If there’s one thing people know about me, it’s that I’m a writer. This goes all the way back to the fifth grade when I wrote my first short story, a Top Gun fan fiction. I showed it to my dad, and he had notes. Everyone’s a critic.
I have over thirty novels to my name, as well as countless short stories, a well-curated folder of most of my essays and blog entries, as well as a memoir and whatever the fuck “Three Stories in One” is supposed to be. Between “Three Stories in One” and my school newspaper column, writing made me a celebrity in high school. I went to college to learn to write. I moved to New York to become a writer, and while I didn’t become published, I certainly enjoyed the craft.
My marriage was great for me as a writer because she had an idea for a novel (I’d only written short stories so far), she got a lead on a contest I ultimately did pretty well in, and she bullied me into submitting my work. Ten short stories were published in various anthologies, but I got over sixty rejections on a novel I wrote by accident while she was in Namibia.
That basically stopped me from writing until seven years ago, when I entered another season of the contest and decided that I was going to write a novel. I did. And then I wrote the next one. I wrote the novels to write them, and I wasn’t going to kill my self-esteem with dozens more rejection letters. I tried again, submitting my best novel so far, but after thirty-plus rejections, I gave up.
Years later, I saw an ad for a writing service. Among the their many offerings is help (from agents and editors) with writing your query letters and synopses, copyediting for your samples, and help finding the agents and publishers your work is the best match for. I purchased all of these. They found me five agents and five publishers because I didn’t want more than ten rejections. I got nine. The tenth should be publishing me in a few months.
If there’s two things about me that people know, it’s that I’m a writer and a Doctor Who fan from way back. I grew up with Classic Who, where the effects were cheap (but very imaginative), the acting was not Method, and the serials were always one or two episodes too long. Then it got cancelled, and seven years later, there was a movie with flashy effects and motorcycle chases. When that went over like a fart in a car, they rebooted the series nine years later, and it runs to this very day.
I’ve loyally watched all of NuWho (or Who Redux) as they have gone from Doctor to Doctor and showrunner to showrunner. Prior to last year, the latter was Chris Chibnall. It did not go over well. It started going badly before his era even began because the Doctor was going to be played by an icky girl. I defended Chris Chibnall from the Doctor-Who-not-Nurse-Who/Go-Woke-go-broke contingent who were complaining about the writing so they could mask their sexism. However, I wasn’t enjoying the show anymore. When it wasn’t completely forgettable, the mythos was being torn down, and the character was being stripped of everything I loved about them. The problem was indeed the writing. As a writer, I’m not happy to say this.
When a project goes wrong, especially on TV, it’s almost always the writers. And considering how much people complain about the writing, it’s no wonder the studios want to use AIs to do it.
But movie and TV writing is not an art, it’s a science. In a movie, you must, by around page 55, have some kind of conflict. And the audience is so trained to expect this that The Avengers dragged a little in the middle because the epic fight on the Helicarrier took place on page 70. If characters don’t hit their beats like they’re supposed to, people can’t handle it. Look at the reaction to The Last Jedi. I tried writing a pilot, but I couldn’t make it fit into five acts.
Movies have endless script doctors fine-tuning every little thing. A sitcom will have rooms full of writers, fine-tuning every single joke. Producers and studios give their input. Actors love to give their input too, sometimes rewriting their lines. A producer (or a comic book editor) will have an idea, and they’ll make a writer make it happen. The writers everyone is complaining about are a committee, about as far from the process of writing I enjoy.
Don’t get me wrong—I love a good collaboration. Some of my favorite memories are sitting in Shane’s studio, bouncing ideas off of each other and creating a screenplay and a lost screenplay. But that’s not what happens. In movie and TV writing, someone is always reading over your shoulder and telling you they can do it better, unless you’re Neil Gaiman.
I used to want to be Joss Whedon (before we found out he was a violent creep) because he had made a brand for himself. He had fans who would watch anything he wrote, even Dollhouse. They picked apart his mythology, they obsessively watched for Easter eggs. I wish someone would do that to my stuff. Yeah, it would be great to have fans. I wish my other twenty-nine novels had readers.
On the other hand, I sit here in my cozy apartment with my swiftly growing cat, living my life with (mostly) peace and contentment. How miserable would I be if I were a professional writer?
If I were a novelist, I would still need a job because authors get paid shit (there’s a finite amount of money for authors, and it’s all going to JK Rowling). If I were a TV writer, I’d have to hustle just to make minimum wage while the studios figured out ways not to pay me, and I’d have to share my inspiration with a crowd and a belligerent showrunner. If I were a movie writer, the screenplay I poured my life into is going to be ripped up and reassembled, so I won’t recognize it.
The Princess Bride is a classic because of the performances and the art direction and costuming and sets, all brought together by Ron Howard, but every single quirk, every single quotable line came from William Goldman. You can’t have a movie, TV show, or comic book without the writing (though the founders of Image Comics gave it their best shot), but people don’t notice unless it’s bad.
I’m living my best life right now. I’m not famous, and maybe that’s okay. I used to feel like I was supposed to have a bestseller for my twentieth high school reunion, but I don’t want to hand over parts of my soul to people who have no respect for me. I’m a writer. I write. And that’s good enough for me.
