In the event you don’t keep track of these things, the Los Angeles Dodgers lost the World Series last month, four games to one, to the Boston Red Sox. It was both the Dodgers’ second consecutive World Series appearance and defeat. From the point of view of many a long-suffering fan here in L.A., collapsing yet again mere inches from the finish line amounts to nothing more than another season-long strikeout, a yearlong exercise in futility, a squandered investment of time and emotional support. “This is where baseball breaks your heart,” someone said to me in the waning days of the season. To be sure, I share the sentiment: It’s hard as hell to get so frustratingly close to the Golden Ring only to go home empty-handed. A miss is as good as a mile, after all. Close only matters in horseshoes and hand grenades. “Almost” doesn’t count.
As recently as a few years ago, I wouldn’t have known, much less cared, who won or lost this Series—or even who played in it. I came to baseball relatively late in life—around forty—as I recounted in “Spring Fever,” the gist of which was this: For whatever reason, neither I nor any of my boyhood pals were born with the “sports gene.” We were all pop-culture fanatics, more likely to be found at the local comic shop than Little League field. When we saw the Bronx Bombers play the Indians at Yankee Stadium in 1986, none of us knew what the hell to make of that abstract experience; when we watched them face-off again in David S. Ward’s Major League in 1989, in the context of a Cinderella narrative, suddenly the rivalry had meaning. We loved movies and comics; sports we simply had no use for.
A few years later, I found myself formally studying comics (under legendary Batman artist and DC Comics editor Carmine Infantino) and cinema (in college) in preparation for making a career in those fields. What they don’t tell you in school, though, is that when you turn your passions into your profession, you often do so at the expense of the joy you once took in those pastimes. Worse still, so many of the things that directly inspired me to be a screenwriter, from Star Wars to superheroes, I eventually grew to disdain. And what Dodgers baseball restored in me, outside my conscious awareness as it was happening, was the innocent pleasure of being a fan of something again; it’s been a welcome, even analeptic, reprieve from the tyranny of passion.
Game 2 of the 2018 World Series
The Dodgers’ reentry into the World Series this fall, and the collective hope it kindled of their first world-championship win in precisely three decades, coincided with a sobering anniversary of my own: It’s been exactly twenty years—October of 1998—since I signed with my first literary manager off a screenplay I’d written called BONE ORCHARD. It occurs to me only now, as I type this, that the project was something of a creative precursor to Escape from Rikers Island, trafficking in many of the same themes and concepts: an urban island left to rot and ruin, overrun with supernatural savages (demons, not zombies), with a neo–hardboiled detective at the center of the action. (I’d studied Raymond Chandler in college and have since been heavily influenced by his fiction.)
Anyway, there I was, twenty-two years old and only a few months out of school, and everything was unfolding right on schedule. The script would be taken to the spec marketplace and I would soon join the ranks of working screenwriters. You study for a career in the arts, and you get one—simple as that.
Christ, if only. BONE ORCHARD didn’t sell. And while I was halfway through writing my follow-up, the management company repping me shuttered. Young and naïve though I was, I nonetheless intuited I wasn’t likely to move the needle on my screenwriting career in New York—an ambition I was resolute about fulfilling—so I left the comforts of home behind for Los Angeles.
When you first arrive in Hollywood, good luck getting anyone with even a modicum of clout to give you the time of day. Not gonna happen. What you do—and what I did—is seek out aspiring filmmakers at the same level and pool resources. In addition to screenwriting, I’d had experience as a film and video editor, so I started cutting USC thesis shorts pro bono. Within a year or two, I’d established a circle of friends and colleagues, all in our twenties, who were collaborating on “portfolio projects.” I was editing by day and writing by night, hoping to network my way to new representation—an objective that would, to my slowly percolating astonishment, take another half-dozen years to realize.
I was in my early twenties when I signed with my first manager, my early thirties before I found my second. I spent nearly a decade in Hollywood—writing specs, doing favors, getting the lion’s share of my sustenance from craft-service tables—before a new opportunity of significance opened up for me. And by the time that finally happened, most—though not all—of the would-be filmmakers I came up with had all long since gone back to… wherever it was they’d come from.
Because making it in Hollywood is hard as hell, and few have the requisite stamina. On average, most aspirants last a year out here before folding up their tents, before deciding life’s too precious to squander in L.A. on an impossible dream. One guy I knew invested four years at film school… then put in a grand total of eight months in the industry before moving back to his hometown of Boston to work for his father at a retail shop. Hell, I recall another hopeful screenwriter who moved out here from the East Coast and lasted—wait for it—five days before sprinting back home. Five days, man. I mean, he was a resident of Los Angeles for less time than he would’ve spent here on vacation.
