Most people believe that creative success is a pipe dream only achieved by people they don’t know. They also don’t embrace anything like it until it has been approved of by a mainstream gatekeeper. My favorite story illustrating this happened last year around this time. A waitress at our local diner overheard me and my buddies talking about movies, one of them being a movie I wrote. She was making small talk with me at the register and asked “So your movie, will it play at a theater here in Austin or something?” I said “Yes, several. It’s on 2500 screens nationwide, and it should be on a number of them here.” Her eyes lit up “Oh! you mean it’s a real movie. I thought it was just, you know, an indie thing.”
In their eyes you are not a writer, you are a dreamer, until proven otherwise.
Similar thing happened to me. A friend was having a party at her house, and I dropped by. She introduced me by saying, “This is Brandon. He’s a writer.”
One of her friends piped up immediately. “Oh, so he’s unemployed.”
This attitude in our society has always bothered me. As if mastering an art weren’t hard enough, we have to deal with the derision of those who think we’re fools for even trying.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.