A Higher Bar

Spending time deciding what’s “the next write thing” (the title of the last post) inevitably involves little signs, or big ones. At least it does for me. Maybe you too. Reaching out to my prior teacher about next steps with one of my scripts, I received a whole lot of wisdom in one brief email to close our discussion:

“…the competition is tough and the bar is higher than what you see on screen. But perseverance is the only solution.”

The bar is higher than what you see on screen. Those words lingered a long while, like a persistent thought storm. Long enough to let doubt creep in.

How can I know what the bar is if I can’t see it?

Will I ever reach it?

When will I know?

And then finally, does it even matter?

Because really, I just need to do my best to learn and improve and persevere.

That said, I have decided to adapt my latest TV pilot into a novella, and started this week. (I’ll post an excerpt. And I hope you enjoy it!) If you’re thinking this in reaction to the counsel above, I can see how you might conclude that. But I had already decided to adapt one of my scripts before hearing that advice. It was just a matter of which one.

I’m having a blast with the adaptation. And I just read the opening pages out loud to my Story Summit family in a “Reading Pages” session led by New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Julie Cantrell.

She said so many wonderful things and added that she wouldn’t change a thing. I was overjoyed! Such tremendous encouragement! (Special thank you to her, for speaking life into this wondrous fiction-writing journey.)

May we all persevere, and for you writers out there, may we all do “the next write thing”!