A few months ago I was chatting with a patient and his wife in front of my office. They had agreed for their story to be featured in an annual report; we were waiting for the photographer to arrive.
We were startled as a painter burst energetically from behind the corner of the building and headed toward us. He had on a worn canvas jumpsuit with splashes of paint on it, and he held a paint roller in his hand. He stopped next to me. "What you said just now, about smoking and Top Ramen," he said chuckling. "I was listening. Smoking and Top Ramen. I'm going to remember that the rest of my life."
He was a blue collar worker, a behind-the-scenes type of person. Thousands of strangers had walked by his various work sites over the years and he passed the hours being entertained by them. He must've spent 20 or 30 years enjoying snippets of conversation overheard during the few seconds they were a part of his world.
I hadn't noticed that our building was being painted and the painter bounded into our group suddenly. I hadn't yet processed any of this.
Just as quickly as he had appeared he left, energetically walking back to his workstation, chuckling to himself. "What she said, Top Ramen and smoking. Gonna remember that the rest of my life."
That was an incredible moment; it's what I dream about, writing stories and later having an actor say a line, creating a moment that is so surprising, new or revealing to someone that they can't let it go. Magic.
Professor Frank Wuliger wanted the screenwriters in his Business of Writing class to succeed. He wants his clients to be successful. He spoke about being so strongly moved by a story that he will set up hundreds of meetings so that the screenplay may eventually be presented to someone who will love it so much that one day it will appear on screen.
Frank has worked with and has known writers who are at all stages of their careers--writers selling their first screenplay, others who are successful, a few who are tragically burned out and who are unable to produce.
But how to be successful? Frank made us think about that. It's so important that it was included in our final test--the "Five-year roadmap into the industry" that inspired this blog. It was woven into the assignment: How will you prepare for, plan for, and deal with failure at the various stages of your career?
The concept of failure came up dozens of times during his lectures. Sometimes failure was the best thing.
"If you're in 'the room,'" Frank said (and I'm summarizing), "and you find yourself working harder and harder to make the person like your screenplay, and if you do ultimately sell the screenplay to that person, then there's a good chance that the entire project will not go well."
A much better scenario, he said, is when a writer enters the room and from the beginning, the people in the room are excited about the project; the writer can feel this good energy; it's a much better fit.
So the first meeting wasn't a failure; people who love the project will eventually discover it, championing it from the beginning instead of needing to be talked into it, never really having been convinced.
Another time the concept of failure came up in class was when we were discussing a paper about the TV business that we'd been assigned to write. I commented that it had disturbed me when I read that Lloyd Braun (chair, ABC 2002 to 2004) had been let go after greenlighting the show Lost, only to have the show (and others that he and a colleague had discovered) become very successful after his departure. His decision to greenlight Lost had been a good one; the whole thing was horrible, life shouldn't be that way; Lloyd Braun shouldn't have lost his job.
"That's not terrible," said Frank. "That's beautiful."
I still didn't get it. If you work hard and do a good job, getting fired shouldn't happen.
Frank continued, "What is he doing now? What has he gone on to do? What is he accomplishing with his life?"
Lloyd Braun hadn't let his lost :) job destroy him or stop his career; and realizing this was one of the highlights of the class for me. I learned that it's not what happens at any one point in our lives, but what we do over our lifetime that matters. And that is beautiful.
I thought about failure when I didn't make it into the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting quarter finals. It was interesting to see what writers who had entered the NFS were posting on the Nicholl Facebook page. Someone who hadn't advanced said that they were going to give up. I guess that is the ultimate failure.
If I am honest with myself and as I look at my own journey, I know that I now feel confident as a screenwriter (slightly after teachers began telling me it was time to 'go for it,' but I needed to feel ready).
I learned that to keep an agent, a screenwriter must produce, giving the agent more ammunition that he or she can sell. I will be ready for that early next year; being selected for the quarter finals would have taken the opportunity away from someone who is ready now.
I am grateful:
- for work that lets me tell stories every day
- an incredible opportunity, an invitation to write a children's book
- for great preparation at USC (mentors who provided tools that I'm sharing here).
And I am grateful for this blog, which is making me a better writer; and am surprised and happy that it has been read by people from more than 12 countries.
Thank you for joining me on this journey; I hope to learn from you, too.
NOTE: These entries are inspired by the final assignment for "The Business of Writing for Screen and Television," a School of Cinematic Arts' course taught by Frank Wuliger. Hoping to help his students become working screenwriters, he asked us to create a personal, five-year road map into the industry.
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