by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
By pretty much any metric I’m a failure and a loser. But there is one metric under which I excel — if you get me liquored up at a cocktail party I usually chat up the best looking woman in the room and start some pretty thought-provoking conversations about a wide-ranging series of topics.
Now, let me stress, I’m well aware that every drunk is the “funniest guy in the room” but it does appear from my time in Seoul that I actually was extremely interesting in that specific situation.
With that in mind, I find myself this New Year’s Eve mulling tipping my toe into screenwriting because I’ve reached a pretty stable point in the development of the novel I’m working on and need the rush of a big, new creative “track” to keep things interesting as I plunge into writing a serious first draft of this novel that won’t, at last, embarrass me.
I have specific conditions going forward towards my ultimate goal — hitting the pavement in LA at some point to see if I can sell a script. My biggest self-imposed condition is I have to have three completed scripts before I’ll do any such harebrained thing.
I listen to the “Script Notes” podcast and realize — oh boy — how cutthroat the screenwriting business is even if you’ve actually gone the traditional route and are, like, a normal human being. I’m about 20 years too old to be doing any of this, but I’m creative and — under the right conditions — reasonably charismatic.
So, I know if the issue is more a matter of how personable I can be in a social setting rather than my age or experience, that I have a decent shot at getting a lot closer to selling a script than you might think. I love to talk and tell stories and if I actually have a few scripts to hand someone given the opportunity, then, well, who knows.
But I have to have paper. I have to have actual completed scripts to hand to people. And that’s going to take work and, most of all, time. I’m hoping there might be some cross-pollination between the novel track and the screenplay track. One will help me look at the other in a different way.
My main focus will continue to be, of course, the novel. I guess, however, that I feel enough self-confidence that things are pretty stable on that front that I can turn my attention to a second “track.”
I just wish I wasn’t so fucking old.
