The Real Reason Your Writing Isn't Breaking Through (It's Not Your Craft)

I’m going to tell you something about myself I’ve never put in this newsletter — and you wouldn’t really know it by Googling my name.

For the past six years, alongside everything I do as a manager and producer, I’ve trained deeply in breathwork and somatic healing. Not as a side career — as a way of understanding myself more deeply and the people I work with. I’ve quietly used it with creatives, a lot of them people in this industry who were falling apart behind the version of themselves they brought into meetings.

I do sometimes feel like I keep it in a separate drawer from my Hollywood life, because for a long time I couldn’t see how the two fit together. But the longer I work in both, the more convinced I am that the thing standing between most talented writers and the career they want isn’t craft, or access, or even luck.

It’s their nervous system.

And I want to talk about that today, honestly, because I don’t think anyone in this business is telling you the truth about it.

You could apply the following to all fields and pursuits in life, but I am going to focus on the writers journey because thats the path I know. Here’s what I’ve watched happen, over and over, and how I believe it can be fixed.

Writers panic, not just when they’re not writing (aka writers block) but in a development session, listening to notes, staring at the blank screen on the page, or; looking at the deadline announcement of some other writer that sold their spec for seven figures and wondering if they’ll ever feel good enough. It’s not dramatic, its just part of the writers life. The years are stacking up, the bank balance is low, and somewhere underneath it a low hum starts: I’m running out of time. I need to work. I need this one to sell. I need to prove to my parents that this is a real career.

And then they sit down to write from inside that hum.

But you cannot do it. I mean that almost physically. When your nervous system is in a threat state — when your body genuinely believes it is in danger, and everything in your body and mind read’s that as danger — it does exactly what it’s built to do. So the parts of you that shut down in order to survive are what’s most needed to create. The ability to take risk and play, to start not knowing where you’ll end up and follow the line because intuitively you know its a good one, one that comes not from the mind itself but from the soul.

Because — without waxing too lyrical — I firmly believe that writing is a calling. That creating art is a calling. It's a voice from deep within you, urging you to share your truth, your experience, your hard-won wisdom. I don't believe any successful storyteller is creating from a place of wanting only financial success, or even critical acclaim — even when that becomes part of it. It's the artists who have done the work — the deep work — to find the part of themselves that stays true even in the most frightening, soul-crushing, ego-destroying moments. Because this path will test you, over and over. It will drag you through the mud, and you'll dust yourself off, and it will beckon you again and ask: how much do you really want this?

Now, fear is a brilliant survival tool but it can be catastrophic for the creative. You can survive from fear and you absolutely cannot create from it.

Fear in writing leads you down a well-trodden path, chasing success, mimicking trends, and looking at what sold last month as what you should be writing today. It sands off the unique, specific, alive thing that was the only reason anyone would ever have needed you to write it. And I can certainly feel it in the pages when I read and hear it in a writers voice. And I can feel when a script was written by someone reaching for the market instead of reaching for their truth. Sadly buyers can pick up on it too.

I know how frustrating this sounds to hear because I understand what its like to be a working and not-working writer. Not first hand of course but from a birds-eye view.

Most of you are plain exhausted. And financially wrecked, working a day job that empties you and then trying to find something left over for the pages at night. And here I am telling you that you can’t write from scarcity, when — for some of you —scarcity is the literal condition of your life right now. You see, every one else in this business will teach you the craft — the structure, the notes, the query letter, the market and yes, I do that too. But almost no one will tell you the truth about the state you have to write from to last, because most of them have never had to learn it, or don’t have the tools to, or its just inherent in who they are and they haven’t put a finger on it. This is the part I can give you that they can’t. So stay with me, because I want to hold two things honestly here, and they’re both true.

Yes — this business asks something almost cruel of you. It asks you to keep returning to the work, for years, often with no money attached to it, no validation, no sign you’re not insane for continuing. That’s real. But if you want a life in this industry, you have to make peace with the fact that the financial reward will often come late, if it comes, and it almost never comes early.

But here’s my advice to you — the advice I would give my own clients — don’t grind harder from inside the panic. This is what actually kills careers. And if you’ve read my 72 Hour Rule when it comes to rejection, you know how I feel about taking drastic action from a place of control when its all an illusion.

You see, its all a vicious spiral — fear produces the exact work least likely to break you through, and then the failure of that work confirms the fear, and the fear tightens, and you spiral. I have watched genuinely gifted people grind themselves out of this business from a state of scarcity, producing more and more frightened work, wondering why none of it lands.

So no, the money cannot be the thing. Not because money doesn’t matter — it obviously does, it’s how you put a roof over your head — but because when financial gain becomes the engine you’re writing from, the writing dies, and then the money definitely never comes.

The thing that has to drive you is always the reason you started. And you have to keep returning to that, over and over, and protect the integrity of your work because it’s the only state you can actually make good work from.

Regulating your nervous system isn’t self-care fluff — it’s the most hard-nosed career strategy I know and one that will always serve you in this business.

I want to tell you about Taylor, who was a client at the first management company I worked at when I moved to LA, because his story gets told as an overnight-genius story and it’s quite the opposite, and the real version is the one you need to hear.

Now, he’s very much a superstar — yes unequivocally, but he didn’t actually start to write until he was 40. Before that he was mostly a working actor for two decades — bit parts, guest spots, a recurring role here and there. Early on he struggled so badly he taught acting classes to get by and, for a stretch, lived out of his truck. When he finally decided to write, I had read his wife maxed out a credit card so he could buy the screenwriting software — that’s the financial position he was creating from. And by 2013 he was reportedly down to his last $800 in savings before he sold his feature spec Sicario.

Now lets put that all into perspective because today his studio deal is reportedly around half a billion dollars a year.

Taylor never chased whatever was selling, he wrote the specific thing only he could write, the thing rooted in where he was actually from, the genre nobody was asking him for. He created from conviction while his bank account said panic.

That’s the distinction. It’s not that the great ones don’t have fear or don’t have empty bank accounts. It’s that they don’t let the empty bank account get into the pages.

I do want to offer you something practical here — rather than my advice to calm down and regulate, then write. As thats not entirely useful.