I read an article today that was a response to an open letter by an employee to their boss about how poor they were with the money they were earning. It was a younger person in their mid twenties who wrote the open letter, and a 30-year-old who wrote the article in response. The article pointed out something that the twenty-something hadn’t quite figured out yet, which was that anything worth having takes a lot of time and effort.
There was more to it than that, but it really boiled down to work ethic. This open letter was purporting itself to be about wage equality, and specifically how hard it is to live in the Bay Area…and those are real issues…but when it came down to the details of who this person was that was actually writing the letter, the more it was clear how little perspective they actually had in terms of “Real Fucking Life.”
There was a lot of talk in the article about struggles, and how hard life can be…and to be honest…I didn’t really connect with that aspect. See…I don’t actually wish struggle upon others. I don’t have to. EVERYBODY struggles. Life takes care of that for us all, we all face adversity at certain times in our lives. It’s something we all have in common. For me, it all comes down to effort. To work ethic. We don’t have to “put in our dues” and scratch and claw our way up from the bottom and then fight every minute to keep what we earn because it’s some punitive system or a bunch of people arbitrarily making life hard because they want to or they can…no, that’s just life. All that effort is what it takes to get what we actually want.
I want to be a good writer, perhaps even a great one. I do, I really do. But I know to get there, I’m going to have to fucking write every single day for the rest of my life and never stop. That’s the ONLY way. Putting in the work, putting in the effort it takes to get what I want.
The real thing that resonated with me in this article was that nothing is ever going to be handed to you. Everything we want, we have to earn.
Unless you’re part of the 1%, and then f*ck you.
I worked today 😛 Got my editing done and then wrote my pages. Act 4 is almost tightened up and done. I reworked some parts of Act 3 today, too, and I’m pretty freaking happy with what’s there now. Finish Act 4 tomorrow…Act 5 hopefully by Friday? Saturday? And then it’s a read-through and some polish here and there…and then submission to a new festival. This one is exciting because I get to send in the FULL script, not just a couple pages and a pitch document. It’s just the script. Pure and simple.
It’s my first, you guys. My first script. I’m damn proud, but I’m also keeping my braggadocio about it at a minimum. It’s the first of many, and it is what it is…it’s a very accurate example of my current skillset as a writer for the screen. And that’s all I ever want ANY of my work to be…a truthful representation of myself as an artist at tha time. Whatever mistakes I make, I’ll work on fixing with the next project.
I will say this, though…I may not think I’m all that…but I am hoping to win one of these contests…
That’s all for tonight. Peace!