Glenn Gers, Screenwriter: Doing your work and putting it in front of an audience,
starting the work, finishing it and presenting it is the most important education you can get.
Film Courage: I’m wondering if being an office temp for the 12 years that you did it
and then doing the writing on the side or in free time
fueled you because if you'd had a more comfortable job where maybe money
wasn't an option and trying to book work maybe you would have given up on the screenwriting?
Glenn: I don't think I just personally the way I'm built I would have I frequently gave up on jobs
rather than than have them interfere with my what I thought was my career but I do think that it is
I think that life can really challenge people trying to be artists that the demands of real life
it's hard it is hard to build a way to get some time and to feel it's worth it when it's
an abnormal thing to do it's not it most people aren't doing it and most people's lives don't
require it most people have perfectly fine lives without writing a novel or a screenplay or doing
you know whatever it is that that an artist wants to do and and I think it's important to recognize
that you are doing something a little offbeat and that the most important thing I think you can do
is find a way to comfortably do it in the spaces you have to do it in whatever they are there
are some people who would rather work for six months and then take two months off and have the
two months to really work and other people would rather work an hour a day or every other weekend
or whatever it is you have to you have to look at yourself you have to see what's productive for you
there's no right or wrong the the novelist simone as french mystery novelist thriller novelist he
used to write in intensely short bursts he would he would plan out a novel and then reportedly he
had a separate house built in his backyard because he could and he would go to this other house
and he would not talk to his family they would drop the meals at the front door and for like two
weeks and he wrote short novels he would be like don't bother me I'm writing and he would go in and
then he would come out with a novel a couple weeks later and then he would live his life and then
next time around he would go back in that's fine there's other people who you know just like me
office temping a half hour here half an hour there at other people's desks or like I happen to be a
morning person so I would get up extra early and work in the morning before work but don't discount
the amount of pressure that real life puts on your art and I would say the thing to do is
adapt your art to fit that life you know if you like throwing all these references around
the painter Matisse when he got older he couldn't stand at his easel and paint anymore
and he ended up doing these cut outs he would take paper and cut out figures and they became gorgeous
artwork called the cutouts there's a book called jazz and a lot of other work he stopped painting
he couldn't physically paint anymore he shifted his creativity to something he physically could do
that I think is a really good lesson for everyone it's like if you can't find
the time to do it the way you think you should like I thought I had to have an eight-hour free
day with a lot of iced tea and music playing and I found that it was better to write little
tiny slices even just a sentence or a paragraph if you keep doing a sentence or a paragraph you
will eventually get whatever it is you need if you wait till you have the whole day free
you may never so that that sort of is what I think you have to do in the face of that inevitable
conflict and that conflict even happens when you're a professional writer I would
run into the problem of you know I'm working on a project a show or a movie or something
I had a project I was dying to do and sometimes I would have to like take a break from my
writing job so my job was writing but I had to stop to do a little indie film that I wanted to do
and so I didn't take work for as long as I could afford and then I would go back to work everybody
has this problem the important thing is to really pay attention to what is productive for you if
that's writing a little bit at a time if that's writing for short bursts a lot whatever works
I just wasn't sure if however painful or maybe not so painful some of these
temp jobs were I know some tempting can be great and some can be probably excruciating
did that fuel you the painful moments to keep going and also too you're around people that this
is their life they're like lifers at this company and did you say I don't want to be that guy
yeah yeah well it's sort of I mean to a certain extent this may it sounds horrible
I generally look around and say I don't want to be that guy just going to the store yeah but what
it did do was inform me about all the parts of life that I didn't know to find out what it's
like to work in this type of place and that type of I worked in a lot of different places
and in fact the first novel I wrote was about a wannabe screenwriter who was an office temp so
I guarantee you nothing nothing gets lost on a an artist who's making his way in the world you got
to be absorbing all of it and writing it down how did you take control of your creative fate
I think recognizing that the only thing an artist truly controls is the work itself and that is not
an original thought to me many far better artists have said it you can't control whether your work
sells whether it is popular even people who have sold and had hits will find themselves doing
something and it flops that's just predictable that that will happen so if if they can't control
it if they can't guarantee a hit if they can't guarantee that people like it how should we
there's no way for anyone to know how things are going to work out creatively and the way that you
become a happy artist and a productive artist is to give up worrying about it you say I am
gambling I am rolling the dice on this thing because I like it because I think it's fun because
I think other people will like it I think that's a big part of it just saying I am completing this
because I want it complete it has nothing to do with whether or not someone else will like it you
should at the same time adjust your expectations if you are writing about a very obscure topic
or in an obscure genre then don't expect a big budget plan one of the things I had to learn was
if I want to write something weird and offbeat write it so that I can do it myself with a video
camera and a couple actors that I get together learn how to do things diy learn how to you know
work within the limits that you can control and then you're controlling your creative
fight and then if somebody likes it great if somebody doesn't like it at least you did it
and you're more likely to do the next thing better from having completed
work and put it out there and seeing the response there is nothing like it for an artist to see
people respond to your work and it's one of the things that screenwriters get to do
very infrequently most working screenwriters most of their jobs they don't get out to the public
a lot of people do drafts of things that don't get made now you you do that less because most people
are working on shows when you work on a show they don't hire you if they're not going to make it but
the experience of doing your work and putting it in front of an audience starting the work
finishing it and presenting it is the most important education you can get there's
nothing else that that replaces it so the more you can do that without asking someone's permission
without waiting until someone says well this will make me a lot of money so I will invest in it
because people don't people don't put money into artworks because they like them mostly they put
money into artworks because they think it'll make them more money so if you do something that's
good but not profitable you won't get to make it it's better to do something that's good and can be
made really really cheaply and then you can make it nobody can stop you and if you don't feel like
directing it yourself somebody who does know how to work low budget will be able to make it
so completing projects is very important to you is that completing the process
the artistic process is the best education you can get if you can
write 10 scripts and finish them and ideally at least get a reading of them but but
really the best thing to do is to shoot them find a way to get someone to shoot your script make it
shorts whatever that will teach you more than any other education about screenwriting and if they're
bad so what you know do it in such a way that if you lose your money it's not the end of the world.
How does an artist take control of their creative fate?