As such, it’s the small handful of contemporaries who have the tenacity to stick around—despite the relentless homesickness and lack of measurable career progress, to say nothing of the endless ache of hunger in the pit of your belly (and I mean literal hunger; that isn’t meant to be a metaphor for ambition)—whom you come to view as your brothers-in-arms. You look to them for strength: If you’re not goin’ anywhere, I’m not goin’ anywhere! Year after year, whether or not we had anything to boast about when we went home for the holidays (an experience we referred to as “Tribal Council,” because it was where you went to account for your time and stand judgment for it), we stayed at it, together, equally invested in each other’s success—because if one could succeed, there was hope for all of us.
And then, at about the same time, things did start to break our way. In my case, that meant signing with new management, and then an agency, which didn’t happen by chance: One of my peers had an “in,” and got my material into the right hands; his network became my network, and vice versa. Ten years it took me to claw my way back up to the very position that had been handed to me right out of college, before I’d earned or could sufficiently appreciate it—before I’d “paid my dues,” as the saying goes. This time… things would be different.
“A famous boxer once said, ‘Everybody has a plan… until he gets punched in the face.’”—Al Gore in An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
For all the promising opportunities and earnest effort that ensued, though, my résumé covering that decade is exclusively an index of almosts: the scripts that almost sold; the projects almost produced; the comics almost published. Same goes for most of those colleagues I mentioned, some of who got tauntingly close to career-launching success themselves. I’m in touch with very few of them anymore; I think the collective frustration, if not outright cynicism, born from the recognition that Hollywood, in the end, is a capricious beast—that there are many who pay their dues in good faith to no favorable outcome, while others somehow score a Fastpass to enviable careers—took its toll on those friendships. The bonds formed during the enthusiasm of our twenties and strengthened by the determination of our thirties were finally severed, it would seem, by the cutting disillusionments of middle age.
It happens. As any Dodgers fan can attest, “almost” is a maddeningly insufficient return on investment of one’s time, effort, and emotion. You can’t put mustard on “almost” and eat it. There’s no fill-in field for “almost” on a bank-deposit slip. Nobody brags about “almost” at cocktail parties. In its way, “almost” is worse than not even coming close—something all those guys who skipped town prematurely must’ve recognized, even if only unconsciously.
How is it, exactly, Indiana Jones is such a celebrated hero when he returns from EVERY adventure empty-handed?
Still, whether or not we’ve realized the personal and/or professional goals we set for ourselves in youth, one can’t reach midlife without facing the sweat-chilling question Now what? Having taken my Hollywood adventure as far as it could go, out of chances and (more or less) out of friends, I confronted it myself a few years ago, with a bulky sack full of “almosts” slung over my back. And answering Now what? meant sifting through that baggage—acknowledging that those “almosts” were no longer the initial attempts at my enterprising efforts, but rather the final fruits of them.
And it occurred to me, during my rite of reassessment, that “almost” can be made to serve a not-altogether-unhelpful utilitarian function. “Almost” tests your commitment to your passions. It sharpens your skills, keeps you hungry (figuratively this time). It sure as hell distinguishes your true friends from the fairweathers. “Almost” gives one’s life a certain narrative context, because it’s the pursuit of our ambitions more than the fulfillment of them that defines the course our journeys take. To say “‘almost’ doesn’t count,” then, is to imply the very expenditure of effort is only justified by a preordained guarantee of success.
All of which reminded me—somewhat randomly and obscurely, I’ll concede—of a passage from journalist Matt Taibbi’s nonfiction book The Divide, in which he calls out the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s lazy (and institutionalized) practice of punishing instances of small-business fraud over prosecuting white-collar crime perpetrated by executives at too-big-to-jail Wall Street multinationals:
“It is critically important that our enforcement program be extremely efficient,” [SEC commissioner Daniel] Gallagher said. “Recognizing that it is unrealistic to imagine we will ever achieve a one-to-one correspondence between incidents of malfeasance and SEC Enforcement staff, we’d better plan to do everything we can to increase our hit-rate per investigation opened, and should commit our staff resources carefully, which is to say, consciously”. . . .
In other words, we’ve got a limited budget, and there’s a bigger degree of difficulty in going after big banks with powerful lawyers. . . .
This is coward’s language. No true cop would ever think like this. Real police will go after the bad guy no matter who he is or how well protected he might be. In fact, the best of them will take on a villain even when winning is a long shot. There’s value even in trying and losing sometimes. It’s not as tangible as a billion dollars, but it’s real enough (Matt Taibbi, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, [New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2014], 408–09; emphasis added).
