is probably the best of all possible worlds: You get to do all the parts that way
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