I forgot the most important thing when talking about my script getting rejected yesterday.

It’s really been a harsh blow to my self-confidence.

Not that it should be. It’s not like it not getting picked had anything to do with whether or not it was funny or good enough. It didn’t reflect on my talents as a writer at all.

At most, it reflects on my skill at pitching my own works, and to a certain extent my lack of focus because I forgot to keep my audience strictly in mind when writing and pitching the thing and if I had kept my eyes on the prize, I would have written exactly the kind of pretentious faux-deep script that film school type audiences like.

Instead, I pitched it like I was trying to get funding. Whoops.

And it’s not like my script was singled out as bad. Thirteen other scripts didn’t make the grade either. Beating myself up for not being in the top 4 out of 18 doesn’t make much sense. I really should cut myself some slack.

But this is not a logical thing. It’s emotional. It’s about my tragically low self-esteem and how fragile it makes any degree of belief in myself. It’s about ambition, and wanting something so badly that not getting it is simply unacceptable. It’s about holding myself to a high standard, maybe too high, but I just have to aim for the stars every time.

It’s about learning that wanting it and trying hard is not enough. Nobody gets a fucking “A for Effort”. It’s about learning to truly focus on what I want and not let myself get distracted by bullshit. It’s about learning to let ambition and desire drive me.

It’s about not being so goddamned heavy inside. I really need to lighten up. Go easier on myself, take a more relaxed attitude towards life.

I guess there’s a lot of things I have to let go first.

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Wrote the above while on break at school. Home now.

I think I am recovering from my downer period re : script non-winning okay. I am not sure why I was so sure my script would make it, but I am choosing not to see that as a mistake, Believing in yourself and your work is vital to success in entertainment. If that means enduring a lot of disappointment, so be it.

Beat the hell out of never trying. As long as I keep trying and keep believing in my own talents, there’s a chance I will succeed.

You can’t win if you don’t stay in the game.

I will just have to adapt to disappointment. Historically, I have not handled disappointment very well. It’s always crushed me.

But history is not destiny. I can change, I can learn, I can grow. I can toughen up my hide. My days of total emotional cowardice are over and I am going to start turning into the wind and facing it head on, instead of hiding underground.

I’m telling you, this little blog of mine is like weight training for metaphors.

Another thing I need to improve : I need to stop doing it all myself. If others seem stronger than me, it is because they are spreading the load by relying on others for support.

I don’t think I know how to do that. My trust issues run pretty damned deep. I am very reluctant to ask for anything or express my needs at all. I got in a lot of trouble when I did that as a kid, and that has lead to both fear of trying it and a very low sense of self-worth.

When you make it clear to a kid that they have no right to ever ask for anything and they are not even worth your attention, you get a pretty fucked up kid.

What I could really use right now is for someone to tell me that I am talented and funny and a good writer. It would hasten my recovery considerably.

Today was a decent day of school. Got my series proposal in on time. I enjoyed working on it, as I knew I would, because it involved developing and fleshing out a lot of the details of the series and I love doing that kind of imagination work.

I am becoming increasingly worried about the quality of my education, though. Specifically, I am worried that I am not going to the right place for a TV writing education.

Because I really thought I would be taking all or mostly TV related classes by now. After all, I am in the TV stream now. But half my classes and 2/3 of my courses are about film. I’m not here for film. I want to learn TV.

This struck me today during Producing for Writers class. We are learning a ton about the film business in it, and that’s pretty cool, I guess. And I am sure some of it also applies to TV production. But I am not looking to become a TV producer.

I want to be a TV writer.

I am increasingly convinced that this whole “Producing for Writers” course is just VFS saving money by giving us writers the same producing course as the film production people get and tacking “for writers” to the end.

I don’t need to know all this shit in order to write for TV. For the people in film, it at least makes a little bit of sense. They need to know this kind of thing if they want to produce their own indie films. They also need to know it for their writing, so their screenplays will take production considerations in mind.

But TV doesn’t work like that. It’s produced in a way that is quite radically different from film, and quite frankly, I don’t need to know most of this shit.

I would rather be learning about how TV shows are made. Not movies.

I guess the way VFS sees it, all we really want is the diploma so why try very hard to actually teach us?

After all, the less the spend on educating us, the more of that $20K/student they get to keep to themselves.

But maybe i am just being bitter.

And maybe I’m not.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.