Operation Achieve Anything: Day Two-Hundred-Sixty-Three, Dateline 9-20-2018
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“Ability without ambition is like kindling wood without the spark.”
Good afternoon crickets. Welcome to day number two-hundred-sixty-three of Operation Achieve Anything. Sometimes I feel like I spend too much time writing reminders that this site was created with the intention train for at least ten years in my effort to branch out and write content outside of the screenwriting format and structure. Though I am compelled to throw this fact out as a reminder for any wackiness one might find in my writing as an explanation and not an excuse.
As I’ve been editing old content on this site, I can clearly see that just one year ago, I was still hanging on to the sparse use of words that’s expected from the screenplay format. I also notice that my perspective used to get way more twisted that might stem from bouncing back around between stage direction, narrative, and dialogue which isn’t always consistent in the blueprint of a structure that you use when writing a script. Since I had all of my eggs in the script writing basket for over twenty years, some of these habits have been extremely hard to break.
I don’t think that I’m getting there thanks to this website, which actually fulfills the lesson that I was supposed to learn from yesterday’s assignment where I was supposed to ponder the quote about how it was more important to determine what you can’t do over what you actually can. By this, the Achieve Anything… book gave an example of a woman who always wanted to be a wedding planner since she was a little kid only to find her desire was there but her abilities lacked. Her heart was in the right place, but she just didn’t have the people skill. This is why she was able to thrive when she discovered a wedding planning adjacent task of graphic designing wedding content, that she found her perfect fit.
This provided example is pretty much the exact reason that I started this blog. Unfortunately, I discovered my love of screenwriting during a time when the indie film world was really allowed to experiment with different types of story and structure to draw attention to a filmmaking style as a calling card, and not as much for profit. At least that’s how it felt in the mid to late nineties to this hopeful nit-wit.
Either way, it was the experimental market that I thought would be my fit. Then, after years and years of training and even more, years working in film and television, it finally sunk in that whether or not the industry is still as acceptable to experimental cinema, I don’t have specific marketing personality to really push this type of risk. No matter how much I believe in my surreal stories, I’m too passive and unconfident to make the kind of pitch that would ease the concerns of any potential financier.
This is why I finally decide to give up on my dreams and find a different route to share my content. Though I would much rather already be a success, I’m kind of glad that this is the route that I landed on. As I also often point out, the main reason I first started to write for the screen was not just my love of movies, but I felt it was the only way that I could share my stories where only a few people would have to suffer from the jumbled words that follow out of my dyslexic self-taught head.
Yeah, I went to film school for writing, but by that time, I’d already been writing for a decade, with a near success and a temporary literary agent. I was mainly hoping that by attending school, it would give me an air of legitimacy that would then build my confidence, but things never panned out that way. This rough road of constant failure has had the surprising benefit of my new found love of my words and not just my general concept.
I’m still honing my skill, which is why I keep referring to this site as my practice ground but by the end of this venture, I hope to be confident enough in my prose to start adapting my scripts into novels. The Chuck Norris script may be the jumping of the gun effort to kick-start this rewriting process, then again, I was hoping to use the manuscript more like bait to real in a potential mentor/writing coach/story editor.
We’ll see what happens, but for now, I’m still comfortable on this new path. With the above fulfilling yesterday’s task, it’s now time to delve into the assignment for today where I’m now supposed to shit or get off the pot. Again, it seems like the book is for lost people and not for those who already had something in mind that they already wanted to achieve before even buying the book, which sometimes it makes it feel like the book just assumes I’m a slacker.
Oh well, I delve more into why I feel with way when I check in with tomorrow’s update. Until then, it’s now time for me to wrap this post up as usual and 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.