Perhaps that’s the reason baseball resonates with me now as an adult in a way only pulp fiction did when I was a kid: Movies and comics have you rooting from the outset for the predetermined winner; sports require your investment with no such promise of a favorable outcome. Baseball, in fact, serves to remind us that we lose a hell of a lot more often than we win in life—that Second Best only means you’re First Loser—and the point of the whole goddamn thing, really, is simply to keep going back to the ballpark every day. The value isn’t in the trophy, but in the experience—the expenditure of effort—itself.
Let’s face it: The best “Rocky” movies — parts I, VI, & VII — were the ones that ended in “almost”
When we understand this—and it has to be experienced firsthand before it’s intellectualized; it can only be learned the hard way—we’re at last, I think, ready to be emancipated from the tyrannical expectations of youth. When we consciously acknowledge failure is the likely outcome of life’s most important aspirations—and presuming that bitter epiphany doesn’t break us (something I’ve certainly seen happen)—we become open to a more sustainable, less neurosis-inducing mode of productivity, one in which small, incremental victories hold more innate value, both individually and in aggregate, than some elusive Big Win.
How else to explain why, despite the wisdom of my experiences, I’m such a sucker for long-odds projects, like publishing a novel or fighting climate change? Al Gore’s recent documentary An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power is a four-decade diary of “almosts,” in which he admits to feelings of personal failure at having yet to achieve his life’s pursuit: substantially curbing climate change. And unlike, say, Trump, who, as John Oliver recently observed, “has failed upward for seventy-two straight years,” the former vice president knows from monumental setbacks. Despite this, at age seventy, he’s more committed to and passionate about his mission than ever, more of an active and vocal presence on the global stage now than he was during his time in the White House. Far from crushing him, the grind of recurring disappointment has only sharpened his resolve.
Likewise, since I’ve become less focused on selling material after repeatedly failing to do so, I’ve been able to redirect that anxious energy into, ya know, living life, which has in turn made my fiction better; I have more of substance to say. Furthermore, when I stopped dutifully capitulating to the “creative” input of managers and producers—all in the vain hope of getting that script sold, or that movie made—and instead starting writing what I wanted to write, the way I think it should be written, I heard for the first time in my material the sound of my own voice.
BONE ORCHARD was the slick and vacuous work of a kid without a worldview, emulating his cinematic idols, chasing the validation of commercial success; Escape from Rikers Island, on the other hand, is all me—for better or worse, like it or not. And I don’t much care who likes it or doesn’t. If it took two decades to get from the former piece of work—and point of view—to the latter, then I’d say that was time well spent.
Cynical idealist Joe Hallenbeck (Bruce Willis) recites his morning mantra in “The Last Boy Scout” (1991)
To be explicitly clear: The takeaway here isn’t reassurance that hard work and perseverance will pay off in the end… eventually. It isn’t to promote the fallacy that failure is an inevitable prelude to success, or that life, in the final tally, is meritocratic. It’s to let you know—and this goes double for any aspiring artists—that you’re in all probability gonna come up short at the stuff that really matters, that even getting to “almost” is astronomically unlikely, but that, as Taibbi says, there’s value nonetheless in trying and losing. You can’t display it on a shelf or post it on Instagram; you just carry it in your heart and be content with it. Take it from someone who’s been failing Olympically for twenty years: Losing stings like a sonuvabitch, but nothing seems to salve it so effectively as trying again.
See you next spring, Dodgers.
— Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life
Damn, Michael! I wish I’d included that quote in the body of the piece! But I’m glad you posted it here — thank you. (And that Teddy Roosevelt was himself a committed conservationist — who helped protect the Palisades — makes those words all the more personally encouraging.)
Hope you’re having a great holiday season, my friend.
A comment I made on Mythcreants (https://mythcreants.com/blog/why-storytelling-advice-is-such-a-mess/) a while ago:
To be a success (by whatever you define as success) in most fields you need five things, in varying amounts:
1. Raw, natural talent
2. Knowledge, such as can be learned from books or websites
3. Persistence
4. Experience, which can often teach things from 2, and can only happen if you have 3
5. Pure dumb luck
In some cases, an increase in one area can make up for a lack in another. Note that three areas are under your control
I would absolutely agree, Dave, particularly with your caveat at the end. “Pure dumb luck,” I’ve observed, has a way of making or breaking an enterprise, particularly a career in arts and entertainment. Sometimes someone deserving — someone who’s “paid their dues” — gets that break, and sometimes those who haven’t sacrificed anything at the altar of Hollywood nonetheless fall into big-time careers; the latter happens a lot more often than folks may realize. Many names you’d absolutely recognize from TV and movies are underserving, even untalented people; I’ve witnessed it firsthand (repeatedly), and I have credible friends who work at the lofty rungs of the television biz who will testify to the fact that a lot of showrunners are lazy no-talents who do none of the work and take all of the credit. And when you see that happen over and over and over again, particularly when you yourself have been struggling to get a foothold in the industry, you get very cynical about the whole business. That kind of cynicism ultimately poisoned a lot of very meaningful relationships in my life that I mourn to this day.
