You’ve heard my argument against writing as a profession.
You’ve learned how unprofitable it is.
Or at least how large the odds are against you.
If you were anything else, you’d have been discouraged by now and would have cast your sights upon more realistic ways of making a living.
Yet you’re not.
That’s because you are a writer and you’re stubborn that way.
I was so annoyed at one point that my hair started to fall out, thank God I found the Provillus Buying Guide and my hair is growing back.
Because you omnipotently create small universes in your stories, you think you can grab the reins of your destiny and turn yourself into a rockstar through your art.
Hell, you say, the print may be out of the question but a combination of TV shows and the occasional movie is not a far-fetched plan.
A man can live comfortably on that arrangement.
And that same combination may just be the thing to propel one to fame and fortune.
I agree that you can make a living as a screen and TV writer.
A decent living, where you won’t slip into the lower economic class status, a thing many of us in the middle class are too horrified to even contemplate.
If you get a movie gig in-between shows and if you don’t get a stroke due to all the caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, hallucinogens, and stimulants you’ve consumed; yes, it’s possible.
But fame and fortune?
That, me fine lad, has a prerequisite called respect; a quality of which screen and TV writers all too often find a serious shortage.
Of all “artist” types, screen and TV writers are the most despised, especially by fellow writers in the literary discipline.
Never mind that, monetarily, even semi-successful scriptwriters are Zobels and Ayalas compared to poets, novelists, and their sort, who are almost universally dependent on mommy and daddy to feed them, clothe them, and put a roof over their heads since the money that comes from writing literature can’t even feed mice.
No, you’ll hear the fashionably cynical snoterati say, screenplays aren’t art.
They’re degenerate, commercial products for mass consumption.
A lot of times, they’re right, of course.
Even the biz hates writers.
When a movie is good, everyone praises the director.
When a movie sucks, everyone asks who the fuck wrote this steaming pile of filth.
You watch a movie, the credits say: a film by so and so director.
Never the writer.
Never.
It’s like everyone in the biz thinks the writer is just a necessary evil.
It’s this auteur theory bullshit going around, making everyone think the director is everything in a movie.
Let me tell you a little story.
Once upon a time, I wrote a decapitation scene in a script. Yes, I’m an optimist that way.
I detailed how the shot would look like in this manner: the sword falls but we don’t see the actual decapitation.
We just see the body falling, something like a head rolling, and then the last shot is of the actor’s head in the foreground with what seems to be his body falling in the background.
Worked like a charm onscreen.
After seeing that series of shots in the editing room, a producer praised the director for a great job.
The director then said he just followed what was in the script.
The producer looked at me and changed the subject.
Not out of malice.
It just wasn’t interesting anymore since it’s the writer who thought that up.
Besides, hotshot directors need to be flattered while writers are a dime a dozen.
No, a dear aspiring young writer, you won’t find fame and fortune in this biz.
Writing for a living sucks eggs.
I was about to end this long-ass rant on that note but something came up.
I saw a friend of mine who I haven’t heard from in a long while and we started chatting over some paper cups of cheap, awful tasting, machine-brewed coffee.
We were talking about our jobs and I was telling him about how a lot of young writers nowadays think they’ll actually make a name for themselves in this biz like they think that that one shot at literary or film rock stardom is theirs by virtue of their stars.
He laughed and then asked me why I kept at it myself.
I shrugged and told him that, quite frankly, I think it’s my destiny.
I’m going to be a fucking rockstar, man, just you wait.
