Every parent has confronted some form of the same horrible moment when their child declares their desire for the unobtainable. Perhaps it’s the skinny, five-foot-four high school junior who wants nothing else in life but to be a professional football player. Or the 13-year-old aspiring ballerina who cannot walk across the room without tripping over her feet. What’s the right call here? Do we tell them the truth and shatter their dreams or smile and say supportive things, knowing that they will fail? We love them more than life itself, but coaches and lessons are expensive. And c’mon, there’s the opportunity cost of the time lost not pursuing something where they’d have a better chance of success (and which might more closely fit with the plan we’ve always had for their lives).
Do we presume failure and shut the door on their unlikely dreams, or do encourage them and hope for a Rudy moment? (If you don’t recognize the Rudy reference, stop reading right now and go watch the movie. With the family. Bring Kleenex.)
Now, let’s take it a step farther (further? I’m never sure). You’ve exhausted the carefully collected 529 Plan money to see your son, Billy, graduate with honors from a prestigious engineering school, and during the celebration dinner, he announces his plans to go to New York to try to be an actor on Broadway.
Or his plans to take a year or two off to work at a coffee shop while he writes the mystery novel that’s been floating around in his head.
I’m going to take a guess at what what your initial reactions would be:
- Like hell you are;
- I’ve raised an idiot;
- Do you realize how much money we just dropped on your education?
- You’re going to starve.
But Billy is no fool. He’s thought through all of these objections. He’ll come back with:
- I’m only young once. This is the best time to take chances.
- It’s just me. I don’t need a lot of money. I’ll find a way to feed myself.
- Mom and Dad, this is my dream. If it doesn’t work out, engineering will still be there for me.
This is where you tee up the failure speech:
- The entertainment business is brutal. It tears people up and spits them out. It’s soul crushing. (All of this coming from articles you’ve read, having never actually attempted to live the life you’re trashing.)
- You were born to be an engineer, not a writer or performer. (Translation: We’ve spent a lot of money on our dream for you. We’ve told all our friends that you’re going to be an engineer. They’re going to roll their eyes and scoff when we tell them that you want to do this. Just as we’re doing right now.)
- Even people who are successful can’t maintain their success. Even if you can sell that first novel for a lot of money, it might not sell through and your career could be over. Even if your first song is a hit, there may never be a second song. You don’t want to risk the humiliation of being a one hit wonder, do you?
Finally, when Billy goes forward with his stupid plan, you hope he’ll fail early and spectacularly enough that it will set his head straight. Even if you keep a good poker face, your real thoughts will likely shine through.
You will launch your beloved son into his future armed with the knowledge that pretty much everyone who’s ever loved him has their thumb on the scale for him to fail. Those aren’t the words anyone speaks, but Billy can hear the “I-Told-You-So Chorus” being rehearsed in the wings.
And in his heart of hearts, no matter what he says, Billy expects to fail as well. Let’s face it: The odds are woefully stacked against him. Of the tens of thousands of hacks who push books out every year now that gatekeepers are gone and self-publishing is easy, how many actually make enough to buy a decent meal, let alone fund a lifestyle? Ditto the thousands of members in the Screen Actors Guild who make little more than pocket change. Who the hell is Billy to think he can succeed when so many others fail?
The answer is simple. Billy is better than all those hacks. He just needs to make the world realize it.
He can start by projecting success. Billy didn’t make this shift from engineering to the arts on a whim and a desire. Yes, he has passion, but he also has talent. How does he know? Because he does. He knows when his stuff is bad and because of that, he knows when it’s good. In the arts, that’s what talent is. True talent. Having it is the key element that separates him from the dreck peddlers. It’s what separates Broadway from dinner theater.
When Billy goes to a reading or a literary event, he makes it his mission to introduce himself not just to the author, but to the author’s agent or publisher or publicist who will likely also be there. If he attends a conference, he will sit among the cadre of authors he knows he will one day join. He will work the room in a way that only a confident person can. People will remember him not for being cocky or loud or even because he had a nifty idea for a book, but because he was interesting.
