There is No They

I currently have a lot of projects going on, and I sometimes get discouraged with the bigger ones (especially the feature film I'm planning to shoot next fall). Mostly this is due to outside pressure, real or imagined, about what I should realistically be spending my time on.

But here's the thing, I WANT to make a movie. For as long as I've wanted to be a writer, I've also wanted to make movies. I'm a storyteller, and that transcends medium. I have some stories that work well as novels (or novellas), and I have some that would work better as films. That's just the nature of my imagination.

And for a very long time, I let people tell me that it was all just a pipe dream. That I shouldn't waste my time on it, and I shouldn't get my hopes up, and I should "get a real job" (which I did, for awhile). I pushed aside my dream of writing for a living, of writing novels, and of making movies. I turned to more practical things. And I was very unhappy because of it.

Then, something happened: I started making money blogging. Then I started making a full-time living at it. I took the knowledge I'd gathered in my "real jobs" (mostly the parts I liked about my "real jobs") and wrote about it. And people paid me to do so.

I wrote some novels during this time, too, and thought I'd follow the traditional publishing route and spend years waiting for someone else to tell me that I was good enough. And then I started looking at some other authors who were going it alone, and self-publishing their books. And I gave it a try. I'm not super-successful at it yet, but I'm making progress. I'd say that as my backlist grows and I keep putting more time and effort into it, I should get to the point where my fiction makes up the bulk of my income.

And yet I still let people tell me that making a movie wasn't within my reach. That even if I could manage to make the thing, no one would ever watch it. It would slip into oblivion. I'd never be able to get talented people to participate unless I could somehow raise millions of dollars (and that I'd never be able to do such a thing without a track record). I believed them. I set aside my dream and figured that someday I'd just be happy if someone else wanted to turn my stories into movies. But even that was a long shot according to "them".

See, a lot of this comes from the fact that as a teenager, I had very big ideas. I was going to change the world. I was going to be famous. I was going to do something so incredibly awesome that everyone would take notice. And time and again I wasn't taken seriously. It's not that I necessarily had anyone telling me outright that I couldn't succeed. I just had a lot of people who scoffed at what I wanted to do and then stressed the need for a "backup plan". Everyone told me to go into business. Or to do something with a more "guaranteed" success rate. Basically, not to take chances. I rebelled by finding something creative that was still business-like: I got into design (which I enjoy, but not as much as I enjoy some other creative pursuits).

But you know what? I'm an adult now. No one has the right to tell me what I am or am not capable of doing. Of achieving. (Not that anyone had the right to tell me that as a teenager, I just didn't realize it then.) If I set my mind to something, I can achieve it. I've proved that to myself time and again, in all sorts of different avenues. I just have to make sure that "they" don't talk me out of it again.

And on that note, I wanted to share this video of Quentin Tarantino talking about how there is no "they". I feel like I should watch this video every single day. Every creative person should. Everyone who's ever wanted to do something and let someone else talk them out of it should watch this. Also, it's not exactly safe for work due to some of the content, but it is well worth watching.