There are a few truths I learned the hard way during my decades of writing for film and television. One of the clearest is deceptively simple: you will spend enormous time trying to figure out the rules and win the game. Looking back, much of that time was wasted chasing what I thought others wanted instead of doing the work that felt like my best self. That is my central regret.
This piece gathers those lessons, the practical habits that saved me from despair, and a few questions that have kept my writing honest. If you write for screens, write for books, or simply want to do meaningful creative work, these ideas are for you.
The Long Game: Decades of Practice Matter More Than Titles
The path to becoming a professional writer often looks like a long, bumpy marathon rather than a sprint. I had about 25 years of paid professional work and another 18 years before that figuring out how to get steady work. That is “40 something” years of showing up to the page.
I figure the most important thing is not how many bylines you have, but how often you choose to do the work. For me, that meant literally working every day — even when I was temping, even when I felt overqualified for jobs I did not want. The daily habit of making stuff, of moving through small increments, compound like interest. They create a stockpile of ideas and a muscle memory for solving story problems.
If you want one practical takeaway: treat the blank page as the most important appointment you keep. Whether you have five minutes or five hours, open it. The blank page is the training ground where you learn to think in story.
Temporary Jobs as Research, Not Failure
Early on I held a string of temporary jobs. Textile companies, a pharmaceutical advertising outfit, all the kinds of day work people imagine creative types doing while they wait for their break.
I hated temping sometimes. I wanted to be a movie writer. But what I learned — and what has kept me from regretting those years — is how rich that experience was as raw material. Working those jobs put me in contact with people and lives I would never have otherwise seen. They trained my eye as an observer.
There is an art to being an observer in a noncreative job. You are not there to change the workplace. You are there to pay the rent and also to collect details. Half-jotted notes, overheard remarks, the rhythm of a certain office’s fluorescent hum — all of those small things eventually feed scenes, characters, and moods.
“You are going to look back on that and that is going to be the fuel for everything you’re going to do once you are not temping anymore.”
That was advice from a director I admired, and he was right. All those odd jobs, the petty humiliations, the small triumphs, form a furnace that powers work later. The key is to treat the day job as a source of material, not as a sentence.
Steal the Stationery: Use Short Windows of Time
When I was temping, I learned a useful hack: always have a blank page with you. Sometimes it was a spiral notebook. Sometimes I would slip a sheet of office stationery into a typewriter. Even 15 minutes between photocopying and filing could be turned into something. That is how you build a stack of beginnings.
The practice here is simple:
- Carry a small notebook or your phone with a notes app. Treat every spare minute as an opportunity to write a line, a thought about a character, or a piece of dialogue.
- Collect fragments — a half-page observation, a list of odd phrases you overheard, a tiny exchange of dialogue. Keep them organized and revisit them weekly.
- Convert fragments into scenes by asking: who is in this moment? What does this moment want? What stands in the way?
Those small stolen moments add up. Over time, the pile of scraps becomes a rough draft, then a real draft, then a script.
Regret: Chasing “They” Instead of Your Best Work
This is the heart of my regret. For many years I spent time trying to figure out “what they wanted” — the studios, the decision-makers, the prevailing trends. When the industry is small and relatively predictable, you can attempt to reverse-engineer the market. But that often leads to making things that are not quite yours.
The danger is two-fold. First, you dilute your voice by tilting toward perceived tastes. Second, those “tastes” are temporary. What seems like the universal hit in your twenties becomes yesterday’s formula in a few years. Trends change every six months now. The supposed rules shift and the list of what sells grows—and shrinks—with the latest fads.
“I spent a lot of time doing what I thought they wanted instead of what I thought was my best and now I wish I hadn’t.”
The cost of chasing other people’s appetites is an internal one: you look back and realize you made a trade. You bought temporary acceptance at the expense of authenticity. When you are older, that trade can feel heavy.
That does not mean you should ignore the marketplace. It means you should balance craft with distribution strategy. Know the market, but make work that feels essential to you. If you are making something that would be your ideal outcome even if it never reached a wide audience, then you are on healthier ground.
