My 17yo is starting to look seriously at colleges, and this weekend he attended an overnight visit event at Asbury University, which is his current top choice and only about 45 minutes from our house. He wants to study media production, and Asbury has a very well respected program. This weekend's visit was aimed at students interested in the media program and was capped off by the college's film festival on Saturday night. For the film festival weekend, there were judges and other visitors from the film industry on campus, giving talks and meeting with students and prospective students.
I stayed for the first talk before heading home, and I was pleasantly surprised that I took a lot a way from it as a writer. Asbury is a Christian university and the talk was aimed at that audience, titled "What every Christian needs to know before going to Hollywood". The speakers, a movie composer and a producer who are married to each other, emphasized that by "Hollywood" they really meant the entertainment industry in general, which is global, and that the principles would apply wherever the students ended up.
I was pleasantly surprised to realize that a whole lot of the advice applies to the creative life in general, including writing, and not just to moviemaking. It was also a good reminder that my son, who is severely dyslexic and doesn't read for pleasure (he can read, but it's a lot of work for him and he only reads when he needs the information) isn't quite as different from me as it would seem on the surface. At the core, he wants to build a life as a storyteller, just as I'm trying to do.
I won't share any of the specifically Christian advice on this general interest blog, but I thought some of the advice would apply to people of other faiths and no faith. Those points are as follows:
1. The importance of community. I've posted here about finding my writing community. Writing is most often a solitary occupation. When you're in the query trenches or agented but on submission to editors, it is also most often an incredibly discouraging occupation. If you have someone to share both your joys and your sorrows with, it's significantly more bearable.
2. Don't go into writing (they said filmmaking, but the principle is the same) because you want to be rich and famous. Go into it because you love to tell stories. That's what I try to keep in mind as I write story after story that no agents want to pick up so far. Yes, I want to see them on shelves and I hope to someday make some money from them, but it's unlikely that I'll get rich from it, which is okay. What I want to do is to tell stories that will both entertain and impact readers.
3. Show interest in other people in the industry. Don't always think about only yourself and what will benefit you. This may in the end open doors for you. I'm not sure if the "opening doors" part is quite as true in publishing, but, along with building a community of writing peers, I do think it's both helpful and important to establish relationships to whatever extent you can with writers ahead of you on the path. At least, they're more likely to read and hype your book if they already know who you are and have had good interactions with you.
4. It takes 10,000 hours of work before you become an expert in something. It may not take exactly 10,000 hours to write a novel that's good enough to get published, but in the case of the large majority of writers, it's not your first novel that ends up being your debut novel. Even if you do sell your first novel, the version that sits on shelves will go through sometimes significant edits and take a lot of work. Even established writers often say that they look back on their early published books and see all that they still had to learn. I can look back at my first three books and, even though I love the stories and hope to someday edit/rewrite them into books worthy of publication, I can see the things I still had to learn and the ways they're lacking. Not that my fourth book is perfect, but it's much better at this stage than the others were at the same stage because of everything I learned from writing them.
I returned to campus for the film festival last night, and I heard something there that was meaningful to me as a writer as well. The chair of the media communication department quoted a filmmaker whose name I immediately forgot (please tell me in the comments if you know who said this), who said "Make visible what, without you, might otherwise never have been seen." That really struck me, because that is half of why I write. First, because I love to tell stories, but second to make the marginalizations I identify with or am very close to, visible. This includes people on the asexual spectrum, girls with ADHD, and the diabetes community. Even if you don't identify with any marginalized group I still think this can apply. You might be making small town life visible, an unusual interest, an experience you've had, or something I haven't even thought of. Everyone has something unique to bring to their writing, and I believe there's a kid out there who could see a character like them in a book for the first time because of the story only you/I can tell.
To end, I'll share some pictures from the festival. I got to meet actor Joel McCreary, who played the prime minister of Genovia in the Princess Diaries as well as posing by statues of Kings Peter and Edmund of Narnia, which are actual set pieces from Prince Caspian movie. The media building as Asbury officially qualifies as a museum because of all the TV and movie artifacts it houses. They're all from projects that Asbury faculty and alumni have worked on.
No comments:
Post a Comment