Living the NBA Dream

We all know the stories of how this actor or that actress became an overnight success. How Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his free time at Harvard. How some people just figure out or get it figured out for them very quickly. That has not now nor ever happened to me.

I went to college to be a journalist. Well, really, I didn't know what I wanted to be but I knew I loved to write. Well, I take that back. I didn't know I loved it. I just did it. It was part of who I was. Since before I can remember, I have been filling notebooks with words. Long rambling stories. Short, not very good poems. And then in college I started writing nonfiction. I took a personal writing course where we wrote about ourselves. That led to me being published, for the first time ever, in a real newspaper. Not a college paper, a paper that you buy on the street out of the box for fifty cents. Then I took assignments for the college paper and started back in with the fiction classes, this time more disciplined and purposeful. By the time I left college I had part of a screenplay typed out and half of a novel. The screenplay I would go on to finish, the novel, not so much.

Then I took a few years to move through life. I gathered experiences, both good and bad, so I'd have something to write about though I wasn't aware of this at the time. I went to grad school and started teaching. I wrote professionally for newspapers and magazines. I moved to Mexico, er Arizona, and then to Los Angeles. I finished that first screenplay and got some positive feedback and then even more negative feedback. Then I wrote two movies in less than ten months. The spark had taken hold, the fire was lit. There was no turning back now.

It's been almost eighteen years since I graduated from high school and started seriously studying writing and seriously putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard. Eighteen years. And many people ask, what do I have to show for it?

Well.

Um.

Yeah.

When I first moved to L.A. I heard someone say in a class or lecture that becoming a screenwriter is like becoming a professional basketball player. There are only so many spots, it's really freaking hard to get a tryout and then you have to fight to stay on the team, much less on top. That analogy stayed with me. I want to play in the NBA and a day of my life hasn't gone by in four and a half years that I haven't thought about it, planned for it, dreamed about it, worked for it, prayed for it, and knew somewhere inside of me that I just wasn't cut out for it. Some days the positive side wins, other days it doesn't.

There have been moments of hope. When someone reads my work and talks to me about it, tells me she likes it or it's funny. When I make an industry contact or feel like I've written a good query letter. When I get replied to or retweeted by someone I consider famous on Twitter (yes, to me, an executive producer on Community is famous). When I come up with a really good story idea (looking at you female baseball team owner script) or finish a spec script that I'm particularly proud of (looking at you Modern Family and Big Bang specs).

There have also been moments of utter sadness and despair. These are experienced mostly by myself, or Angela or occasionally my parents and writers' group. This is not the face I want to put out there to the world or Facebook. You will never see me write a status update talking about how much my life sucks. Because it doesn't. Yes, I have written bad scripts (see first script ever written) and have bad ideas (construction worker who inherits family wedding planning business, you might have been one of them - the jury's still out). But guess what? Those are so 'first world problems'. For almost five years I have been writing. That is my job. To be a writer. Just like those NBA-wannabes who spend their days shooting free throws and doing layups. My job is to practice. Practice practice practice. And I do.

I've met many self-proclaimed writers in Los Angeles who don't have a finished script to show me or even talk about. That baffles me. Or when people say they've written a script. As in one. One single script. I just don't get it. Time and time again I hear screenwriters say they wrote ten or twenty scripts before they hit it. And I believe them. I believe them when they say they've written fifty drafts of the same TV pilot. Why do I believe them? Because that's what I've done. That's what I'm doing. I have a solid portfolio of nine scripts at the moment. Nine. Yes. Nine. Nine scripts I would be comfortable handing to anyone who asked to see them. Friends. Showrunners. Directors. Producers.

And so that is how, when my friend Sonora told me this winter that she was looking to produce a sitcom pilot next year, I got the job. Yes, it's true, we're friends. But we've also worked together when I was a Production Assistant (PA) on her webseries last year. And when she asked to see samples of my writing before she even brought up the sitcom venture, I emailed her my entire portfolio. I showed her what I could do, I didn't just tell her.

So that's my big, little, medium-sized, whatever you want to call it, announcement. I am writing (well, I am making notes at the moment, the writing will happen soon) a sitcom that is on track to be produced. And no, I don't want to make a mountain out of a molehill. There are no contracts, there are no sure things here, there usually aren't in this city. But there are plans and hopes and dreams. There is the real possibility that in a year's time, my words will come out of the mouth's of actors on a soundstage somewhere in this city. And to me? That is freaking unbelievable. Truly.

Tuesday I was driving north toward my house, about two blocks away from home, with a car full of groceries. I was thinking about the meeting Sonora and I had had two hours earlier when I saw it. The Hollywood sign. I see it almost every day from a distance but the luster has worn off. When I first moved here it was exciting and now it's become common. But Tuesday, when I turned onto my cul-de-sac, I almost had to pull over the car. I was just smiling, staring at the sign and thinking, well, this wasn't the plan but it'll do. It'll do just fine.

What was the plan? Sell a movie right away. Get a Nicholls Fellowship and write the next masterpiece. Then it was get a staff job on a TV show or become Aaron Sorkin's assistant. Maybe PA on a show or become an assistant director. Honestly? There never was a plan. I'm a writer, I figured I'd make it up as I went. And so far? I guess I'm doing okay. Especially when I think about that soundstage and what's going to happen on it a year from now.