Someone asked about rewrites and making scripts tighter.   I posted the comment under my previous blog.

The simplest answer for how to tighten a script is to remove all dialogue that isn’t necessary to move the story forward.   If you give your script to others to read, they may have notes about exchanges of dialogue that are too long.   The notes might be stated as: “I got bored in this part,” or “This part seemed to go on for a long time.”  There’s a place where you need to trim or cut.

The following was sent to me by a friend. It was written, as credited, by Chuck Lorre, the creator of "Two and a Half Men" and "The Big Bang Theory."  Thought you might enjoy bitter cynicism from someone other than me for a change:

HOW TO CREATE A HIT SITCOM
A simple, step-by-step guide to prime time success.
by Chuck Lorre

Start drinking early. I don't mean early in the day. I mean early in
life. Eight years old oughta do the trick. Heavy drinking isn't
...

I’ve just returned from the first annual Toronto Screenwriting Conference, which was held at Ryerson University in the heart of downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada.  

Several thoughts come to mind as I sit back at my desk here in Los Angeles:

First, I left too soon.   I didn’t know I was going to have such a good time, so when I was given the option weeks in advance of the conference for a one or two-night stay in Toronto, I opted for the single night, figuring that if my presentation really sucked I could get out ...

Often on this blog, I have reminded you that there are no talent scouts.  The movie studios and TV networks are not now, nor have they ever been, on a desperate nationwide search for new talent.  The manufactured myths of American Idol aside, Hollywood is not looking for sexy singers, pretty actresses, hard-charging producers, visionary directors or even clever sitcom writers.  They don’t need to look for these people.  Those people are already here. 

Ten thousand incredibly talented people, more talented people than Hollywood will need for the next twenty years, are camped outside of the studio gates at this very moment.  (If you come to Hollywood, the people that you literally see camped out in front of the studio gates are actually in line to see Ellen DeGeneres or The Price Is Right.  When I say “camped,” I mean that metaphorically.  The talented people already live here.  They can show up for a studio audition or a network pitch meeting in ten minutes if their agent calls.)

So where do TV sitcom writers really come from?

Let me rummage through my memory and give you a short background on some of the writers that I worked with when I was writing and producing network TV sitcoms.

On my first TV writing staff, one of the older writers had been an actor on radio when he was a kid.  He kept acting when he grew up, but when that got frustrating he tried his hand at writing.  Since he knew a lot of people in show business already, he was able to talk friends into hiring him as a writer.  He acted sometimes and wrote sometimes and made a decent living at it for many years.

One of the other writers on that first TV writing staff started out writing the celebrity ad-libs on game shows.  (I hope it won’t come as too big a shock to you that celebrities don’t actually think up those clever things that they say to Bonnie Hunt or David Letterman.  That stuff is written for them by professional writers.)  Through connections that this game-show writer made at the TV networks, he worked his way into sitcom. 

Another writer was the step-son of a well-known TV writer.  One writer was the girlfriend of the step-son of another well-known TV and movie writer.  Another woman was the daughter of a well-known writer.

I once worked for a writer/producer who had started out as a trumpet player for a popular singer.  He pitched jokes to the singer.  The singer liked the jokes and used them in his act.  The trumpet player started making more money selling jokes to singers than from blowing his horn.  He eventually got a job writing for TV when one of these singers landed a prime time variety show.  When variety shows disappeared, the trumpet-player-turned-writer moved to sitcom. 

A number of the sitcom writers I knew started out writing jokes for comedians.  I worked with several sitcom writers who had worked as joke writers on the late-night talk shows.  Some of these men and women had started out as stand-up comics themselves.

One writer I worked with was the son of a famous cartoonist.  Several writers with whom I worked were former actors.  I worked with a number of women writers that started out as secretaries on TV shows or for production companies.  One woman had been a page at NBC, showing people to their seats when they came for a taping.

I worked with a writer who got his start at the Harvard Lampoon.  Another came from advertising.  One writer was the brother of a Playboy Playmate.

In the early days of my career, some of the sitcom writers I worked with had a background in the New York theatre as playwrights or actors or just working in an office on Broadway.  Later, more and more writers came from cable TV.

