| [BACK]
You thought you lost me, didn't you?
Me, too.
The toughest thing a writer in L.A. faces is the realization that it may never happen for him. "That's it," you think. "I have to face reality. My dream is never going to come true."
Dreams don't come true, people. But, the good news is that hard work pays off. You can dream all you want, but if you don't apply hard work to it, nothing will happen. No one knows that you have a dream unless you show them some proof that you're working towards something. A Hollywood exec driving down the 405 isn't going to sense your talent and veer off the freeway and sniff you out. You have to do the work.
In the past six months that I haven't written this column, I haven't written much of anything. My life has been a turmoil and I just spent six solid days in a rush move that has my belongings spread out over three storage units. I couldn't help but think that not only is this crap not worth the cost of storage, it surely was not worth five days of my life to deal with it. If I could have left half of it behind, I would have, but that wasn't an option.
In the past six months, I have also gotten involved in two business ventures. The first one blew up in my face when I found out that the opportunity I thought was being presented to me was, in fact, a lure to get me to do something I probably wouldn't have been motivated to do under normal circumstances. The second was a means to another end and also involved someone who used me to further his ventures and didn't really care if I got anything out of it.
Basically, I got off the path. The thing that surprised me was... I didn't care. I was fine with this new path. Even the actuality of no payoff didn't dissuade me. I liked where I was going. I just didn't like the company.
So, that was it. My work with animal rescue charities had given me a clearer idea of what my life would consist of. I always thought it would be my writing that would provide the funding for my altruistic pursuits, but this new thing was so interesting it was like a story that was writing itself. It had drama, it had humor, it had characters (boy, did it have characters) and there was a logical ending.
Then I heard the song.
Being a HUGE music lover (my first published writing was as a music critic), I often attach my screenwriting to songs I like. I'll hear a song and scenes will play out in my mind. Sometimes, they'll even play out in my car, and people in surrounding vehicles might even look at me funny if I lived somewhere other than L.A. and everyone around me wasn't in their own little world. I started to think about how disappointed I would be if some of the stuff that I wrote - stuff that I believe to be great - never even got read, let alone made into a movie. I realized that I could never live a life where I had to accept that. If someone would just tell me I sucked, I could let go... but no one has told me that yet. |
