It's all good (Diversify and thrive!)

I started out writing mainstream/women's fiction, then did a memoir and a weekly syndicated column, which led to a monthly advice column in a national magazine, which I continued while I ghosted my first memoir guru project and wrote another novel, which I edited while plotting my first mystery novel and taking a screenwriting class, which led to other mysteries, other ghost stories...

Schizophrenic or Renaissance woman? I guess it's a matter of opinion. In his wonderful book Adventures in the Screen Trade, novelist/screenwriter William Goldman recommends writing in multiple formats and genres as a way to keep the minds moving, and adds: “Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before."

So in that spirit, let's have a little more writing and a little less conversation.

Don't get derailed by Dingus Magee

A while back I read William Goldman's terrific Adventures in the Screen Trade, which is so packed with great writing advice, I had to make a list of things to blog about down the road. One particular passage came back to me when a recent proposal of mine was shot down. Discussing the process and production surrounding his script Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Goldman says that when it came time to market the screenplay, it was a "hot item" with interest from several studios, but it was rejected by MGM. Goldman says:

A Metro executive told me that the reason they didn't bid was this: "We've already got our joke western, The Ballad of Dingus Magee."

The fact is this: If Butch went out today, just as it did originally, a simple unencumbered screenplay available for purchase, it would never have sold.

I laughed out loud when I read this. The only time I'd ever heard of Dingus Magee was in an episode of MST3K. Meanwhile, Butch and Sundance went on to become a classic, and Goldman won an Oscar for the screenplay.

There's two things we can take from this. First, there's the eye-roll response to rejection. If they don't get it, they just don't get it. There's nothing you can do to change their mind. Second, Goldman makes the point that to everything there is a season. Timing is everything in the placement of a manuscript. A writer's only response in either case is to write what you want to write. It's a terrible mistake for an author to internalize rejection, change course, or abandon an idea simply because the market for it isn't (at this moment) ripe for it. Or because somebody just doesn't get it.

A universal truth in the writing life: rejection happens. So they sent you a thanks but no thanks. Let them have their Dingus Magee. You know who you are as an artist and what you're doing as a writer. To thine own self be true. Your time will come.

"Nobody knows anything" and other true stuff said by William Goldman

I'm reading Adventures in the Screen Trade by novelist/screenwriter William Goldman, who wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, among other things.

Among the very true things he says:

“Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.”