Actually the whole intention is
I want all of my productivity to turn into an active and financially stable and sustaining career.
The past two years have been massively productive. I don't say that to brag. I say it to remind myself because I too easily forget that I have been making progress and that results in feeling I have to reinvent the wheel constantly. And that's a big waste of time. It's better to build on something than to have to build from scratch every time.
In 2014, I wrote five scripts and almost 1000 pages. In 2015, I wrote three full scripts and started a fourth. Plus I came in at around 2000 pages. Or at least double what I wrote in 2014. Why so productive? Or better…HOW? I stopped worrying about setting goals and I got down to the business of doing stuff. It's great to set an intention and to say I want to be rich. Or I want this year to be the year that I trust myself. Or I want this year to be the year I finally break up with the person who's not right for me. But if you don't do the incremental things it takes every day, then you'll never get it done because it's too hard to take on in one big fell swoop. I had a lot of reprogramming to do. I was the kind of person who wanted to dream it and then have it come to fruition because I wanted it the most or because I had gone to a famous grad school or because I was God's chosen person or any number of countless reasons that made me feel entitled to greatness. Now that entitlement came from insecurity and feeling that I needed to be great and had to be great and that the world owed it to me because of how much I had suffered in life. The truth is we all suffer. Some of us survive it. Some of us don't. But suffering is a shared experience. This daily practice of doing a little bit each day to see my intentions come to fruition has been a revelation. It's something a lot of my cohorts had naturally. They weren't entitled and they were getting the work done and they were seeing success. So I had to get with the program.
Like I said, the past two years have been about productivity. I want to be a show runner. In order to do that I need to get on someone else's show first. And if I want to survive, I need to be well conditioned. I need to already have the car warmed up. So writing eight (almost nine) new scripts with several drafts over the past two years helps in working that muscle. I could jump on a staff tomorrow and handle the workload. The fringe benefit of that is that I now have several samples to show. Some of the scripts I wrote are straight up usable samples. Some of the scripts were what helped me get better and they'll never see the light of day. But most are usable. And the more I've done it, the better I've gotten at it in increasingly shorter and shorter amounts of time. I just wrote a "first draft" of a pilot script that's really a revised version of another script I've written several drafts of. But again, since I'm not reinventing the wheel and I'm building on that experience, I have a pretty solid version of it and will have a draft ready to send out that I wrote in less than two months.
But now that I have this productivity and product, what do I do now? Good question. The second half of that intention is that this becomes an active and financially stable and sustaining career. In other words, I want to make a living as a working TV, Film and Theatre writer. I want that to be my main source of income. I want the money I make and pay my bills with and pay off my debts with to be from that source. That doesn't mean I won't get money from elsewhere while I'm working towards that end, but I don't want to just be taking jobs to make ends meet forever. I want to take jobs and create opportunities that are a direct result of being proactive, not reactive.
All of that sounds nice, doesn't it? The first part of the HOW has to do with productivity. The second part has to do with asking for help. I need representation--agents and/or managers--who are helping me cover ground that I can't cover on my own. I need to spend my time writing and they need to pick up some of the selling. It's true that I might get many jobs on my own. It's true that I might be getting most of my first jobs on my own. But I need someone to share the workload with. I need someone to bounce ideas with. I need a collaborator. But like any collaboration, I can't fully engage if I don't have a level of trust. And I can't get to that level of trust if I make a poor decision about who to work with. And I can't make that decision of who to work with unless I know what I want.
I want someone who's a fan of what I do and encourages me to make what I do the best version of what I'm capable of. That person will not try to make me into someone else. Or follow the trend. Because those are signs that you're just not into what I'm about. If you are fully into what I'm about, you're going to encourage me to do it more. That's who I want. And I believe I have the work that shows that I'm capable of all the things I think I'm capable of. Once we've got the right team in place, then I can fully engage in collaboration. But it's no good if I'm holding back because I don't trust that person. And maybe that won't happen on the first shot. But that's the goal.
With that team in place, then I can start working. And it's my belief that once I get these opportunities to have these meetings and be in these rooms, then I can give this a real shot. And if it doesn't work out, then I'll do something else. But I want to be working on a career that makes me satisfied and helps me grow. Money's important going into this new year. I want to start building a life for myself.
I am grateful for all the moments of my life.
I am grateful for the challenges.
I am grateful for the friends who listen and support.
I am grateful to have a sense of humor about everything.
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