“I picked an all-timer of a year to break into professional screenwriting,” has been the joke for the past few months’ worth of coffee conversations with interesting people. This was less about the since-resolved strike and more about the fact that, strike or no strike, the “money gun” of streaming expansion has been, likely permanently, holstered.
I was so fascinated by the strike actions but I’m even more so about what happens next: as the industry tries to sort out how to stabilize in the wake of losing the Wall Street shell game, posting the worst opening weekend in Marvel Studios history, and contemplating the advent of cost-saving measures whose only pesky downside is that they don’t let human creators, uh, create. Turns out this whole “unregulated capitalism” thing was just a really, really bad idea, huh?
Expect nothing, hope for the best. Eerily, on the personal level, three huge strands of effort more or less bore their fruit simultaneously this week:
- My 32-week Blogging the Next Generation sequel project, Picard, concluded its run. It was tough going (particularly in the middle parts) but I ended up very happy that I chose to do this; as usual, it’s less about the thing than it is about the world that wanted the thing, and what that means.
- The pilot teleplay for a one-hour drama series I’ve been working on with Daniel Cockburn is reader-ready, and I’m really happy with it.
- And that experimental novella I’ve been noodling around with… I wrote the last words of that this week, too. It’s a long way from done — what I have is a very loose draft of around 80,000 words that was guided more by instinct than any thought to actual structure — but I feel like once I tighten up the bolts some, it will at least be interesting.
The latter served as my “morning pages” since I quit my job in the spring, and sometimes the output was painfully little, in the area of 200-300 words. But all three of these projects outline (once again) that if you just keep chipping away at it, sooner or later, the mountain falls. None of them were the fruits of harried sprints or all-night writing sessions (although I’ve got another one to tell you about sometime, which qualifies). They were just… the work, and the diligent application of time, and poof! here they are.
Another so-obvious-duh lesson out of this year: turns out if you clear up a bunch of head space and really focus on something, the learning curve is exponential. I stripped my life down to the boards in 2023, and I won’t lie, I’m more than a little nervous about building it back up. But, doing so has certainly created the mental and emotional space for me to really grab my writing with both hands, reach deeper into the pockets. Will it all amount to something? The above suggests that it will. Sooner or later the mountain falls.