Ghost Writer Bangor native Melinda Hsu crafts spine-chilling scripts for NBC’s ‘Medium’

Melinda Hsu can relate to the title character on NBC’s hit “Medium.”

The medium in the show is Allison Dubois, played by Patricia Arquette, whose visions often channel messages from the dead that help to solve crimes. As a member of the “Medium” writing team, Hsu channels words to Dubois and the show’s other characters.

OK, so that analogy had only the slightest ghost of a chance of working. Anyway, Hsu, 34, is savoring her first writing job for a TV show that made it on the air.

“When I tell someone that I work on ‘Medium,’ people will start telling me what we should do next,” said Hsu (pronounced ‘shoe’) in a recent phone interview. “It’s a lot of fun to see it’s sparking people’s imaginations, and generating different ideas.”

In the first season for “Medium,” which began in early January, Hsu was credited with writing two episodes. The first, “Jump Start,” which aired on Valentine’s Day, was about Allison’s vision of a young woman jumping off a cliff. The second, “Being Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow,” involved Allison’s vision of a plane crashing and its connection to a pilot’s wife being murdered.

Hsu, who is now a story editor after a year as a staff writer, explained that, despite the credit, the entire seven-member writing team, which includes executive producer Glenn Gordon Caron, is involved to some degree in each episode.

“Each writer is assigned an episode slot and gets credit for it, regardless how much team effort goes into it,” said Hsu, whose parents Yu-Kao and Martha Hsu still live in Bangor. “It’s very collaborative, with not a whole lot of ego in it. You’re delighted to have help. The amount of rewriting varies. Glenn will do a certain amount of adjusting to make sure it has the right voice.”

The writer gets about two weeks to produce a script, “which is pretty generous,” Hsu said. “You can do it in a few days, but it’s very stressful.”

The writing staff doesn’t have much to do with rewriting on the set.

“We’re mostly working together in a conference room, outlining an episode on a dry-erase board, or writing in our offices,” Hsu said.

Although she has written stories since she was a little kid, Hsu never dreamed that this would become her career. After graduating from Bangor High in 1988, she headed off to Harvard to prepare for the business world. After graduating with a degree in history in 1992, she discovered that “I didn’t like having a regular job,” so she headed to film school at Columbia University, graduating with her master’s in 1996.

She went straight to Los Angeles to start her writing career, which actually began seven years later. In the interim, she went through a series of day jobs, including short-order cook at a bar, a production assistant (show biz term for “gofer”) on the film “Money Talks,” and script reader for Dustin Hoffman, which was “a great way to learn what makes a script work and what doesn’t,” she said.

She continued writing through all that time, without any success.

“At times I thought, ‘I wish I had stuck with my idea of being a dentist,'” Hsu said. “It was pretty much constant self-doubt. When you’re broke, and you’re getting postcards from friends who went on to Wall Street and are on safari in Africa, it’s really discouraging.”

In 1997-98, she came back to Maine, to Bar Harbor, for pre-production work on her indy film “Firefly.” She met a lot of enthusiastic people, but was unable to line up financing. But that script ended up helping her earn a slot in the prestigious Warner Bros. writers workshop, her first career breakthrough.

“People take you seriously and return your calls,” she said. “From that, I got an agent.”

Around that time, her husband, Thom Taylor, an investment banker who had been in TV, suggested that she try for TV work: “You write fast, you like people, and there’s work in TV,” she recalled him saying.

Around that time, she and Taylor collaborated on the book “Digital Cinema,” about how digital video is changing the way people make movies.

Her first paid writing job came in 2003, when she was hired for the Fox series “Still Life,” a teen drama about a family pulling itself together after the dead of the oldest child. Unfortunately, “Still Life” was stillborn, never making it onto the air. However, that job gave her the credibility to gain the “Medium” position.

“Medium” will resume production this week, with about seven scripts ready. Hsu and Taylor are working on a production of their own, with their first child expected in the fall.

Now that she’s establishing herself as a writer, does Hsu really want to direct, or produce?

“I don’t want to direct,” she said. “I’d find it really stressful to be on the set. I’m on the track to move into the producing side of things down the road.”