His work as a writer-producer for the television series L.A. Law earned him an Emmy Award in 1991.  He has been nominated for an Emmy on two other occasions, once for a Golden Globe Award, and (three times) for the Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Teleplay of the Year.  He received a People's Choice Award for L.A. Law, and his short story "Ma Qui" was honored with a Nebula Award in 1992.

He has developed screenplays for major studios, as well as miniseries, pilots, and television movies.  Other series to which he has contributed include China Beach, Simon & Simon, and the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone.  "But in television and film," he says, "sometimes your best work is never seen."  In 1999 he spent six months writing a four-hour miniseries for NBC and Kevin Costner's Tig Productions, based on David Marion Wilkinson's epic novel Not Between Brothers, about the founding of Texas.  When the network opted not to produce it, Alan decided he needed to write something that people would get to see, and the result was Moloka'i.

His new novel, Honolulu, grew out of the research he did for Moloka'i. "One of the most colorful periods of modern Hawaiian history was the so-called 'glamour days' of the 1920s and 1930s," Alan explains. "This was a time period I couldn't really explore in depth in Moloka'i, since my main characters were in isolation at Kalaupapa. These were the years when Hawai'i made its deepest impression on the American consciousness: the years of Matson liners, the China Clipper, Hollywood celebrities vacationing in Honolulu, and the Hawai'i Calls radio show that broadcasted popular hapa-haole music to the mainland. Yet at the same time this image of paradise was being presented to the American public, many Native Hawaiians and immigrants to Hawai'i labored on plantations for low wages or lived in poverty in Honolulu tenements. So Honolulu, the novel, is partly about this collision of image and reality...and how that reality was actually far richer and more captivating.