The way most other industries work is that you formally study/train for them, you apprentice in them for a while (whether that’s done as a residency if you want to be a doctor or on a farm team if you want to be a ballplayer), and if you put in your time and earn your certifications, eventually you’ll get where you’re going. You can’t bullshit your way into being an accountant or a lawyer or an investment banker, ya know? And even if you somehow manage to, eventually you’re bullshit starts to stink and you’re pushed out; I’ve seen that happen with people who networked their way into advertising jobs they were completely unqualified for. After a while, you just can’t hide how full of shit you are — your bosses will see you can’t deliver on what you promised… and they’ll fire or demote you for it.
Hollywood ain’t like that. Here, bullshit fertilizes. The arts are subjective, after all. And the problem with storytelling is that alarmingly few people — including many, many successful writers and filmmakers — really understand the mechanics/principles behind it, and yet everyone thinks they know how to tell a story because they’ve been watching movies their whole life! They think they understand narrative osmotically, through constant exposure to it. I mean, I’ve been driving around in a car my whole life, but I couldn’t explain the finer points of how one operates — and I sure as hell couldn’t build one from scratch! Yet here, you have a bunch of people who know shit about storytelling and yet think they know everything. It’s a condition called confidence without competence. And, with a little pure dumb luck on your side, it’ll get you very, very far in this business. Careers have been built on it.
They warn you in school making it in Hollywood is difficult, but they never really explain how unfair it can be. (I’m not crying about that, you understand, just explaining an intrinsic fact of this business.) You never suspect (scores of) undeserving people will make it while your own years of sincere dues-paying might not amount to anything. I watched a lot of people, so passionate and deserving of careers, flame out for no reason other than bad dumb luck. It happens a lot. And I thought there was an opportunity in this post to talk honestly about that and try to extract some kind of meaning or value from it. So… thanks for adding to the conversation, my friend.
Two quotes from Order of the Stick:
“If I let myself get hung up on only doing things that had any actual chance of success, I’d never do anything!” – Elan
“It doesn’t matter if you win or lose, as long as you look cool doing it.’ – Julio Scoundrél
Yeah, there are a lot of great proverbs about trying and failing, including these and the one from Teddy Roosevelt that Michael cited above. I’m sure far wiser people than me have opined on this matter, which is why I opted to draw meaningful examples from my own life — those endemic to my experiences — and I tried (and hopefully didn’t fail this time!) to keep from being too preachy or platitudinal. I wanted to offer an insight on the subject that was honest and hopeful but realistic, too. Failure sucks, and it’s gonna happen way more often to you than success, and maybe that’s something we should be more comfortable discussing openly.
I talked a few months back, in “Changing the Narrative,” about how we ought to use our stories to challenge (rather than reinforce) some of our uncontested cultural beliefs — from our demigod-worshipping superhero epics to our cynical view of social institutions — and maybe that includes telling more stories about trying and losing? We used to be okay with that kind of worldview — it played out in Rocky and Raiders, certainly — but it’s become less common in an era in which our narratives have no agenda beyond their own self-perpetuation. To end in a failed resolution, after all, a story would have to actually end, and we don’t conclude our narratives anymore.
The erosion of storytelling as a craft has a lot to do with the popularity of meaningless fiction right now, as well the sustained success of the talentless artists who produce it, something you and I discussed, Dave, in the previous comment. That’s a subject I hope to expound upon in a post next year…
“Movies and comics have you rooting from the outset for the predetermined winner; sports require your investment with no such promise of a favorable outcome.” Yes! Your heart soars or breaks on the crack of the bat, or the whiff of the swing-and-a-miss. How well I know, after Our Crew made it only so far as game seven, bottom of the ninth–LA’s ecstasy was MKE’s agony this season. Almost. Almost. Almost. Your almosts are beautifully and almost painfully expressed here. I am so looking forward to your book, YOUR book!
Wendy, I was thinking of you all throughout the NLCS — which was, from start to finish, anyone’s Series, by the way! That could’ve just as easily gone the other way, and I know how painful it must’ve been to watch the Brewers lose in Game 7, because that’s exactly what happened to L.A. in the 2017 World Series! Because I was never invested in a team before the Dodgers just a few years ago, I never grasped that fundamental truth about sports: that being a fan means risking losing right alongside your team. My wife has always understood that; she didn’t relax at any point during the postseason! “Almost” is a sonofabitch, isn’t it?
