How Writers Break a Story Before Writing It
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Long before a script exists, a writers room spends days or weeks doing something called breaking a story: talking through the shape of an episode out loud, scene by scene, until the structure holds together. Nothing gets written down properly until the room agrees the bones are solid.
This process often happens on a whiteboard or a wall of index cards, physically moving scenes around until the sequence feels inevitable rather than arbitrary. Seeing the whole episode laid out at once lets writers spot pacing problems that would be far harder to catch buried inside a finished script.
Only once a story is broken does an individual writer usually go off to draft the actual dialogue. That division of labour, collective structure followed by individual voice, is part of why television writing can move so quickly without sacrificing the coherence a season needs across many hours.