I just won an award for a feature length screenplay I wrote. Am I happy about it? Of course I am. Who wouldn’t be? But with the happiness comes a bit of melancholy. Sounds like a strange thing to feel but it’s true. The reason is the award is for new voices – new vs old. And I really feel like I should be an old voice by now and I have to question why I’m not. Why don’t I have more of my writing produced? The fact of the matter is I spent too much time worried about what others thought of my writing and too little time actually working. I let other people and their judgments stop me dead in my tracks…and that’s the worst thing a writer can let happen.
I am a studier of writing. I’ve taken no end of classes and read no end of books, but never seemed to get around to writing an actual script. I just thought about it a lot. I was one of those people we all know very well. I was a writer who didn’t write. I spent my time ruminating over it instead. And when I did write something I let criticism by instructors and fellow students eat at me.
I remember being asked by a producer I worked for what I wanted to do with my career. This was 1997 and I was working on a series for Showtime. I told him I wanted to write and produce my own work. He said he could only help me with half of that, but told me to go to the writer’s room and pay them a visit. I walked down the hall, lingered a minute in front of the door, and kept right on going. I never popped in to ask for advice and guidance…I went back to my day job where I stayed for many more years.
Then a few years after that I finally got up the nerve to pitch a couple of story ideas to a series I was very familiar with and knew the team. There was no response so I figured they weren’t good, so I left it at that. I should have taken this as a sign but I didn’t. I wasn’t deterred.
I finally decided all of the thinking I had done over the last decade had to turn into action so I wrote a spec script. I knew it wasn’t producible because I wasn’t privy to the conversations had in the writers room, and didn’t know the direction they were taking the characters that season, or what the story arcs were….and I informed them of all this – yes I was in touch with reality. I decided it was just a good exercise to test myself, and see if I could actually write a half hour of television, so I submitted it. Then nothing. No acknowledgment, no advice, no “thanks for trying”….absolutely nothing. And I was mortified. I felt so embarrassed by the whole situation I stopped writing as soon as I had started. If these people thought my script was crap then it had to be. I thought I was a talentless hack, and once again went back to my day job. I didn’t write anything again for several years.
Then something funny happened. A friend came to town and we had dinner one night. Sitting in a Moroccan restaurant sipping mint tea I recounted the fateful incident and what a bad effect it had on me and my belief in my abilities. He had worked on the show in question so was familiar with it. His immediate response was “It’s not like Ivan Reitman told you that you were a piece of $#@%!. Why don’t you let me read it and I’ll see what I think?” I had never let anyone else read this script, and was admittedly very scared about what he was going to say. He told me he would be brutally honest which fuelled my fears even further. He left town and I emailed it to him. Then the waiting began.
About a week later I heard back from him. He was scratching his head trying to figure out why I had not gotten any kind of response from the powers that be. He thought it was good…better than good. In places he said he loved it. He told me I had a talent and shouldn’t let one bad experience deter me. That was a couple of people’s opinions…and who is to say they were right?
I learned from that as hard as it was. You have to be careful who you are exposing your work to, and despite believing you have a relationship with someone, and therefore will warrant some kind of respect or consideration that’s not always the case. Where you think you might receive some input that is useful to you, you might end up being raked over the coals, or like me being treated like you’re invisible and don’t warrant five minutes of time for a conversation. You can’t let a bad experience stop you from pursuing your dreams of becoming a writer!
Always think twice before handing over your work to someone. Even if its family or friends, question whether what they will or won’t say will be valuable to you in any way. Are they tactful people? Are they kind? Will their words potentially hurt and damage your fragile skill set? Because that’s the truth – in the beginning, what we are creating should be handled delicately and with care, because we can’t expect to get it right the first few times out of the gate. It’s a process, and you have to get people on your team who are going to support you in that process, and let you learn and grow and aren’t going to shame you for not writing a camera worthy script.
I made the mistake of taking other people’s response (or lack thereof) as gospel. And as my friend said, who is to say their opinion was right? I thought that script must be so bad, that no one even wanted to admit they’d received the thing. And to me that’s the worst thing you can do – ignore somebody when they are making an attempt at something. But it happened and it took me a long time to get back on that horse again and try. So I finally wrote a script. This time a feature length one. And it was recognized and won an award.
The reality is my skills haven’t improved in the least since I wrote that fateful spec because I haven’t been writing. There’s a valuable lesson there, and don’t forget that when you get some negative input. Either take it or leave it or file it away for later. But don’t let it stop you. Use me as an example – the writer that went from being ignored, to the writer that received an award in the blink of an eye. Take it all with a pinch of salt and keep going anyway. There will be your detractors, and there will be your champions, and you have to take the time to figure out who those people are and do your best to avoid the naysayers.
And if you’ve put your foot in it and realized after the fact you’ve exposed yourself and your work to the wrong person, forgive yourself for that mistake and go on. It may take you a while to undo the damage inflicted, but you will eventually. In the meantime just keep your head down and keep writing anyway and you will get where you want to go. Eventually you’ll end up as an old and seasoned voice with many stories down on paper ready to be brought to life on screen.