Full Sail Stories

Colby Applegate fell in love with wrestling when he attended a live taping of Raw 15 years ago. But it wasn’t just the athletic feats in the ring that caught his attention.

“The storytelling was drawing me in once I realized how the show worked,” he says.

That interest in WWE’s stories made Colby want to tell some of them himself, and he got a Creative Writing bachelor’s degree from Full Sail University to get started. Today he’s a writer for WWE NXT, and he helps create storylines that are watched by thousands of people each week.

When Colby arrived at Full Sail, he quickly got involved with SPARK, the university’s student-led production agency, and started working NXT events both on and off campus. He did everything from grabbing props at ringside and scanning tickets to selling merchandise and capturing social media content for WWE and NXT’s social media pages.

Working on those live events two to three times a week gave Colby plenty of face time with people who worked for NXT, and soon he was working as a part-time Marketing Coordinator for the organization. When he graduated in 2019, Colby started working full time and got to be part of NXT’s weekly live show. Then the pandemic hit, and Colby had to pivot.

“I knew I still wanted to write for WWE, so I did what I could during the pandemic era and just kept writing,” Colby shares. “I self-published a few books during that time… I kept track of stats for wrestlers across a few different companies, got a wrestler to write the foreword, and then I self-published it. I [self-published books] for a couple more years, just kind of seeing where that could go… I was working some independent wrestling events and reaching out to other people in other wrestling companies, trying to maintain those connections. And I just kept applying [to work again at WWE].”

Colby applied to write for NXT three times before he finally landed a Writer’s Assistant position with the show in 2024. Earlier this year, he was promoted to Writer. Doing a new live show every week means adhering to a tight schedule for the storytelling and scriptwriting process.

“[The writers] come in on Wednesday and that is our primary creative day where we just go through all our stories and start putting the script together for the following week. We usually spend eight to nine hours doing that. Then we come in on Thursday, kind of do the same thing, finish the script, start looking at future stories, and start planning for the next week. So when we're going to film certain things, or if we need props, we have to let the props team know to order things for us,” Colby explains.

“And then we write our segments and stuff on Fridays, and then Monday we come in and it's kind of our pre-production day to go over the script one more time,” he continues. “It's like a table read. Then we make sure we record everything, make any last-minute changes, and then Tuesday is show day where we just spend all day filming our backstage segments. Then the show goes live at 8 PM Eastern on the CW, and we do it all over again the next week.”

Although Colby and the other writers try to plan ahead as much as possible, sometimes they have to rework stories on the fly during the live show.

“We can pivot in an instant, like if the crowd's reacting a certain way, if the head writers are feeling something in the moment, or if someone gets injured, we've had to pivot on the fly. And even though we script who’s going to win what match, sometimes things happen and a wrestler who's not supposed to win a match does win, and they become a champion. So we have to come up with something, do our best to kind of recover from whatever it is that happened or make the most out of the situation… It’s not like your average TV show or movie where you can just kind of do it over again to get the right take,” he says.

Making those pivots requires flexibility and hard work on Colby’s part – and they’re important skills for aspiring writers to master.

“Living with the idea that your writing will get changed [is important],” he says. “It’s a team effort. You have a vision for it, but at the end of the day you have to work with the other writers… And the wrestlers will come up with different lines to say, different things to do. So it is a super collaborative process, and you can't be egotistical about it.

“[To do this type of writing], you have to be willing to put in the work and make sacrifices,” Colby continues. “And I feel like that's something that gets said a lot, but I've also seen people who say they want it, but don't put in the work to actually do it… You just have to take it seriously.”