Screenwriting : You Know You're A Screenwriter When... by Lee Matthias

From something I wrote elsewhere...

"Kris Young, a teacher at UCLA’s screenwriting program has a nice little piece in the book of screenwriter interviews, TALES FROM THE SCRIPT, Edited by Peter Hanson and Paul Robert Herman, ItBooks, HarperCollins, 2010, pp. 26-31. He talks about something he calls, “Kung Fu Screenwriting.” Based, as he says, on Bruce Lee’s philosophies:

"'...there’s a difference between doing and being. When you venture forth to do screenwriting, like many people do, then the moment you stop, you’re not a screenwriter. But if you move toward the idea of being a writer, then it never leaves you. And I think that’s a higher thing to aspire to – to be a writer. You keep writing not necessarily to sell a script or to get a movie made, but because that is who you are.

"'I look for people who are already self-motivated. People who already have a high level of interest in the subject – they’re really not gonna do anything else. They’re writing before school begins, they’re gonna keep writing when school stops. It’s not something they do, but it’s something they are.'

"Be a writer as opposed to someone who does writing.

"It may sound delusional or pompous as I have had no film of mine ever produced in a complete form, and I have only had options taken on my written work, but... I am a screenwriter. I realized this when I found myself working on yet another screenplay with the full awareness that it was not a movie I expected Hollywood would ever make. And I didn’t care. I had to tell myself this movie.

"I have worked as an agent, sold books to publishers for advances so high that the New York Times, no less, wrote about it as out-agenting the New York agencies. But I have no agent. I have sold scripts to major studios. But none was written by me.

"And now, I find I don’t even care. In fact, I maybe never have cared. It’s about the stories. I have to make these movies even if they never go before a camera. They go before my camera, the one in my head. So I guess I’m nuts, endlessly repeating the same thing and looking for a different result. The stories in my head make me tell them. Substitute “voices” for “stories” in that previous sentence and I meet the definition of insanity; probably without the substitution.

"Comedian, Jeff Foxworthy has made a career with the “You know you’re a redneck when...” jokes. They are a hilarious platform for observations about the culture. Me? I know I’m a screenwriter. I have no choice. It might be said that screenwriting has me.

"I once work-shopped a script at a well-known online website. Readers actually lavished praise on that particular script. It was almost embarrassing. That one won an option on the first and only submission I had ever made with it. Alas, the option lapsed. Why don’t I try again? The subject has become over-saturated lately. But it will come ‘round again someday. [UPDATE: The subject has come around so often that, now, a few years later, I no longer care, so it's here on the site, and I'm pitching it these days.]

"But, now, I have another script. It's here, too. I’ve worked on it off and on for years. I’ve finally gotten it to a submission-ready draft. Problem is, it’s set in Hollywood, based, in part, on my own experiences as a WGA-Signatory agent. Of course, we all know, Hollywood never likes to make movies about Hollywood. Oh, they do them, but rarely. I’ve wrestled with this issue all along during the development, always telling myself that it doesn’t matter, that someone will see it as the really cool caper movie it actually is. But that little devil 'on the left shoulder' just laughs and laughs at such delusions. And then I realized that... no matter, I don’t care. I wanted to tell myself the movie. If nothing else, that drawer has room for one more."