It Gets Better

This year I've seemed to have a love/hate relationship with my aspirations to be a TV writer.

I started writing dance theatre plays in college. I went to NYU for my MFA. I love the theatre. However I am from Los Angeles and I have never been one of those writers to say that I hate television.  I love, love, love TV.  I have been watching syndicated reruns since I was a kid.  I was obsessed with television as a child.  I'm happy that TV has become a destination for good writers and good writing.  I'm into it.  But I've gotten burned out.

I was at this theatre festival this weekend and realized that a lot of my expertise about TV through my work for a production company and work as a producer's assistant for a pilot on USA has served me well.  I'm totally qualified for a development job.  I am qualified to be a producer.  I'm sure that last statement will gain the ire of many an agent, exec or producer.  I haven't even been staffed as a writer on a show yet. . But I've been around enough and have seen enough and have produced my own plays and have worked as an events manager and have worked as a project manager in advertising and have been an office manager and have put my bosses' lives together and I still get calls about jobs where someone needs someone to "put their business together" for little money.  Trust me, I'm qualified to produce. 

But I'm a writer.  And there's that old adage that you tell people how they should treat you.  And for so long I have told people to treat me as someone's right hand.  Let me be clear, I wouldn't trade that experience for anything.  But I'm a writer.  A writer with that sort of experience.  But I'm also a writer with the experience of knowing his craft.  I am a writer who has taught.  I'm a writer who has worked with writers of all levels on developing ideas, from professional level writers to students.  I know my shit. But what I want to do is write.

I say that and I have taken myself out of contention for pilot season this year.  Not for lack of drive.  But because I refused this year to get caught up in the paranoia.  I decided to exercise my choice.  I choose not to freak out by reading all of the pilots and figuring out how to get to certain showrunners.  I have chosen not to try to write the perfect spec for the one show I want to write on.  I have chosen to write.  Plays.  I had a meeting with an agent friend almost three months ago where he told me to take my pilot idea and write it as a play.  And I followed that great idea.  I now have a play reading two weeks from today for a play that I have spent the past three months writing.  I am now embarking on my fourth draft.  I plan to have the fifth draft read. 

I became a member of The Playwrights Union about a year ago, after seeing their Festival of New Play Readings.  And now I'm presenting in that very same festival.  I liked that there are a group of like minded individuals in Los Angeles who are writing plays.  Good plays.  Plays of merit.  Not just plays to get TV jobs, although we advertise ourselves as writers working in theatre, film and TV, so we would NEVER turn down an opportunity.  But we're writing plays that we want to write and the rest of the world can figure out what to make of them or what they want to do with them. 

I have a community which has supported me and given me a framework to write this new play. I met with my agent friend in early February, right before the PU was about to start its Playwriting Challenge to write a play in a month.  Then a month later we read these fresh plays together over a weekend.  Then we were given two months to rewrite, polish them up and get ready for the public reading festival.  I learned in that first reading that I wasn't writing the play I wanted to write.  It's not that I decided to write a different play with different characters and a different story all together.  I thought my play was about one thing when it was about something else that also encompassed this one thing.  I had an Oprah "a-ha" moment.  Then I wrote the next draft of the play in four days.  I sent it to my wing man Larry.  He had some thoughts.  Then I sat down to do the next draft.  I probably had 3/4 of a third draft in that next week.  Then I went to Portland to see my brother and his family.  Then I had a party to attend to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Wieden + Kennedy, a fantastic ad agency I used to work for.  While I was in Portland I found out that they wanted to put my father in hospice at a facility.  That began a three week journey of dealing with my father's health issues in a more focused way than we had in the past 9 months.  I had to monitor my father's time in that facility.  Then we had to find somewhere else for him to be.  We decided he would come home.  But in order to do that, we had to find him a night time caregiver to stay with him while my Mom was at work. 

Two weeks ago we began the process of getting him ready to come home.  That included a six hour intake at home with the hospice intake nurse.  That included setting him up with a hospital bed, a walker, a wheelchair, an oxygen tank, a machine that would help his breathing with the use of Albuterol, a shower chair, hand rails in the shower and many more things too numerous to mention.  Then the hospice workers started showing up.  The regular nurse came for a visit.  My brother and his family came to town to see my Dad and to help start the process of dealing with my parents financials.  Then our nighttime worker started. 

The idea of finishing this play in time to use it as a sample for staffing started to drift away.  And helping get my father on his feet and to transition him into a life that would make him comfortable for the time we have left with him (which by the way could be several years still) took its place.  I have spent the past month feeling angry and resentful in private, while being helpful and supportive with my family.  Then my best friend Alanna said something important:

"It will do nothing but make you better."

We both realized how selfish that could sound.  But you can't come through an experience like this, facing your father's mortality and what you have to do in the face and in the aftermath of it, without having been changed and made better.  Life experience just makes you better as a writer.  When I applied to grad schools I had four years in which I had moved to Portland not knowing anyone, made a life there, worked for W+K, then moved to NYC.  I had been writing but not as actively as I did in school.  But when I sat down to write that play that got me into NYU and got me a scholarship, I was a better writer.  Not because of studying or even writing.  But because of living.

So even though I wanted to finish the last 10% of the play over this past month, I had to live my life and deal with what was in front of me.  I had to let it make me better.  And I finished it.  And I am going to read the 90 page play I have in front of me as soon as I finish this blog entry. 

I'll let you know if it made me better.  But I do know that I'm ready to write the next play and that play will be better.  And I'm getting ready to write a new sample to try and get into these writing fellowship programs.  After that I can pull up my list of pilot ideas that I wrote at the beginning of the year and pick one of those up.  Then when I'm done with that I can pull out my list of new play notes that I keep.  I can pull out an old play out of a drawer.  I can direct again.  I can go up to SCU and work with students.  All of this will make be better. 

The Drummer also said something months ago about teaching that echos what Alanna said:

"Teaching will make you better at what you do."

So I should be a ridiculously better writer than I was a year ago when I was pitching ideas for a proposed Season One of our show to my bosses.  But that also made be better as a writer.  Those ideas were even better than ones I had pitched year after year to my managers when I was working for them, working crazy long hours and squeezing in time to write at night, while also dealing with a dysfunctional relationship I was in for five years.  But even that made me better.  And when I rewind everything that has happened since I was in grad school, all of those things made me better. 

I have been writing all of this time, here and there, very productively whenever I had the time.  Now I have the time and I'm using that time.  I need a respite from my Father's health issues.  I need a break from figuring out what pills he should be taking and what he should have for lunch.  I have an incredibly supportive and talented boyfriend who understands the need for space and who needs his own space.  We both don't like being crowded and smothered...unless we're in bed together pretzeled up.  Then we like being smothered. 

So I might not be a contender at this moment.  But that doesn't mean that I won't be a contender soon and shortly.  I'm pouring everything I'm going through into my work.  That's when I'm at my best.  And right now, my cup runneth over.