Thank you for the kind words about the piece above and the book. I’m currently trying to get the manuscript set up with an agent/publisher, and we know, courtesy this post, what typically follows the “trying” phase! One way or the other, though, I’m gonna find a home for Escape from Rikers Island, even if that means supplying one myself. I went into 2018 deciding I’d heard the word “no” enough for one lifetime, and have actually been making a number of important personal/professional things happen that I haven’t even discussed publicly.
One of the other great benefits of accepting the likelihood of failure is that the fear of failure is then alleviated, and you’re compelled to just go for broke at whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish. So that’s what I’m doing: going for broke. In youth, your courage comes from the certainty you’ll succeed; with age and experience, it comes from knowing you’ll probably fail but it ain’t the end of the world if you do, so why not try?
Hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving, Wendy, and that your holiday season is merry and bright! I’m thankful this month (and every month) for your support and engaged participation.
It’s about the journey, not the destination, right? Most of us won’t be lauded beyond our circles of family and friends. Most of us won’t even hit the “almost” mark when it comes to our vocations. But success can be measured in multiple ways, and we are the ones who get to choose the measurements that matter to us.And as you say, Sean, failure too has a valuable place in our understanding and growth, the sorting of our values, and our sense of contentment and accomplishment. 🙂 Excellent post, my friend. I enjoy your reflections.
Indeed, Diana: I think as we get older, we come to develop a more refined, more mature notion of what success is. In our youth, success means achieving nothing short of all the flashy trappings: the big house, the bestselling career, etc. The “American Dream,” I guess. It’s not our fault: That’s what all our institutionalized cultural narratives teach us life is about. Age and experience (hopefully) show us, though, that the good stuff isn’t just out of reach outside our circle of family and friends, but safely ensconced within it. When you finally realize that, there’s nowhere else you’d rather be.
I would also second your observation about failure’s utility in our journeys of self-discovery and personal growth: We don’t really know who we are until we’ve fallen down. Scoring a manager at 22 years old only confirmed what I already knew about myself: I was the shit! It was only after I lost that manager, struggled in Hollywood for several years, learned storytelling craft under some indispensable mentors, got on a screenwriting hot streak — followed by an Ice Age that “killed off” most of my friends and supporters — that I found the sense of self I’d been missing my whole life. I knew who my true friends were; I understood why writing was important to me; I had something to say about the world and wasn’t afraid to use my voice to say it; and I realized that I trusted my own talent and abilities — I believed in myself — without external validation. That’s what I got after two decades of failure. I somehow doubt I would have any of that today had BONE ORCHARD sold in 1998 and put me on the fast track to “fame and fortune.”
Thank you, Diana, for reading and commenting and always having something encouraging to say. Blogging, which my wife had encouraged me to do for years, was something I didn’t have “time for” when I was a hotshot screenwriter about to break through, and it’s only now — thanks to friends like you — that I realize what I was missing out on. A Big Screenwriting Career was my metric of success all throughout my 20s and 30s… and yet this project makes me feel so much better, richer, and more connected than that ever did! That’s what I mean by refining one’s definition of success.
I think a lot about how our standard American measurement of success, Sean, and it tends to be materially-based. Even our words, such as when we talk about someone’s “worth,” we are referring to money. Success seems equated with heaps and heaps of cash – how much, how big, how fancy, how costly, and all the things we can blow it on at a whim. The more lavish, the better. No wonder so many people feel left behind, disregarded, and angry. The dream of vast riches doesn’t apply to the vast majority of us, and yet there is it – frequently used as the definition of success, and erroneously considered a key to happiness.
Not that poverty is desirable or easy; that’s not what I’m talking about. In truth, most of us are surrounded by successes everyday and have within our grasp the simple choices that would increase those success tenfold. Loving another or being loved is a success, or sharing a laugh, or taking a walk, or showing up to work and doing a good job, accepting our strengths and limitations, trying and failing and picking ourselves up and trying again. The mere act of striving is a much a success as being satisfied with having done our best and failed. Would I like to be a writing sensation? Dam right, I would. But in the long run, it’s not how I’ll measure the success of my life. When I lie on my death bed, it won’t matter at all. <3
Beautifully expressed, Diana — and a fitting sentiment for the holiday season now upon us. I always make a point this time of year to reread A Christmas Carol (or at the very least watch the 1984 version with George C. Scott, which I consider — and I’m not alone — the finest screen adaptation of the story). When the novella was first published in 1843, just as the Industrial Revolution was spreading from Britain to the rest of the Western world, Dickens in his prescient wisdom tried to warn us away from the pitfalls of consumerism, capitalism, material wealth, etc. — the very practices and ideologies we later came to codify as “the American Dream,” that have now put civilization in an existential crisis.