The point of all of this is that over the course of my career I worked with and knew dozens of sitcom writers.  Everybody had a different story.  Almost every story was interesting.  But no two stories were alike.  I knew writers who started out as journalists or documentary film makers.  One woman was working in a post office on the east coast when she sent a spec script to a former college roommate who had gotten a job in Hollywood.  Several writers started out on children’s shows.

As I think about it now, years later, I may have been the only sitcom writer that I ever knew who started out actually wanting to be a sitcom writer.  Most of my colleagues seemed to have stumbled into sitcom from somewhere else.

Where do sitcom writers come from?  Everywhere.

There are no talent scouts.  There is no shortage of talented people in Hollywood.  Hollywood is not waiting for you to finish your spec script.  There is no line that you can stand in to sign up for a job on a sitcom staff.  There is no magic address to send your pilot or screenplay to.  There is no person at any studio or agency in Hollywood whose job is to read the scripts sent in by people that no one has ever heard of.  If one of those unsolicited scripts does get read before it’s thrown away, it’s because some receptionist or junior assistant got bored.

In my book, Elephant Bucks, I devote a sizeable chunk of Chapter Seven to offering suggestions on how you can get your Lucky Break in Hollywood.  But there are a thousand other ways to do it.  It’s up to you to figure out the way that works for you.

I opened The Los Angeles Times this morning – yes, I’m so old-fashioned that I still read a printed daily newspaper – and found three, count them, three articles about Jay Leno and NBC.  One article was on the front page of the entire paper – below the fold but there it was nonetheless.  The other two articles were on the front pages of the business section and the entertainment section.  You may have also noticed or even stopped to actually read articles about Jay and NBC this past week at various sites on the internet and even in the vaunted New York Times.

In case you’ve missed all of this, NBC seems to have finally admitted to itself what everyone else already knew, that The Jay Leno Show, which airs five nights a week on NBC at 10:00 pm, is not succeeding.  About twenty million people could have told NBC that last summer when The Jay Leno Show was announced, but more about that later.  

If you don’t understand much about how network television works, or you don’t really care – and if that’s true, what are you doing on this site? – the main purpose of 10:00 pm programs on the broadcast TV networks is provide viewers for the 11:00 pm newscasts on local stations.  “Really?”  Yes.  “You mean to say that the real purpose of CSI: Miami is just to funnel viewers to the late news on some station in Baltimore?”  Yes, that’s precisely what I’m saying, and every TV executive or ad executive in the world will tell you the same thing.  “Why?”  Because pretty much all of the money that local stations earn comes from selling advertising time on their local newscasts.  If local stations aren’t making money, they can’t afford to buy the expensive series produced by the network.  (You can read dozens of articles to back this assertion up.  I interned in the newsroom at a local TV station when I was in college.  I can tell you from my personal experience that the 11:00 pm newscast is the bread and butter of any local station.  If the 11:00 pm newscast isn't doing well in the ratings, everyone panics.  It really helps a local 11:00 pm newscast to succeed if the network show that comes on at 10:00 pm is popular.)  If a TV network like NBC doesn’t have thriving local stations to air its prime time programs, then the network can’t charge as much money for advertising time on those prime time programs.  The network also risks losing some of those local stations to another network.  The way to have thriving local stations is to help them promote their newscasts.  The way to promote local newscasts is to provide the local stations with popular series at 10:00 pm, which is the time slot right before the newscasts come on at 11:00.  See how it works now? 

So, if this site is here to try to help you break into sitcom writing, why should any of this brouhaha with Jay Leno matter to you?  Why am I writing about this today?  Jay Leno isn’t the star of a sitcom and there are no sitcoms on at 10:00 pm.

One of the reasons that I blog on this site is to try to help you to think clearly about what kinds of sitcoms succeed and what kind don’t.  If you understand what succeeds, you can write what succeeds.  And one way to possibly encourage you to think realistically about what succeeds is to show you how thinking unrealistically leads people away from success. 

I keep telling you that the series you should be watching and studying are the series that are the most popular.  I keep harping about Two and A Half Men and The Big Bang Theory on CBS because those are the two most popular sitcoms on TV, and they are the most popular by a lot.  It’s not as if those two series are just barely edging out 30 Rock, The Office or Family Guy in the national ratings.  Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory are miles ahead of those other shows and way ahead of all other sitcoms in the ratings, and that’s why I think you should pay attention to those series.  Unlike Jay Leno, Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory are succeeding.  If you were trying to break into screenwriting, would you study the movies that flopped and ignore the giant blockbuster hits?  I hope not.  So if you want to be a TV sitcom writer, or even a one-hour drama writer, or even a TV sketch writer, shouldn’t you try to understand what succeeds on television and not just focus on what your friends think is hip or what some critic likes?