Rules, Theories, and the Myth of Universals
There are a lot of “rules” taught in screenwriting classes: three-act structure, plot points, beats, and the forms that promise formulaic success. Many of these “rules” are industry conventions that guide what gets bought. They are useful tools. But they are not universal laws of art.
Consider the three-act structure. It is a practical method used widely because it helps organize pacing and stakes. It is also an inherited convention borrowed from theater. Film did not always have acts; the convention was adopted because people needed something to hang structure on as the medium evolved.
A rule can be both useful and limiting. When you treat a theory as a rigid law, you stop listening to the story. Stories demand different shapes. Look at Shakespeare — his plays do not always conform to the neat formulas taught in contemporary books, yet they remain powerful and alive.
The practical approach is to learn the common structures and master them, then learn to break them. Serve the story first; use structure as a tool, not as a cage.
Art’s Job: To Remind Us of What Matters
One of the quieter reasons I have stayed with art is its power to remind us of our fragility and finite time. Most of us try not to think about mortality, but art makes that awareness palatable. It lets us sit with hard truths within a scene, a line, a portrait of someone losing something.
Art’s value is not purely commercial. It trains attention on things we will not regret at the end. Those things are rarely the same as what makes you most popular or wealthiest. For me, connecting to that narrower, truer set of concerns is what matters.
If your work feels like it is just chasing popularity, consider what you would make for yourself if you had to. The project that haunts you at night, the one you would do even if it failed — that is probably worth exploring.
The Currency of Truth in Fiction
When people say “put truth in your story,” they mean a lot of different things. I prefer a practical definition: truth is the part of your story that feels recognizably human. Even in the most improbable caper or the wildest sci-fi setup, there is an emotional or ethical center that readers and viewers can recognize as true.
To find truth in a made-up story, ask:
- What does the character care about? The care must be specific and deeply felt.
- What is the cost of desire? Stakes should reflect what the character stands to lose emotionally, morally, or physically.
- Which moment in this plot parallels a universal feeling? Loss, betrayal, joy, fear, shame — these are all human currencies.
Truth is not literal accuracy. Fiction is not a documentary. Truth in fiction is emotional veracity — the way a lie in a scene feels like a real human lie, the way anger reads as anger, the way grief maps to a recognizable sequence of thoughts and actions.
“Where is the truth in that made-up story… where is the thing that you feel or that you know that you say, ‘Oh I recognize that emotion’?”
Feeding Your Work: How to Use Your Life Without Becoming a Copy
If temping, day jobs, or life in general supplies the raw material, how do you turn it into creative fuel without merely reproducing other people’s lives verbatim? The answer is transformation: you observe with curiosity, record with precision, and then reshape.
Techniques:
- Detail Inventory: Write five sensory details from a place you were today. What did you smell? What sound kept repeating? Put them in a file labeled “Place Details.”
- Character Capsule: Take one person you noticed and describe them in 150 words. Name three physical ticks, one secret, and one regret.
- Emotion Map: For a moment that moved you — someone’s annoyance, a child’s delight — outline the mental beats that likely led to that emotion. This creates the truth that can be fitted into a fictional arc.
These exercises turn raw observation into tools that make characters breathe.
Balancing Authenticity and Market Sense
You do not have to choose between art and career. The balance is a craft of its own. Here are practical strategies that helped me:
- Make a Portfolio, Not a Perfect Career Map. Instead of shaping everything to a single trend, build a body of work that shows range and voice. A producer can see what you can do from several pieces, not just one opportunistic screenplay.
- Keep a Personal Project. Always have at least one thing you write purely for yourself. It keeps your center of gravity from wandering to what others want.
- Learn Market Language. Be able to describe your work in clear, marketable terms without changing its essence. This helps when pitching without diluting the project.
- Choose Which Rules to Follow. Use structure as a tool. If a story benefits from a classical three-act arc, use it. If the emotion demands an elliptical structure, break it.
