Fear of Failure

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” -Anais Nin

Marketing. It’s not just about your writing skills anymore.

What do the Camino and screenwriting have in common? Fear of Failure! At least for me. I’ve been told repeatedly on my pilgrimage of the pen that I need to take time to market myself as well as my work. Develop a brand, send out more query letters, attend conferences, mingle-mingle-mingle - and pitch! It’s an introvert’s nightmare.

This year I’ve had two screenplays final in competitions - Wayward and Homing Instincts. Check out their pitch decks on the home page - they are rudimentary, I warn you. When Wayward was chosen as a semi-finalist in Scriptapalooza, it came with a year of the company promoting my screenplay. I was asked how I was marketing myself. Did I have a website? Did I have a blog? Was I LinkedIn and had I considered getting an Instagram account? I’m a technophobe, people!

My last attempt at Instagram ended with my identity stolen and used to approach my contacts on Facebook. Pitching my work - and myself - at a film festival or conference had me running to the bathroom to wipe the sweat off my brow and into a stall for privacy to strike a Wonder Woman power pose with composing breaths. It really helps - Google it! I’d go back into the room and pitch, be handed contact cards, and feel hopeful. When I followed up, I wouldn’t hear back, I’d feel insecure all over again - thin-skinned in an industry that requires a suit of armor.

Despite the setbacks and successes, I still get nervous when I pitch my work or ideas. I can handle putting words on the page, for the most part, but I struggle to find the right words off the page. I lose track of my pitch points, my log line, even my characters’ names - and I birthed them! After being selected for mentorships in multiple genres, as an emerging talent, decades have rolled by. I have grey hair and three types of glasses. I’m still emerging. But I’m not giving up.

I don’t engage in the creative process for the sake of art itself. I’m writing screenplays that I hope will create jobs for actors, crew, producers, and directors. I hope that my plots, characters, and dialogue will inspire audiences and other writers. But I also want my children to inherit royalties instead of boxes with copies of unproduced work. I want it all to mean something to someone someday. I don’t create just for myself. Few artists do. Imagine a gifted singer, pacing on stage to begin, but the concert hall door is stuck closed. Screenwriters’ nightmares are made of such as that. My voice, as a writer, is only as good as its ability to be heard.

Isn’t writing for introverts? Isn’t marketing for extroverts? Well yes to both, in part. Life experiences may nudge us more toward one than the other. My introverted tendencies stem from bullying in school and growing up on the wrong side of the street.

I was the only Anglophone student in a French school for years, teased by my peers and singled out by teachers who felt I was a bad linguistic influence. It was a Catholic French school and I had my knuckles rapped with rulers, was made to stand in a corner, write lines on the board, and was even forced to kneel on the cold bare floor with my hands under my knees, grit embedding in my flesh. Showing up, just being me, wasn’t enough.

My parents had wanted me to have the advantage of being bilingual before French Immersion schools existed. They weren’t even aware of how I was being treated, partly because our home life had its own set of challenges. I spoke Frenglish at home and Franglais at school, struggled with spelling and grammar, and the only real upside at the time was that I could swear well in two languages.

I did a lot of copying and translating and it took forever for me to gain confidence in my own voice. Sometimes I’m still that insecure girl trying to find the right words in person and on the page.

Insecurities aside, I’m determined to better market my work and my skillset. If I reach the right mentor to guide me, one person with connections who believes in me, one producer who can turn my screenplays into screen time, my words will find a home. And I can teach what I learn. I have a degree that says so and I truly believe that learning is for serving. To quote Grey’s Anatomy. “Learn one. Do one. Teach one.” But right now, even with a measure of success in competitions and publications, I feel like I’m on thin ice and feeling a little overwhelmed. Believing in yourself and putting your work out there requires courage. So find it! And if you can’t, fake it a little.

What do you fear as a writer?

What are you doing to market your work?

If you aren’t doing anything, what is holding you back?

Now that you know a bit more about me, my writing background, and my hope for what awaits at the end of the writer’s journey - let’s hit the Camino Ingles, the preparation for it, and snippets on how walking it informed my screenplay Wayward.

Ultreia! Forward, together.