The lesson I want you take away from The Jay Leno Show is that the hippest, most aggressive, most opinionated, most confident, brashest, most in-your-face people are often the stupidest.  In fact, those people usually are the stupidest.  We had eight years of proof of that between 2001 and 2008 with a brash, confident, swaggering, boastful cowboy in The White House, and the country nearly collapsed because of him and the incredibly idiotic decisions that he made.  We also had boat loads of brash, confident, boastful, swaggering businessmen running some of the biggest corporations in the world – corporations like Enron and Bear Stearns and AIG and General Motors and Bank of America.  Those companies are all now bankrupt or nearly bankrupt. 

Well, now NBC is on the verge of collapse because of the brash, confident, swaggering, boastful executives that have been running that network for the last few years.

The Jay Leno Show was a bad idea.  The network was thinking unrealistically.  When NBC started falling behind the other networks, they should have looked at the Neilsen ratings, seen which shows were succeeding, watched those shows, and tried to learn from their success.  But they didn’t.  A few brash, confident, swaggering executives decided to let themselves be distracted by costs, deluded by their own ill-considered impulses, and dazzled by Emmy awards and industry buzz.  As a result, they stuck with shows that weren’t popular, dropped shows that were popular, and made themselves believe that they could succeed with a bargain basement retread of The Tonight Show in prime time.  It didn’t work.  It didn’t work in a spectacular way.  If the executives in charge of Comcast Corporation, the new owners of NBC, are smart guys, they will first fire all of the swaggering executives now working at NBC, they will open the latest Neilsen ratings, they will look at what is succeeding on their rival networks, and they will realistically try to learn from other people’s success.

I’m currently reading a very interesting book called Dangerously Funny – The Uncensored Story of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour by David Bianculli.  If you are under forty years old, you may never have heard of The Smothers Brothers, but they were an extremely successful comedy act back in the 1960’s.  They starred in a short-lived but groundbreaking and wildly successful one-hour variety series on CBS, back in the days when variety series were extremely popular on network television.  The Smothers Brothers were cutting edge comedians, but when they were awarded their own prime time variety series, they did not decide to get boastful or impulsive or swaggering.  They decided to be realistic.  They decided to do what worked.  They developed a very traditional variety series based on other successful variety series on which they had been appearing as a guest act for years.  What made their series so successful, and ultimately so controversial, was that rather than thinking outside the box, they stayed in the box and then pushed hard at the sides of the box.  They did comedy sketches, but their sketches were hipper and smarter.  They booked musical acts, but the acts they booked were edgier and fresher.  They also used established acts and familiar performers.  They mixed everything together in a new way.  What made The Smothers Brothers successful was that they studied what was already successful, then followed the example of success in their own unique and innovative way. 

If you want to succeed in television, look at what is already succeeding.  Look at the Neilsen ratings every week.  See which shows are the most popular.  Watch those shows.  Study those shows.  Try to understand why those shows are successful.  Then try to learn from their success.  I’m not saying that you should never think outside the box.  But before you can think outside the box, you have to watch what’s on the box, and see what works in the box, and then try to imaginatively and realistically apply that knowledge to the space all around the box.  NBC and Jay Leno forgot to do that, and as a result, they fell on their brash, swaggering, boastful faces.

CBS continues to dominate the sitcom world with their Monday night lineup anchored by Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory.  These are the only two sitcoms on TV that can reasonably be referred to as hits.  How I Met Your Mother does okay opening the night.  I guess it’s there to help Jason Segel’s movie career.  Accidentally On Purpose, the sitcom knock-off of the movie Knocked Up, is no knock-out and likely won’t be knocking around next season. 

I still think The Big Bang Theory is the best sitcom on TV, despite the critics’ and award givers’ undying love for the wildly unpopular, sketchy, uneven, and often cringingly bad 30 Rock. 

