Hoo Boy.
I know that one of the reasons I am on this writing path is that, at certain moments in my development, people offered to take a gamble on my potential – and even if I wasn’t sure I could live up to it, I said yes and threw myself at the challenge. I believe that you need to watch for those moments in life, because there aren’t many of them, and they are the moments that can change everything.
There’s another piece of wisdom I’ve tried to follow in the last few years – screenwriter John August’s precept that the time you quit your day job is the moment when you absolutely, positively, cannot keep working at it and fulfill the creative obligations around you. Speculative work does not count – he’s talking about real, professional responsibilities in the arena where you want to be full-time.
Is it possible to follow both tenets simultaneously? I sure don’t know. I know I’ve gone without steady employment before in my writer’s life – sometimes it’s viable, sometimes it isn’t. The non-viable times have consequences.
The chance has arisen that I’m going to be offered a commission to write a play. A real, full-length play that would definitely be staged in a well-publicized (for the area) world premiere exactly one year from now. I would get paid to do it – not enough to live on between now and then, but certainly more than sandwich money.
This would not be a simple project. There would be travel, research, some very challenging performance elements to which the story would have to be tailored, and a branching structure that could as much as triple the length of the script. The concept is thoroughly, innately theatrical and I absolutely love that, even if the amount of labor that would go into just making the thing hang together is terrifying. If I had total freedom I would say that I needed, at absolute minimum, six months with nothing on my plate to come up with a solid first draft. As it is, they would need something they can start rehearsing and building something like 9 1/2 months from today; and I have a job to wake up for and a novel to finish and screenplays to get out to the marketplace. And, like I said – what they’re likely to offer is not enough to live on for that time, even as lean as I know how to live.
Now – there may be a way to stitch this together, and believe me I will be doing serious stitching, because I want to do this something fierce. A lot will depend on what commission they actually offer. My research into the matter has given me an expected range, and it could pay for a few months’ survival.
Financially speaking, the wisdom would be to hold the job absolutely as long as I can. My instinct as a writer tells me, though, with a hard deadline looming for something I’ve never done before, I should clean my desk of other obligations as soon as I can. The longer I hold the job, the bigger the gun I will be under to pull this off when I finally leave. And once the play’s over with – what? Will there still be a job for me? Will something else have opened up?
So much that is unknown – but I can’t let that frighten me. I know how rare a moment like this is.
That opportunity comes not through open competition, but because of a personal connection of mine. It’s not that they have nothing upon which to base their opinion that I can do the work, but I also didn’t exactly have to beat out the masses. The ultimate satisfaction for me has always been to have the work speak utterly for itself – no personal bias, no author’s note, just another clump of words pulled off the stack and studied only on its merits.
Early last month I was building an attack plan for America’s second- and third-tier literary journals with my short stories. I have no connections at all in that world, and the short stories I’ve written have not been exposed to anyone outside a few friends, so this is about as cold and naked as submissions get.
I set that goal aside when I got off on my recent writing streak; but before I did, there was one on-line quarterly that was accepting stories with a particular theme, with a deadline that was about two days away. The story that best suited it was the one I felt was the riskiest, the most esoteric, the most out of my comfort zone, so since it seemed so unlikely it would get published anyway, it would cost me nothing to just take that shot.
Last night, while at a birthday dinner with my family, my phone buzzed – they want the story for their upcoming issue; which is publishing next week. My first-ever submission of fiction, and it connected. I am still trying to fathom that. I gave myself a 5% chance at best after my plan of submitting four or five stories across forty or fifty publications. By that standard, this is simply not a sane result.
I admit I was in a grumpy mood most of the day. I didn’t sleep well, I’m pessimistic about my birthdays, and I was unusually out-of-sync at work. But during the family dinner expedition, my phone buzzed, I saw that e-mail, and suddenly everything was re-oriented in a positive way.
In one week, I will be a published author of fiction. And I did it without networking or nepotism or because I just happened to be around with a pen. Gifted as I am at kicking the pillars out from under my own accomplishments, it’s hard to wreck this one.
I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday present. Although I did get some books and Blu-Rays and an iPod dock after that.