A wide-angle lens view of Troy DeVolld’s career in reality television would reveal a lineup of gigs that took him from MTVs Fear and The Osbournes to ABCs The Bachelor and Dancing With the Stars and beyond. Upon closer inspection, however, you might catch a glimpse of him on set or on location anywhere from L.A. to Vancouver, crouched behind a laptop mere feet away from all the action reality TV has to offer.

Carving out a career as a story editor, producer, and writer in the rapidly growing reality TV genre has been an exercise in dexterity for the Film grad. “Here’s the main thing,” DeVolld explains. “Story structure is the same whether you’re doing scripted or reality. With reality elements, though, everything’s snapped into sharper contrast than when you’re writing a screenplay. Your resources are finite, as if you were writing with refrigerator magnets. When you’re drawing those moments out…it’s about trying to figure out what the bones are, to hang the meat on. It’s made me better as a traditional scripted writer because it makes me think more about structure.”

Since we last touched base with DeVolld, he’s had a hand in constructing story lines for The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, Spike TV’s On the Road with Sugar Ray and, most recently, story producing ABC’s surprise hit Dancing with the Stars. He says that he tries hard to work on shows that are comedic rather than dark, citing prank shows as an example.

Though DeVolld prefers to stick to working in comedy, he does not discriminate when it comes to his involvement in the business. In fact, since moving to Los Angeles, he’s hooked up with a top television agent (Beth Bohn, a Senior VP at APA), gotten involved with the Writers Guild’s effort to organize writers working in reality television, and become a card-carrying voting member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. “I’ve been out here for five years and I’m already a voting member of ATAS. That’s a big deal for me. To feel like you’re really a part of your industry and to be in situations where every single day is an encounter with some celebrity that you’ve always liked or other writers whose work you’ve enjoyed, it’s pretty far out.”

Meanwhile, reality TV isn’t his only creative outlet – he recently completed work as a co-producer/unit production manager for LolliLove, a feature film being released in March by Troma. According to DeVolld, producing has been one of his favorite experiences so far. “A lot of it, too, is that it’s every writer’s dream to produce because it’s one less person giving you notes on your material,” he says. LolliLove was co-written and directed by Jenna Fischer (Pam on NBC’s The Office), and while on the production, DeVolld learned enough from the production that he’s working on a film of his own now.

In his quasi-free time, he keeps busy producing his own pilots, continuing to shop a screenplay based on his 1996 comic, Jinx Oople, and knocking out spec features alone and with collaborators like former Jon Stewart Show writer Eduardo Penna. DeVolld’s latest collaborative effort with Penna is currently making the rounds.

“I’m drifting toward producing because it’s something I really enjoy,” he says. “In the next year or two I hope to more aggressively market my original series. The connections are there, the resources and talent are there. Having gone to Full Sail, I feel like I know what I’m doing and that has translated to a pretty quick rise through the system to a point that I’m feeling pretty comfortable and almost anything’s possible.”