Because I think it’s undeniable at this point that the American Dream was a lie. Let me rephrase that: It was a tool. A tool to keep us working harder and buying more so the rich got richer — all through the false promise that one day we’d be rich, too! We’ve talked at length on this blog about how audiences don’t trust storytellers anymore, and that’s because so much of the propaganda we were sold were patent falsehoods. And now, consequently, everything’s out of balance: the economy, the justice system — even nature itself. We recognize now — and thank Trump in part for making this so uncomfortably apparent — that a selfish, materialistic mode of living hasn’t made us wealthier, healthier, or happier; instead, it’s left us feeling, as you rightly observe, disregarded and angry.
But we have a tool to address that, too! And take it from this cynical idealist that there is real hope now for a fairer, cleaner, more equitable world — the 21st century we deserve — but it will mean systemically reforming our economic policies, our justice system, our extractivist practices, and our consumerist mindset/habits. It’s time for a new American Dream, we just need to dare ourselves to Dream Big (and be willing to challenge institutionalized cultural “truths”). I think that’s going to happen in 2019 — I genuinely do — and I’ll be posting my thoughts on that here before year’s end…
Thank you so much, Diana, for imparting some of your wisdom and sensitivity to these discussions. Your time and friendship, which you give so willingly and generously, is very much appreciated.
Sean
I’m a hopeful cynic too. 🙂 I have high hopes that we are not a lost cause.
I’m coming around to the idea that cynical idealism isn’t the worst philosophy one can espouse. I think the difference between us and the Trumpublicans is that they’re not cynics — they’re balls-out nihilists. They want to see our American project burned to the ground. Our side is certainly frustrated by the hacking of our democracy by special interests, but we nevertheless want to reform those institutional instruments to continue building a more perfect union… despite the doubts we harbor that we’ll actually succeed (which kind of goes to the theme of this post).
A fellow environmentalist recently said something interesting to me: He thinks the reason the Trumpublicans shift immediately into aggression and/or anger when confronted with issues like income inequality, climate change, racial profiling — any of those hot-button political topics — is because buried somewhere in their secret heart, they hate themselves for selling out to an opportunistic, amoral pig like Trump. They know he conned them, but they don’t want to admit they got fooled. So they spring to anger when challenged — they’re utterly incapable of engaging in meaningful intellectual debate on any of this stuff — and they clutch ever-tighter to their nihilistic worldview. Oddly, they already view civilized society as a “lost cause,” and are now obstructing our best efforts to prove otherwise.
Will we prevail? I don’t know — see the penultimate paragraph of the essay above for the odds on that. But it sure as hell is worth trying. Nihilism is anathema to our great projects of democracy and civilization, and I for one can’t wait till we’re past this very dark period in American history. But I ain’t sittin’ on my hands waiting it out, either, and I hope my fellow cynical idealists are doing likewise.
Best advice I ever got: Get that manuscript out there! Your book sounds super-interesting–are there any publishers out your way who accept unsolicited manuscripts?
Thanks, mydangblog! Yes, I am aggressively querying/pitching literary agents, both in person in New York (last August) and via e-mail (ongoing). I am not at all shy about pitching my projects or sending materials because it’s a process I’ve been through many, many times as a screenwriter: When you write a spec script, your agents typically “go wide” with it, meaning they send it simultaneously (usually on a Friday for what’s known as a “weekend read”) to all the buyers in the marketplace (studios and prodcos) in an attempt to get some heat on it and get it sold. On Monday your agent calls you with the first round of passes, then more on Tuesday, until the last of the passes trickle in by week’s end. So, I fully understand that the way to get your material sold is to cast as wide a net as possible, expect a lot of passes, and hope for maybe a nibble or two that turns into a bite! That’s what I’m doing now in the search for a literary agent.
One of the great challenges of trying to find Hollywood representation — hence the reason it took me half a dozen years after arriving in L.A. — is that very few (if any) agencies/management companies will accept unsolicited submissions; it’s all referral-based. You need someone with clout to vouch for you. In the world of publishing, conversely, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many literary agents are actually open to blind e-mail queries! But, I’m discovering, just because they accept them doesn’t mean they ever actually get to them! I’m sure the lion’s share go on a low-priority to-do list before getting buried under a pile of incoming unsolicited manuscripts until they’re eventually forgotten about altogether.
