Brian Dreger sends me a lot of interesting questions. Here's one…
I've been meaning to ask this for quite some time, and I apologize if it is rude or unprofessional, or something "that is just not done!"
When you're writing things that prevent you from blogging because of a looming deadline, is there some reason why you never — after the fact — mention what it is you've been working on? Is it contractually not allowed? Or for writers is it considered a "jinx move" that might put "the whammy" on the project? Just curious…
I think I have mentioned what I was working on occasionally but I don't do it often. There are a few reasons and the first one that comes to mind is that I think the Internet has too much self-promotion on it with people trying to sell you their current projects. If I have genuine news about something coming out and people are asking me about it, I'll address it here. But really, I like blogging better when I don't feel it's heavily-linked to my current income. I like this to be a place where I get away from that.
Also, writing is for me a very solitary experience and I like to keep it that way. I rarely discuss the content of what I'm writing with friends because I really don't want their input. If I do, I ask for it…but I rarely ask for it.
And I guess the main thing is that a lot of things I write — including some for which I am paid — never come out. I wrote a spec TV pilot which has been optioned twice now and may get a third "buy"…but I don't want to spend the rest of my life answering questions about what's up with it and what happened with it. When it's not an active project for me, I put it out of my mind and I don't want others putting it back in there.
And of course, I have a story. When do I not have a story?
Back in the seventies, a syndicated comic strip artist asked me to write gags for a new newspaper strip he wanted to do. This was in addition to the one he already had running in newspapers across the land. I wrote a batch and he decided I should not only be the sole writer of this new strip he'd conceived but also have my name on it. Well, that was nice. I wrote and he and his assistant drew about eight weeks of it and he sent those weeks to his syndicate, where it got a highly favorable response.
Note that I did not say they agreed to syndicate it. I just said that it got a highly favorable response. They loved the premise and they loved the name…but apparently not enough to immediately draw up a contract.
I was relatively new at the writing game and I made what turned out to be a mistake. I told my father about it and showed him the eight weeks. Perhaps in your life you have had a moment where a parent or someone else close to you way overreacted positively to something you did. When I was about eight, I could do a couple of celebrity impressions that probably weren't even good for a kid that age but my Aunt Dot thought I was ready for The Ed Sullivan Show and inevitable stardom.
Anyway, my father thought the eight weeks of this strip were genius, brilliant, fabulous…insert the synonym of your choice. Any day now, he was sure, newspapers would be axing Charlie Brown and that mutt of his to make room for our new strip, and my father could see my name (our name) every time he opened the L.A. Times.
For at least six months, he asked me every day if I had any news on the strip's certain sale and success. The truth was that the syndicate waffled and balked and at one point, a guy there who'd said "This is perfect just the way it is" sent us a passel of notes, asking us to redo the eight weeks and take out this character and change that character and add a new kind of character.
They wanted to change the whole premise (i.e., the premise they'd loved) and finally, they said the name of the strip — the one they'd loved — "has to go." And there was still no indication that they were serious about actually trying to sell it to client newspapers.
By that time, the cartoonist had decided he really didn't need the hassles of a second strip; not even if his assistant and I did 90% of the work on it. I had plenty of other things to do then so we jointly decided to just drop the project…and no, I will not run any samples here nor I will I divulge the name of the cartoonist. (But it was not Jim Davis. This was more than a decade before I met Jim.)
In the writing game, you have to do that all the time. You work on a lot of different projects. Some go forward, some don't…and sometimes, the ones that don't will disappear for reasons that have nothing to do with the merits of the material. An amazing number of projects vanish because there's some shakeup in a company's hierarchy and the new folks in charge reflexively don't want to go where their predecessors were heading.
You have to just file that one away and work on one of the others you have on your plate. I generally don't find that difficult to do…
…but with that proposed newspaper strip, it was tough. My father kept asking me about it and asking me about it and asking me about it…and I don't mean for weeks. I mean for years. No matter what else I accomplished, no matter how busy I got, he kept telling me, "You've gotta take that strip and send it around to newspapers. I'm sure they'd all start bidding for it!"
My father was a very nice man without a speck of malice, especially towards me. He was giving me what he thought was good advice…and he had his heart set on opening the paper every morning and being reassured that his kid had a job. But he just wouldn't listen to me explaining I was no longer interested in it…or that I didn't own the strip and the guy who did didn't want to pursue it any longer.
I never — well, rarely — made that mistake again. When I teamed up with Dennis Palumbo and we began selling scripts and ideas to television, our first few sales did not get made. We got paid but our scripts were not produced. I didn't tell my parents I was writing for TV until I could also tell them that a show I worked on, which would have my name in the credits, was on TV the following Wednesday. And by a fluke of timing, Dennis and I would get getting our second screen credit on a show that aired the day after. My father was real happy that week.
What I was writing the last few days here which distracted me from blogging was an assignment that may never go the distance. We all work on things like that. I have a friend who has made a very good living writing screenplays for which he is paid handsomely but which, for one reason or another, never get in front of a camera. I think he's done at least twelve of them. He doesn't tell people about them because he doesn't want people to keep asking him about each of them…or thinking he's a failure because for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of what he wrote, they didn't get made. I think that's a very wise way to operate.
