One Wild Year

December 14th, 2009Blog0 comments

2009 has been a heck of a year. I began the year as the schlub I had always been, drinking way too many Diet Cokes and yukking it up to Keyboard Cat videos. I ended the year as a member of New Dramatists, got a playwriting commission from one major regional theater and had a play premiere at another; I won a big award, found myself with a lawyer, new agents, and a producing parter. I’m now a professional screenwriter as well as a professional playwright.

So how did this happen?

Thinking back, what I did was this: I wrote stuff.

I wrote a lot of stuff. Over the last few years I’ve written five feature screenplays, six full length plays, two TV specs, numerous short plays, short films, short stories. And it’s not like a piece of work is done once it’s written — there are innumerable rewrites. Cycles and cycles of iteration on everything as notes come back on a script or a play is prepared for production.

Every day I write — it would be impossible to get anything done if I didn’t. Like an insane sports fan, no matter what I’m doing I’m thinking about my sport. I think about writing while I’m washing dishes. Throughout the day I’m logging everything that happens, taking notes, jotting things down to plug into the computer.

I heard an anecdote once about how someone asked Conan O’Brien how he broke into writing. “I wrote a lot of stuff,” he said. It really is just that simple. Of course, you still have to go out there and sell this stuff (submit it to contests, get people to read it, get it produced), and it helps quite a bit if your work is good. And getting good at selling is a whole other extremely useful skill. But the key is to always be generating new work.

That’s the power of the writer — he or she makes something out of nothing. You’re like cold fusion — a power source that gives and gives, seemingly by magic alone.

So a friend of mine recently said, “Hey Mike, all you have to do now is to just keep doing what you’re already doing. Just keep on writing.” That’s exactly it — keep on riding this thing, keep drinking Diet Cokes and watching Keyboard Cat videos. Keep turning out work, dreams. People always need stories and dreams.