Talent v. perseverance

Want a writing career? Hang in there. My students who "make it" are not often the ones with the most talent. Instead they are the ones with the most perseverance. My most talented students usually give up too soon and do something with more immediate rewards.

One former student is an amazing example of perseverance. Everything was going against this woman for a career in writing for television: she was a woman in a sexist industry; she was over 50 in an ageist industry; moreover, she was homeless, living out of her car. When I told her the advantages of being in LA, she decided she could be homeless one place as easily as another, and worked for gas to get her way to LA, where she continued to live in her car. Now and again she sent me an email from the library. She began making the rounds of TV producers and agents, trying to find someone interested in her work. After about a year of this (!), still homeless, she landed a job: a producer told her, The only way to get rid of you is to hire you, right? She became a gofer jack of all trades. But her boss liked her once he got to know her. He began sending her as the company rep to film festivals and seminars. She did this well. She met people. Finally she met an agent who liked her sample scripts for established TV shows and took her on. That's where she is now: with an agent, still trying to break into TV, but no longer homeless.

Talk about perseverance!

I experienced the flip side as well as the normal struggle. As a freelance journalist and literary short story writer, I collected enough rejection slips to make two large collages (at the suggestion of an older, successful writer), which I still have. Then I began to publish both with regularity. I eventually abandoned fiction for the stage, only picking it up again decades later.

As a playwright, I had immediate success: my first one-act play won a contest (one of three winners), the Tennessee Williams Award, I was flown to the University of Missouri and treated like a big shot. Through the 1970s into the mid 1980s, my playwriting career soared -- then I became obsessed with hyperdrama and fell into the shadows of the avant-garde.

But I'm at the age when "perseverance" doesn't describe anything I do. To me now, writing is a way of existing in the world. I can't imagine not writing any more than I can imagine not breathing. Both are necessary prerequisites to existence.

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I have no commercial goals any more. I write to try and meet literary standards I have. If something commercial comes of this, fine. But it's not a goal. And I have so many adventurous non-commercial instincts, that lack of this kind of success is almost assured now.

The exception is screenwriting. I'm doing my best to write a Big Commercial Script for my agent but it's unnatural, hard work for me -- yet fun, in the way off the wall challenges can be fun.

I do have a goal: to get up to speed on the piano enough to write music drama. This is the form I want to focus on, if I can hang around enough to learn the tools I need. It is, of course, a very non-commercial form, but that's par for the course. These would be like small chamber operas. I also want to make short videos in the same genre.

I have 3 novels in progress, and I think I'll at least finish one, but I should finish all of them since they are clear to me. But this kind of traditional writing doesn't excite me the way it used to. And Kerouac's Scroll may be as good a novel as I'm capable of (and while it hasn't excited very many folks, a few respond in ways pleasing to me: it's definitely "a male book" and the majority of readers today are women). I'm easily bored, which has not been good for my career.