You will be tempted to follow the current “universal” of the moment. Remember that universals pass. Build long-term artistic credibility by being true to the ideas that persist in your work.
Practical Daily Habits That Mean Everything
If you want a blueprint for the day-to-day life of a writer, here are the minimalist habits that mattered to me:
- Do the work every day, in some form. Even 500 words or one page of notes counts.
- Protect a block of uninterrupted time for deep work at least several times a week.
- Keep an archive of fragments — character sketches, overheard lines, scene seeds — and revisit them monthly.
- Read widely — not just screenplays. Literature, history, philosophy, and even industry trades inform you differently.
- Practice the blank page. Open it and sit with it until it yields a point. Your tolerance for the blank page increases with practice.
These are not glamorous, but they are the infrastructure. They make the difference between someone who waits for inspiration and someone who produces consistently.
What to Do When Your Name Is on Work You Didn’t Write
There are moments in a career where you must take jobs that are not perfectly aligned with your voice. You may find your byline on work where no line is yours. That can feel corrosive.
I have been there. I also paid bills. Both experiences taught me two things:
- Use financial work as a bridge. If it funds your living, it buys you time for the work that matters.
- Keep a separate file of your authentic projects. Return to them regularly. They are the trunk of your career.
It is understandable to grumble at the compromises. The pragmatic path is to accept compromise without making it the identity of your career.
How to Know When You’re Doing Your Best Work
Your “best” is not a number of awards, a paycheck, or a number of viewers. The clearest test, for me, is whether the work feels like it arose from a place of necessity. Ask yourself:
- Would I do this even without external approval?
- Does it feel honest to my fears and interests?
- Does it surprise me as I create it?
If the answer is yes, you are moving toward something that can sustain you. If the answer is no, consider whether you are writing for someone else’s checklist rather than your inner compass.
Exercises to Reconnect With Authentic Work
If you feel you have been chasing trends or pleasing “they,” here are five exercises to find your authentic voice again.
- Write Your “Disastrous” Script – Choose the idea you have been too afraid to write because it might fail or be unpopular. Draft a short treatment. Allow it to be bad. Failure in private is fuel.
- Truth Audit – Take an existing draft and underline every line that feels like imitation. Rewrite those lines with specifics that tie back to your experiences and emotions.
- The 15-Minute Habit – For one month, write something related to your project for 15 minutes at least five days a week. This short-burst consistency reveals the core of the story.
- Character Memory Map – For your protagonist, map five childhood events that shaped them. Even if those events never appear, they inform behavior and choices.
- Market Translation – Write a one-paragraph pitch of your work that would appeal to buyers. Then write a one-page personal note explaining why you must create it. Keep both. You need both fluency.
Distribution: The New Freedom
One of the fortunate changes of the last decades is the ability to self-release. If you want people to read, see, or hear the work, you do not always need gatekeepers. Platforms and tools allow creators to publish and build audiences independently.
That does not mean everything should be self-released, but it does mean you can treat your personal projects as public experiments. A handful of readers who truly understand your work are better than mass exposure that leaves you anonymous in a sea of content.
When distribution is your strategy, focus on:
- Community over numbers — cultivate readers or viewers who respond and engage.
- Authenticity over polish — polished marketing can help, but the core material needs to be honest.
- Iterative release — put out drafts, gather feedback, improve, repeat.
Stories That Last Are About Human Truth, Not Trends
If anything has mattered across my career, it is that stories survive when they land on human truth. Whether you write a caper movie, a family drama, or a quirky comedy, the emotional core must be recognizable. That feeling of recognition is what animates your work.
Popularity will ebb and flow. There will be moments where what “they want” looks obvious. Build your craft so you can write with both honesty and skill. Learn the rules, but stay ready to break them for the story’s sake.
Final Thought: Make Work Worth Looking Back On
The regret I carry is not about the time spent working. It is about the time spent trying to please. If there is one piece of advice to fold into everything else: do the work that makes you proud even if it fails in public. You will be happier looking back, and you will have built a legacy that is yours.
The rest is endurance. The blank page will greet you tomorrow. Open it.
