The creators behind some of Netflix‘s buzziest series pulled back the curtain on their process — from staring at the blank page all the way through post-production — during a string of recent conversations at Netflix & Deadline Present: The Visionaries.

“The bit that I love best is always the blank page. I like that moment of not knowing quite where I’m going and feeling sick and a bit sad, and then starting to write and going, ‘Oh, that’s who they are,’” said Jack Thorne, who adapted William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies into a surreal four-part limited series for the streamer. “That’s the bit I always love, and that’s the bit I tried to go back to again and again and again.”

Not all of his peers can say the same. Thorne, who also penned awards darling Adolescence, was joined on his panel by Stranger Things‘ Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer, Big Mistakes‘ Dan Levy, and Beef‘s Lee Sung Jin.

“Unlike Jack, I hate the blank page,” joked Ross. He and his brother, who wore many hats across five seasons of their science fiction series, say they were partial to directing because it allowed them to get into the nitty gritty with the cast and crew.

“Just to be there, entrenched in it all, with the actors, with the crew, with all the department heads, for many, many hours, for weeks on end, it just teaches us sort of what each season is and what the story is and what’s working and allows us to actually go back and adjust the writing and evolve [across seasons,” Ross continued.

That time spent on set is even more invaluable for unscripted creators like Sean Combs: The Reckoning director Alexandria Stapleton, who revealed that she spent more than 12 hours interviewing single subjects for the documentary series. While the “set” looks a little different than that of a show like Stranger Things, the trust and ideation that comes from being hands-on is very similar.

“Trust was a very big deal on on this on this series. It took a lot of off-the-record conversations…a lot of phone calls, a lot of just listening. I mean, most of the people that that I interviewed for this had spent so much of their life being outcast after they had a falling out with Sean. They were siloed. They were silenced, and they really felt like they were alone,” she said. “My average interviews for this were like 12 hours for one person…I didn’t want anyone to feel rushed. Sometimes I was talking to people that were living with trauma for over a decade, so I’m not going to sit there and go, ‘Spit it out.’ I wanted them to feel comfortable, and I wanted them to take the lead.”

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Letting the subjects take the lead was a common thread across the unscripted discussion, which also included Famous Last Words creator Brad Falchuk and director-producer of Love on the Spectrum Cian O’Clery.

“I think any good conversation is a dance,” Falchuk added.

While they weren’t dealing with real-life trauma, the creators behind The Beast in Me, Death by Lightning, Monster: The Ed Gein Story and Black Rabbit all had to delve into both personal and societal anxieties for their shows, which tackle stories about murder, deceit, grief, familial estrangement, presidential assassinations, and complex mental health diagnoses.

None of these creators are keen to shy away from harsh truths, but they also understand the realities of making television. The No. 1 rule, of course, is to keep audiences engaged, which on shows like these requires a precise tonal balance.

“You couldn’t watch Uncut Gems for eight hours, because you’d, like, tear your hair out, right?” quipped Black Rabbit‘s Kate Susman. “That movie was very inspirational to us, [but] we kind of knew in the beginning, everyone will throw up if you have to watch that for eight hours.”

Even though these series are scripted, some, like Monster: The Ed Gein Story and Death by Lightning are dramatizations of true stories. That is always top of mind for writers like Ian Brennan, whose story about life and motivations of one of the most notorious murderers and grave robbers in American history was also an exploration of complex mental health struggles.

Brennan explained that explorations of society’s associations with mental health, both broadly in the aftermath of World War II and specifically Gein’s own struggles with schizophrenia, were key when penning the script.

“It’s actually something that felt actually quite pressing, but thrown into this mid-century sort of Capote landscape of complete isolation and a changing century,” he said. “Before Ed Gein, before the horrors of the Holocaust came out, what we thought were monsters were was literally like the Phantom of the Opera, Dracula and the Wolfman. After Auschwitz, that all changed. The monster became us, and Ed Gein was stuck squarely in the middle of that.”