But I never get discouraged by a “pass” (either a formally issued rejection letter or rejection by “no response”), because I want someone who absolutely loves my work, prioritizes it, and wants to be in business with me. I’ve had agents who openly hated my creative sensibilities and clearly didn’t like me personally (why they signed me, then, is anyone’s guess) and I refuse to put myself through that ever again. It’s pure misery and it’s counterproductive — even destructive — to a writer’s career. The only thing worse for a writer than no representation is the wrong representation, one of those “life lessons learned the hard way” I alluded to in the essay above. So the right champion for me is either out there or isn’t; I’ll either find them or I won’t. I can live with either outcome, because I’d rather have no advocate in my corner than the wrong advocate. If anything, a writer — whether he’s repped or not — has to learn to always be his own best, most vocal, most supportive champion.
I think things are very different in Canada, where it’s not necessary to have an agent–you can just send your work straight to a lot of publishers–not the huge ones, but there are a lot of independent ones like mine who are great and will read your first few chapters and then ask for the rest. But I really hope you find an awesome agent–you deserve it!
Very kind of you to say! There are several smaller/indie publishers here in the United States that also don’t require an agent to act as an intermediary — they’ll review submissions straight from the author and publish the manuscript if they like it! That’s an avenue I am also actively pursuing, and, truth be told, might even be a better fit for my project than the Big Five, given that it’s something of an unusual genre hybrid: It’s a zombie thriller (which, let’s face it, is a niche subgenre unto itself) crossed with a gritty policier — imagine, if you will, a grindhouse treatment of David Simon’s The Wire.
It’s certainly commercial — I nearly got it set up as a feature film in 2011 with Ice Cube aboard to star — but it’s going to require a publisher who gets its particular aesthetic ambitions as a literary crossover/horror novel, and knows how to market to that readership. That’s who I want to find, and if they’re not out there, then they’re not out there; better to accept that than sign with the wrong partners. But I think they are out there, and I’m turning over every stone to find them. Again: If you accept failure is the likely outcome, you neutralize the fear of failing and empower yourself to go for broke.
Maybe not failing. Maybe you just needed to readjust the lens, look not through a straw where you see such a tiny piece but from a mountain. What I thought was ‘success’ in my 20’s sure isn’t. My definition is totally different.
Excellent essay, Sean. You really got me thinking.
Thank you, Jacqui. As always, the feedback I’ve received has compelled me to think deeper about the issue at hand — the very aspect of blogging I find most rewarding! We do (necessarily) reconfigure our perception of success as we age, as we both succeed and fail and attain a fuller sense of what those life-shaping experiences mean. (I guess they call that wisdom, and it does come at a price!)
For me, the great psychological benefit of surviving repeated failure is that it neutralizes the very fear of failing, freeing us to try and try again. And it’s in the trying, really, that life occurs: the human connections we make, the wisdom we attain, the very meaning we extract from our experiences and existence — all of that happens in the midst of our endeavors, not at the conclusion of them. So, for me, rather than serving as a detriment to venture, failure acts as a strange sort of catalyst for it.
Lots of points to reply to here, so I’m going to jump around a bit…
I used to go to Dodger games as a kid. Sat in the cheap seats and ate hot dogs. I can even recall some of the names–Steve Garvey, Ron Cey, Tommy LaSorda, and even the radio guy–Vin Scully. It still sparks a fond memory, enough that I passively rooted for them–not enough to actually turn on the TV, but enough to regret their loss.
Loss is…not that big a deal. Loss is normal. In part, it’s just a mind set. The Dodgers won a lot of games. They were an outstanding team. They didn’t win the final contest. In my mind, that makes them still really good. Not being able to relate to other sports fans that way is one of the reasons I don’t watch games any more. It’s not fun. It’s not about a great play. It’s just about racking up another win–or not.
I think the important thing is to celebrate small victories. Our lives will contain many more of these than the huge, noteworthy ones. YMMV, of course, that’s just how I see things. 🙂
Cathleen,
Happy New Year! Apologies for taking so long to reply to your thoughtful comment; I left town for the holidays the very day you posted it, and haven’t had time before now to give it the proper response it deserved. Hope your Christmas was a joyous one.
I second everything you’ve stated above. For me, Dodgers baseball gave me something I’d been sorely lacking: a hobby — that is to say, something I care about that’s nonetheless relatively low-stakes. I am fortunate to have several passions — like my writing and activism — but those things aren’t relaxing; they don’t quiet my mind — they engage it. A good Dodgers game gets me out of my own head for a while, and, as the old Tin Pan Alley tune goes, if they don’t win it’s a shame… but it’s not anything I lose sleep over, ya know? I’m just happy to come back the next day and hope for the best once again. Dodgers baseball — whether I watch it on TV or from the stands — has become, for me, perhaps the last safe haven from the pressures and problems of the outside world: For the duration of a game, I am insulated from the angst of my personal, professional, and philanthropic pursuits (to say nothing of the anxieties produced by external high-stakes geopolitical affairs over which I have no control).
