Operation Achieve Anything: Day Seventeen, Dateline 1-17-2018
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“The great danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.”
Hello Crickets, here we go again for day number seventeen of Operation Achieve Anything. Once again, yesterday’s assignment, that I’m about to provide an update on, and the new assignment, that I’m about to share, both involve practices that I’m not just aware of but have already been actively using in my life.
As I pointed out in a past update, part of the reason that these early assignments have a “been there, done that” feel is partially due to the fact that there are still 348 left to the challenge and the Achieve Anything… book is doing a good job at easing the reader into the process. As I also pointed out in the past, it doesn’t help that I went through a phase where I listened to a ton of self-help books when I discovered that they provide a lot of interesting insights to help me with character development as a writer.
On top of the reasons mentioned above as to why many of these early assignments don’t feel all that new to me personally, I’ve unintentionally been implementing many of these tasks through the development of this blog. By no means is this a criticism of the book in any way, I’m more pointing this out in case my attempts at these early tasks may feel a bit uninspired if/when I revisit examples of how I’ve already completed a task far before I bought the Achieve Anything… book.
For example, yesterday’s assignment was to become a detective in order to discover any hidden talents with the example being a kid who really loved theater and wanted to act throughout their entire childhood. By the time that got old enough to audition for their first play, they found that they had a crippling case of stage fright but still didn’t want to give up on their theater dreams. Eventually, they discovered their fit in the lighting department and became a very successful lighting designer allowing them to live out a slightly adjacent dream.
Almost the exact thing happened to me, where I wanted to write movies my entire life but had no actual interest in filmmaking until I was on the set of my first non-school produced short script which led me to love the set life. From that point on, I knew I wanted to do this as my backup career while I continued to try to get my foot in the door as a writer, but I had no idea where I fit in with a film crew.
I started out in a department that wasn’t a fit, or at least it was way above my experience level since my very first gig was as the assistant director. Keep in mind, though I went to film school I was part of the writing program which never even touched on how a film set works and there I was utterly untrained as the person in charge for the crew. Looking back and knowing what I know now, that crew had to have hated me because I had no idea what I was doing since I thought I just handled the paperwork, which was pretty much what the producer said when she reassured me that I’d do fine, even without any experience.
Luckily, I’m not the type to give up right away because I kept applying for gigs and eventually found my fit in the lighting department, just like the Achieve Anything… book’s example. Only, unlike the in the book, I only grew to be good enough to join the Grip and Electric Union. It was at that point where I went from being a medium-sized fish in a small pond to an invisible spec floating in an ocean and struggled to find any work.
It was at this point that I started to lose interest in film in general. The lighting went from being super fun to just another annoying job and had come to grips that my writing is too quirky to be profitable for producers, but I had no plans to change my ways. That’s why I started this blog as outlet/learning device in order to escape my purely screenwriting dreams and start adapting my scripts into novels which is where I am at right now.
I feel that this fulfills the assignment even though I didn’t do any real detective work to discover anything brand spanking new since I’ve already I’ve just started this process and can’t afford to spend more time on finding a new new approach of finding a skill that runs parallel to my ultimate goal. Based on the rest of the assignment information, I feel this is acceptable since I’m just slightly ahead of the book’s plan.
Today’s assignment suffers from the same issue in that it’s asking me to take a look at my goals to make sure that I’m not aiming to low and whether or not this is why my efforts might feel stagnant. Here’s a hint at tomorrow’s results, my ultimate goal is to adapt a majority of the over twenty-five screenplays that I’ve written over the years into a series of novels in order to create my master opus.
Of course, I’ll go into this, even more, when I check in tomorrow with yet another update. Until then, it’s now that time for me to say, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.
Talk to you soon.
Sincerely,
The Wicker Breaker
P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.
