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Ready to give up yet?
It comes with the territory.
In most areas of our life, we see progress. There aren't too many things that have the all-or-nothing charm of the entertainment industry. If you want to drive from Vegas to L.A., you don't sit in your car for four hours in front of your house and then suddenly appear in front of The Luxor. There's no diet that keeps you fat for six months and suddenly dumps 50 pounds overnight. If you can only lift 50 pounds over your head today, you're probably not going to be able to lift 200 pounds over your head tomorrow.
Most monumental efforts in our lives start off slowly and build on their own momentum. We see progress and it fuels us. Working hard at our job nets us that new car, nice entertainment system or shiny bimbo we had our eye on. We get promotions, make more money and move up the corporate ladder. Working hard at cleaning the house gets us an empty sink, painted porch, clean floors, and, eventually, a clean house.
It's a predictable pattern. You start out slowly while you figure out what works and what works for you, you apply yourself and you see progress. The progress itself fuels you, re-energizing you for your daily efforts. If you don't see progress in a "reasonable" amount of time, you either assume you're doing something wrong - and fix it - or you conclude that this isn't for you - so you quit.
None of this applies to screenwriters.
Most screenwriters start off working a crappy job that's barely related to entertainment, (if at all) then dump it to "focus on my writing" and then chase every shadow until they finally find someone to read their script and vouch for their talent and maybe even their sanity. The struggle is on, and the struggle will continue until the writer either gives up and gets a real job or sells a script and scores big. You can go from homeless to homeowner with one sale. But the two big questions remain: Where do you start, and when do you stop?
No one wants to know you until you're famous and then everyone wants to know you and you just want to be left alone. So, what's a poor writer to do? The easy answer is to get a job at a studio. As a writer you should be able to type, and this makes you employable to a great degree in this town. Call temp agencies and find out which ones cater to the studios... or call the studios and find out which temp agencies they use. Once you're inside the wall AND YOU'VE ESTABLISHED YOURSELF you can start poking around and find out what it takes to submit your scripts to the various production companies that are all over the studio lots.
Sounds easy, doesn't it? That's because it's not. You know what else sounds easy? Getting an agent (it just takes a letter), getting married (everyone does it) and flying a rocket (monkeys used to do it). We've all heard that good help is hard to find, and, as I've stated before, it's high on the list of Hollywood's proclamations. There are an amazing abundance of people with good secretarial skills who don't want to do anything creative but want to be around the fun of the entertainment industry. Who do think's gonna get hired first? Will it be the pretty girl from secretarial college who's not going to be pestering everyone in the office to "read my script" or is it going to be Mr. Unreliable who's getting tons of personal calls from every wanna-be he's chatted up at a party and disappearing from his desk every ten minutes to do anything but his job. Who would you hire?
So, the start isn't going too well, and you're starting to question your efforts. You've tried "everything" but nothing's working. It hasn't just been months... it's been YEARS. Yes, you're not supposed to see this as a race, but it is troubling to see others around you enjoying things you can't possibly afford (like Pepsi).
I got my first dose of this writer's reality about three years in. I was at a Halloween party that had all but broken up and some of the stragglers (who I didn't know) decided to go to Denny's. They invited me and the friend I was with, and I said "Sure - I'll treat myself to a little Denny's." The guy's dry response was "I never thought of Denny's as a treat." Listen, Caeser - I'm not used to a daily feast. When you're scraping together coupons and change to get a box of frozen chicken for $1.50 - and you expect that box of chicken to feed you at least twice - then yes, Tutenkhamen, Denny's is a treat. You know what else is a treat at that point? Everything. A fresh razor, an apartment without roommates, a mattress that rests on something other than the floor, a full tank of gas, clean laundry... Anything that costs more than ZERO DOLLARS is a treat.
Was it time to quit? No. I was just getting started. But, getting started has a way of catching up to you.
Getting in to the studio system isn't easy, but getting lost in the system is. Any job other than writer clearly isn't what you want, and if you luck out and get on a TV show in some capacity, who says it's going to be something you like or something you can write for? I worked for a specialized film division at a major studio, submitted a few projects to development, was well-received, got my hopes up... only to see the entire division go unsupported by the studio and finally fold up. I "took some time off" to focus on my writing, but I've seen how quickly you're able to go from the Taking Some Time Off phase to the Back to Square One phase.
When do you quit? Well, it depends on what else you've got planned for the rest of your life. If you want to play house, you've got the biological clock to deal with. If you want to buy a house, you need to think about establishing a stable credit history. If you want to buy luxuries like heat and food, well, then, you have to get a job. The trouble is that the longer you wait, the older you get, the farther away from the job market you get and the harder it's going to be to get something viable in your field. You may not be too old to write a screenplay or start an acting career, but you do reach a point where you're too old to start off in the mail room.
You have to support your art until your art can support you... before you go from unemployed to unemployable. If you're really serious about your art, this will weed out the dreamers from the misdirected. No matter how much you love that job at the tire center and no matter how far away you run after declaring that you're done with this business, if you're a writer you will always write. By the time that it's Time to Quit, you'll already be done and you won't even realize that you've moved on.
As usual, serious column gives way to last laugh. Here's your joke of the week:
There once was a young man who proclaimed that he would one day become a great writer. He wanted to "...write stuff that the whole world will read. I want to write the kind of stuff that people will react to on a truly emotional level - stuff that will make them scream, cry, wail, shout and curse. I want what I write to make people feel pain, desperation, and anger!"
He now works for a computer company writing error messages.
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