The Three Types of Hollywood Writers
If you want to be a writer, you have to ask yourself: Do you write for the sake of writing? Or do you write so you can wear hipster glasses and tight jeans?
Spoiler: Both answers are wrong. You write so you can get something turned into a sitcom or movie so that your mother can watch it and finally love you.
The Writers' Writer
The first type of writer is the Writers’ Writer. These writers give off a vibe that writing is all they care about. This is just a bullshit method of pretending that even though they are a giant sack of failure by any standards, they are somehow okay with it. The Writers’ Writer will have ten screenplays on every topic from the man who painted the molding in the Taj Mahal to a sequel to Titanic starring Wocka Flocka Flame.
Of course, none of these scripts will be marketable in any way because that would imply that they should try to sell them…and if they can’t, they are a failure.
The Walkie Talkie Writer
The second type of writer is the Walkie Talkie Writer who only writes so he can talk about writing. The Walkie Talkie Writer is perpetually in the middle of a script or novella or theater production. He’s always prowling around the latest Vegan restaurant or underground comedy show looking for someone to produce one of his grand ideas. Unfortunately, if he ever found someone willing to do so, he would not be able to complete a script.
But what about me? And more importantly, what about you? You can waste all your time writing and waste more time trying to network or you can find some shortcuts.
No matter how much we love writing, we do not do it just to have our work sit in a folder on the computer desktop. My goal, our goal, is to maximize output for input. This means: doing the things you like, meeting the people you want to meet, and finding ways to generate meaningful writing opportunities. The amount of work you put in should be directly correlated to the likelihood of success. This can be financial or social success.
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The Grizzly Bear Writer
You must become a third type of writer – the Grizzly Bear Writer. You must spend months hibernating, cultivating and curating ideas, until the right time to emerge from your slumber to maximize the capture of delicious salmon. In this metaphor, the salmon represents producers, which is fitting since they are basically slimy beings writhing up a river of the Hollywood ladder. Does the grizzly bear expend precious body fat on bad hunting strategies every day? Does the grizzly bear spend all his time looking for salmon in the winter? No!
Like a grizzly bear I do not expend energy unless I can see a full path to success. But once a grizzly bear sees an opportunity they will go insane and murder the hell out of that opportunity!
The graph below shows that if Warner Bros hired me, I would write infinity pages.
But Warner Bros has not hired me so instead I write articles on Steemit when I could be writing Rocky 12, Titanic 2: The Re-Reckoning, and Kindergarten Cop 3.