From the brilliant book named "All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of the Wire" by Jonathan Abrams:

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I was able to vocalize the rule once we had a writers’ room. A real writers’ room began in the second season. It was a nicer, new construct of what we tried over the first season. Once we had a full writers’ room, I had to sort of express the rules. We had to say, “It either happened or it didn’t happen or it is rumored to have happened, but we’re not quite sure.” With all three cases, it could have happened. The parameters of this universe make all of the outcomes plausible.

Some things The Wire made up. Some things absolutely happened. Some things we always heard they happened, but they were part of cop stories or what people said somebody did or why somebody got killed. But it couldn’t violate the basic tenet of: This is the world. This is how it works. This is a logical and rational outcome of this.

ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): You’re trying to say, “There’s a truth here,” and you have to see it. These characters are not the everyday world of the inner city, because the everyday world within the inner city—you wouldn’t want to watch that show. It just goes on. It’s relentless. I always think of it in terms of human drama, with the emphasis on the human. You’re staying true to the characters and you’re just trying to share what they’re going through. They’re all composites, but there’s an integrity to them that flows. There’s no miracles happening. They’re on this course, and tragically enough, very little can steer those kids, those people, away from that particular course that they’ve started out.

You don’t get a story unless there’s a back-and-forth. David and I provided the wind, and guys like George Pelecanos and Bob Colesberry, if we went off too much in one direction, they would turn the ship back, get closer to reality again. It’s like a hop, skip, and a jump. Next thing you know, you’re way over here and you don’t want to be over here. Yes, we argued all the time. I would say there’s two-thirds argue.

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): The argument was creative, and if somebody stops arguing, it’s because they don’t give a fuck. Ed gave a fuck, and I expected him to argue and I expected him to be frustrated and I learned it is not always pleasant. We probably finished four to five seasons with Ed feeling like we left stuff on the table that we couldn’t get to. Ed is a guy who if you present him with a scenario like, we’re going to have a story arc that goes here, he’ll come up with enough material for thirty-five episodes. Then it’s up to the practical choices of what we can get to and what’s best. What would be the best choices here? Even when you make those choices, you’re leaving thirty elements behind, because that’s how fast and how thoroughly Ed turns a Rubik’s Cube. “If we do this, then we can speak to that.” He does all that. Ed would always finish the seasons incredibly frustrated. He’d be like, “We blew it. We could have done this.” Like, “Yeah, well, we did what we did, Ed. We opened some doors, we closed some other ones.” He would go, “What’s the point?”

He would go into the hibernation of being off for a month, completely disgusted with the whole process and then by the end, the episodes would come out and, not that he was sanguine about everything, but he would come back ready to work the next season. He needed the month off to just take a breath. Everybody in the room would be in agreement. “Okay, this is what we’re doing.” Ed would come back the next day and say, “It’s not right,” and he would proceed with the argument. Sometimes he would turn us all around and sometimes we would just have to go, “Ed, we can’t. We don’t have the characters. We don’t have the locations. There’s no sensibility in the story that that would happen. We’ve traveled a million miles to get to some point that we can’t justify turning to.” Other times, he would turn the whole ship around. He’d be like, “I agreed to this, but you know what? Think about this. Because two or three episodes from now or next year, what you will have effectively said is X when you needed to say Y.” We’d all sit there going like, “Shit. We just wasted a day yesterday. We’re back to square one.” That’s Ed. By the way, that’s the core DNA of what made The Wire what it was, was Ed arguing.

ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): David would get very, very frustrated because I would come in—after the beat sheet was all done and the writer was off writing—I’d come in and say, “We got to change this. This works better.” It would drive him crazy, but he’d change it. David handled everything. That left me free to handle just story, and that’s all I was interested in. He would do post and he would deal with HBO and deal with the actors. I could just be free to do story.

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): George is the barometer. When the morality of the show or the ethos of the show, when it’s going wrong or when we’re not honoring something or a character, that’s where he’ll assert [himself] in a way that can change the direction of the storyline or story arc. Once the universe is established, if we’re getting too schmaltzy, he’s on it. If we’re being brutal just to be brutal, he’s on it.

I’ve learned to listen to him. Ed and I could argue for hours, and George would be the third guy who would spin it one way or the other. George was the third vote. If you swayed George, then you were probably right. If you didn’t sway George, it was time to rethink.

GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): Not in the sense that I went one way or the other. The one argument was about the chips in the phones. That went on for a week with the SIM cards.

“Guys, can we move on? Like, this is ridiculous, you know? Let’s get some cards up on the board.” That was my role, was to be sort of the adult and say, “It’s time to stop arguing. Let’s just move on, because we’ve got to get some work done.” There’s that expression, David always uses it: “I’d agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong.” He never will give up a fight, and Ed’s like that, too. Even when they’re wrong.

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I didn’t get everything I wanted in the scripts. I lost arguments to Ed. Ed lost arguments to me. Ed doesn’t like to lose arguments. He’s pretty unrelenting. It becomes sort of a hive mentality if it works. If it doesn’t work, then you don’t have a writers’ room. If it becomes just one person, you can’t imagine the universe well enough. You can’t imagine all these different characters well enough to have it have the breath that it needs to have. You gotta let air into the room.

You have to argue. The room has to be about argument. It has to be good academic arguing. It can get a little heated. You’re basically arguing a story. You’re not arguing self-validation. These are writers. They’re novelists by training. George is a novelist. George sits down, and it’s him and the paper, maybe an editor behind him and that’s it. That’s the only thing between him and broadcast and publication. This is not that. What I’m saying is writers are about ego. What else has a greater vanity than coming to a sort of collective campfire and saying, “I have a story I want to tell. My story is good. Pay attention to me. This is my story. I’ve got a great story. My story is better”?

The whole act of telling a story is a grandiose thing in some ways. So, now you get a bunch of storytellers in the room, and they have to get along. They have to create one singular thing. It’s at a point the showrunner has to be a little bit totalitarian and say, “I have to look out for the whole.” But long before I do that, you need to be open enough and benign enough to let the arguments lead you where they’re going to lead you. Those were the moments that made The Wire better than it might’ve been.