Stones

Alas, I have been rejected again and not just once, but twice. I got nowhere with Nicholl and the Austin Film Festival.

I have read that you might as well just light your first ten or twelve screenplays on fire the second they are done and move on with your writing life because they will sink like stones. They are to be regarded as practice. Have I been simply lucky that the first one was a quarter-finalist and the second top 10%? Should I go ahead and get the matches anyway and just give up on them?

When a person encounters so many rejections from so many sources, they must have moments of stopping and wondering if this is a fool's errand. There is no way of knowing if there will ever be a "yes" in the future and therefore no way of knowing if continuing on is the thing to do or a waste of energy and emotion. I think about these things a lot.

There are some structures that began underwater. Someone had to figure out a way to set a foundation in the murky depths so that the part above would be solid. So they set down one stone in the bottom of the river, and then they set another on top of it, and another on top of that one. And when the structure was finished, no one ever gave a second's notice or appreciation to those stones at the bottom that were holding everything up, that were the beginning of it all.

I'll keep writing. And I'll appreciate the ones that sank like stones.