-embrace failure

by -the awesome

most writing is failing. rare and infrequent is the moment when the mind and the page meet in the ether, that most holy of unions, a fusion of mind and spirit, the tantric fuck all writers pray for.

when i sit down to write, i assume i have already failed, or will fail. this takes the pressure off me and allows me to do what i have to do without thinking about pleasing anybody, or how bad the writing is; it's already bad. it already sucks. i'm already a hack.

and all those things are true, until they are not.

most people who start out as aspiring writers write to succeed. everyone wants to know how to market that novel, that screenplay. "i just finished my first script and i'm looking for an agent." well stop looking. throw that manuscript in a drawer and forget about it and then start your next one. that one was just practice. read it in six months and tell me you think you deserved an agent with that, anyway. the "overnight success" stories you hear about hot writers were years in the making. nobody succeeds or lasts because they got lucky. they succeeded and lasted because they got good.

when you write to succeed you are most certainly going to not. because really, what is writing to succeed, anyway? the execution of a concept that's currently been hot in the market? writing a movie just like the one that broke $100mm on opening weekend? therein lies the difference between the hipster and the trendsetter. hipsters get and are into what's hip--the trendsetters knew what was cool before anyone else did. and they never gave so much as a fuck. "nobody knows anything" is the phrase made popular by the pope of screenwriters, william goldman. bill meant a lot of things when he said that but to me he meant that as much as people in hollywood try to tell you, or try to come up with them, there are no such things as "rules" of "what sells". before it became the highest grossing movie in the history of the universe, people were sure "titanic" was going to be a flop.

so write to fail. it sounds nihilistic but really it just means write something that moves and challenges you and only you. even if someone tells you it's pointless. even if someone tells you it's a waste of time because it's a "soft concept" or a "character piece" that "nobody will buy" or "will never get made". screenplays written with passion for the characters and the subject matter often become the most memorable or powerful films you will ever see, against the write-by-numbers fare that hollywood puts out year after year like so many soda cups. off the top of my head, here are a number of "soft concept character pieces" that have played in movie theatres from not-so-long-ago to fairly recently:

american beauty
lost in translation
21 grams
mystic river
the station agent
talk to her
rushmore
y tu mamá también
in america
the royal tenenbaums

the other thing about these kinds of movies is this: an awful lot of them often end up being nominated for the best screenplay oscar. an awful lot of these writers also end up being the most in-demand in town.

if you want to write x-men and aliens vs predator, that's okay too. but you have to want to write them because you're nuts for that kind of thing. you're passionate about that. and because you love big blockbuster movies, not because they're popular and make a lot of money (hey they lose huge amounts of money, too) and they're "marketable". charlie kaufman makes pretty much the same point in his movie, adaptation, when his twin gets the idea for a ridiculous serial killer script that's a hackneyed amalgamation of every clichéd serial killer movie ever made. except of course donald sells it for 750,000 dollars, again proving the old adage, nobody knows anything.

write to fail. forget about the people who'll try to give you lists of "what's in" and "what's out". you know what's the most ridiculous thing? sometimes what's "in" is something that was "out", that a writer took and gave a fresh spin on. most scripts never sell. most writers never make it. the failure rate is staggering. yet everyone who is kicking and clawing outside the magic gate believes themselves the exception. they're different. they're unique. they're special. back in their college days, they somehow always got through with a b+ even without studying. so they believe like the way they have cruised through life, so too will they come out the other end of this tunnel with a six figure sale, a three picture deal, an agent at the Top Five.

and they won't.

but when you have accepted defeat, you don't hold anything back. you are overcome by a desperation that runs deeper than any desperation, and in the maelstrom of this despair, will you find zen. will you find the strength and the constitution to carry on, to sit in that hard chair and churn out page after page of shit. and somewhere in that steaming pile of wood pulp turd, will be your life, your soul, your blood. and it will be magical.