Writing Wednesdays
Looking for the Overlap
By Steven Pressfield | Published: September 1, 2010
[While the blog takes a short vacation, here's a post from a few months ago that I've always been partial to. See you in two weeks!]
Writers and artists get asked all the time, “How do you decide which book to write, which painting to paint?” The person asking the question usually has a million ideas in her head; she’s struggling to determine which one(s) to pursue. Here’s an answer from my experience.
A few years ago, in Hollywood, I got a new agent. He was a good agent and he did what a good agent should do: he immediately sent me out on a round of meetings. I met with producers and studio execs, actors’ and directors’ development companies. These were the kinds of meetings that screenwriters go on all the time. I told the execs what projects I was working on, they told me what they were looking for, we tried to see if there was a way to work together.
I had thought the meetings would be fun and energizing. Instead they were terribly depressing. By the second week I was feeling down. Week Three, I was clinically bummed. By the fourth week I was suicidal.
I couldn’t figure out why. The people I was meeting with were uniformly smart, motivated, funny. They treated me with respect. They were good peeps. What was wrong? Was it me? This was serious. The emotion was such a downer that I thought, I can’t keep feeling this and stay in this business. What was happening? Finally it hit me.
I realized that floating in the air over every meeting I had been on was an unspoken assumption. The execs and producers and studio people all shared this assumption, and they assumed—because I was in the room with them—that I shared it too.
The assumption was this: We will do anything for a hit.
I don’t fault that position. It’s a good business model. If ultra-violence will get us a smash, let’s go with ultra-violence. If jerk-off teen comedies work, crank ‘em out. Movies based on board games, old TV shows, comic book characters … cue ‘em up, let’s roll. (more…)