Recently on this blog, I’ve been admittedly critical of those who retreat from reality — particularly through the embracing of (and obsessing over) “shared superheroic universes” — but it is worth noting that limited doses of escapism are therapeutically invaluable. (Our culture simply indulges in too much “entertainment therapy,” but that’s a discussion for another day.) My wish to all my fellow writers — those gifted/cursed with internalizing all the chaotic shit that happens around them so they might transmute it into art, something with meaning and value and beauty — is a recreational interest/outlet that offers them an occasional reprieve from their own acute sensitivity. I didn’t realize how badly I needed one until, quite accidentally, I found it.
Thanks for being such a faithful friend of the blog throughout the year, Cathleen. I wish you nothing but personal and creative prosperity in 2019 — and fun, too. Don’t forget to have fun. In the midst of all my impassioned polemics, lightheartedness is a virtue I need to more actively practice and promote in the months ahead…
Sean
I have too much to say about all of this … to actually say it. But I’ll say some.
Going for the “big dream” is an inherently privileged problem. Mothers in war- and famine-ravaged countries, on the march daily and deciding which child to leave by the side of the road to die because they can’t carry both any longer, never wonder if they’ll make it big. They don’t even fret about which college they’ll get into.
It’s all relative.
I have unlimited clean water, a temperature-controlled home and car, and more food than I need. And I live simply. Am I a success? It depends whom you’re asking. I look stinking rich to much of the world’s population, a king.
And yet we pursue. And that’s good.
As a lifelong mentor, I’ve seen some kids I invested years and tears into wind up with life sentences. Or dead.
As a singer/songwriter, I’ve toed up to the cliff of “almost” with wings poised to soar countless times—only to have “the other people” responsible for that one thing drop the ball and lose the opportunity. I’m talking Whitney Houston sized opportunity (literally).
As a writer, both blogger and author, it’s a constant struggle even to get people who read and love my work to share it or write a review. Or, as is presently the case, getting good momentum on a book—only to have my health robbed for months and knock me off course.
As a speaker, I see mediocre presenters brought in all the time, paid thousands, while the same people will exclaim to me, “We love you! You’re so much better and more interesting than the usual people we bring in. But you don’t have a huge social media following to back the dollars yet…”
The “almosts” hurt. I’ve gotten (and still, at times, get) emotional over some of them, when I remember that kid or hear that song from back then. But I realized that I don’t do what I do in order to “get big” or to receive validation. I do what I do because it’s in me to do it. And that has been enough to keep me doing it so far.
A beautifully, perfectly expressed sentiment, Erik — an essay unto itself, really! Thanks for taking the time to share all that.
You know, a few years ago, I started working with a physical trainer, who was not only a cool guy, but he was actually a great teacher (a rare skill in its own right). Here we were, at my local sports club, with me trying — at forty — to get myself into the kind of shape I’d never in my life known, surrounded by some of the most beautiful and fit people in the country. (This is Los Angeles, after all!) And I’ll never forget the advice he gave me: “The only person you should compare yourself to… is yourself.”
Meaning: Don’t compare your physique with the guy at the next station; compare it instead with the pictures you took of yourself in front of the bathroom mirror last month. Don’t compare the weight load you can lift with the one he’s lifting; compare it instead with what you recorded lifting last time, and the time before that. You set goals for yourself — be it losing weight, gaining muscle, bench-pressing ten more pounds at the same number of reps, going down an extra belt notch, whatever — and you work toward meeting those goals. When you do, you congratulate yourself.
I try to carry that philosophy over into other areas of my life, as well. I try not to compare my career with that of my colleagues, or my personal goalposts — like, for instance, home ownership — with where my peers are on that same trajectory. You know? I just try to set goals for myself — which includes defined endgames and deadlines — and then put my energy into achieving them, rather than measuring my progress against external (and irrelevant) metrics. In doing so, I define for myself what success is, and then hold myself accountable for my progress. It’s a cliché to say it, but validation comes from within.
Looking left or right (e.g., “Well, I’m doing more than that bum” … or … “Why aren’t I doing as much as that superstar?”) never lands in a good place. As you and MJ put it, “I’m starting [and continuing] with the man in the mirror.”
Exactly — looking left or right is a surefire recipe for defeat. Look ahead. Look within. The ultimate authority we are all answerable to, after all, is that man in the mirror.