The entertainment business–of which writing is a part–is a business of relationships, and people love to help interesting people.
If Billy’s smart, he will stay away from anyone who sneers at his decision to pursue his dream, taking solace from the fact that those who sneer will be the same ones who want to take selfies with him after his dream proves to be successful. Billy should make a commitment to himself never to apologize to anyone for the artistic path he chose.
Everyone who has seen any level of success in the entertainment business started as Billy. They all share the common elements of talent, drive, focus, more than a little luck, and the ability to see rejection merely as a slammed door that opened a window.
A lot of Billys quit. Most, probably. They go home to the “I-Told-You-So” concert and complain that the industry isn’t interested in new talent anymore. They’ll testify without evidence that traditional media is dying anyway. The real route to success, they’ll say, is doing it all yourself because even if they buy your book, they’ll turn on you like jackals if the book under performs.
As evidence, Whining Billy will regurgitate the one-hit-wonder trope of their friend John who was really, really good. The industry paid him a lot of money, and got behind his first two projects. They sent him on tours, and while the books were bestsellers, they didn’t earn back the money the company spent, and now nobody will return his phone calls. Poor John.
Whining Billy glosses over the lede here–that John had a hit. For a period of time, however short, he got to live the dream. He got to see his name on bookshelves around the world. And while he beamed with pride of accomplishment, the world belittled him because he didn’t do it twice.
Perhaps Whining Billy–having quit and started a garage band, or maybe gone into teaching creative writing classes–was unaware of the fact that while John was having trouble getting his phone calls returned, he was still in the game making calls.
Yes, we’re talking about me now. And perhaps it’s pure hubris, but I never stopped believing in my abilities during the dark times. I never once saw rejection as personal. I understood the quiet happy dances performed by that handful of veteran authors who’d never made a fraction of what I’d been paid for those under-performing books.
I didn’t care that large elements of my extended family celebrated my slump because it’s what I expected of them. I think they had a lot to do with my desire to escape into fiction in the first place.
That noise doesn’t matter to me. I can’t let it matter to me.
To the outside world, it looked like my slump ran from roughly 2001 to 2006, but what no one outside of my very tiny circle of trust knew was that I had made the pivot of a lifetime. I was researching and writing my first and only nonfiction book–the first book ever to receive cooperation from the Army’s super-secret Delta Force. That book became Six Minutes to Freedom, co-authored with Kurt Muse, whose story it tells, and when it was done, we couldn’t give it away to the Big Five. (Nobody cares about Central America, Special Forces is overdone, neither of us is a “journalist” and therefore we’re not qualified to write the story.) I actually had to fire my agent over the book because she refused to represent it.
That’s when I remembered that Steve Zacharias, then a senior executive (now CEO) of Kensington Publishing had always been a fan of my work. My new (and better) agent, Anne Hawkins, sent him the manuscript, and he bought it. Boom! I was back in the game, and the research for that book provided the launch platform for the Jonathan Grave series.
The success of the Grave series allowed me to launch my Victoria Emerson Series, and now my Irene Rivers thriller series. That’s thirty books and counting folks.
And Six Minutes to Freedom is slated to be released by Netflix as a feature film in 2027.
The human tapeworms who troll the interwebs either spreading promises of quick riches through self/hybrid/vanity publishing or spreading rumors of doom and misery in the traditional world are lying to you.
Talent. Relationships. Persistence. The ability to tune out the naysayers. Those are four legs on the stool that defines success in the entertainment business. We talk a lot about tying your butt to the chair and writing. Well, yes, that’s important. But you have to get out there and meet people, too. Build relationships.
Your work has been rejected? Ah, that’s a shame. Get over it and try again. And again. And again.
Or quit. There’s no shame in that. Just remember that it was your choice to quit. Dismissive agents or cranky editors didn’t make you quit. You chose to quit.
And somewhere, you left and editor or an agent hungry for exactly what you’d written. After fifty rejections, you’ll never know if you would have discovered each other on your 51st query.