CBS’ sitcom hour on Wednesday of Gary Unmarried and The New Adventures of Old Christine continues to eek out lackluster ratings and no buzz.

NBC has basically given up.  Their anemic Thursday night lineup, anchored by an increasingly tiresome The Office, limps along unnoticed by the public.  Neither Parks and Recreation nor Community has found an audience.  I suspect the audience for 30 Rock is made up entirely of critics and award givers.

ABC’s ringing return to sitcom has been mostly a dull thud.  Cougar Town whimpers without a growl.  Hank clanked after only a few airings.  The Middle is a muddle.  What is the premise of that show exactly? 

The one semi-bright spot for ABC is Modern Family.  I’m not thrilled with their “let’s shoot is just like The Office” faux-documentary approach.  I suspect it was the network’s idea, and perhaps this conceit can be dropped if the series is renewed for next season.  To the extent that Modern Family works, it is because of the break-out character played by Sofia Vergara.  When watching, I live for the moments when she is on screen and endure the long stretches when she is not.

I expect Modern Family to survive and would pick it as most spec-worthy for 2010.

The problem with every sitcom that isn’t on CBS, and why the sitcoms on other networks don’t grow into hits no matter how many awards they receive, is that the characters are unlikable.  Sitcom has been stuck for over a decade in the same rut: “Let’s do a show where everybody is a selfish, clueless, immature jerk with no moral compass.”  It was fun on Seinfeld for a while.  It hasn’t been fun on any other sitcom for the last ten years.  Does anyone at the networks other than CBS remember when sitcom characters were people that we liked and sometimes even admired?  Does anyone remember when sitcom characters aspired to be decent people?  Does anyone remember Everybody Loves Raymond, Cheers, Frasier, The Cosby Show or The Mary Tyler Moore Show?

On another but not entirely unrelated subject:   

When the late Blake Snyder and I were collaborating on movie scripts, a question that Blake always insisted that we answer for ourselves was, “Who are we writing this script for?”  Who is the intended audience for our screenplay or TV pilot?  Blake wasn’t talking just about which studio might buy the script, although that was part of the consideration.  More importantly, Blake wanted to know precisely who our ultimate audience was going to be.  Who did we expect to be sitting in the movie theater or in front of the television watching this story?  Was it teenage girls or twenty-something men or married women or who?

Why did Blake feel that it was important to identify the audience?  Doesn’t a writer just write whatever story comes into his or her head and then leave it up to fate to decide who is going to want to hear it?  Blake always said, “No.  You can’t leave it up to fate.  You have to know who you are writing for!”  If you know who you are writing for, your story will have focus.  Your structure will include the plot elements that your target audience wants to see.  A studio considering your project will understand what kind of movie or pilot you are trying to sell.  It is critical for every screen writer to know who she or he is writing for.  Without that knowledge your script will likely become a muddled mess.

And to make that point – know who you are writing for - let me use the movie Funny People as an example of what can go wrong when you don’t know who you’re writing for.

I was watching a DVD screener recently for this Judd Apatow movie.  I didn’t see Funny People when it was in theaters.  (Apparently, millions of other people didn’t see it either.  According to IMDB, the movie grossed about $70 million worldwide, which was also the estimated budget.  When you factor in the costs of marketing and distribution, probably another $70 million, the movie was a bomb.)

As I watched Funny People, I kept asking myself Blake’s old question: “Who was this movie written for?”

Judd Apatow’s regular audience is young adults.  His hit movies, and he has had quite a few of them, have been aimed at the eighteen to thirty-year-old demographic, which is a smart demographic to shoot for.  Other than thirteen-year-old boys, young adults are the people most likely to go to a movie.  Executives at the major studios and at the TV networks are most interested in making movies and TV shows that will interest this demographic group.  Judd Apatow has shown a real gift for developing hit movies for young audiences: The Forty Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Superbad. 

So what happened with Funny People?  Why did it perform so poorly at the box office if Judd Apatow’s fans are among the people most likely to go to a movie?  Was Funny People written for Judd Apatow’s regular audience of eighteen to thirty-year-olds?  And if it wasn’t written for them, who was it written for?

The elements for a successful movie seemed to be in place for Funny People.  The movie starred Adam Sandler, who has been a popular star among younger audiences.  It co-starred Seth Rogen, who seems to be in every Judd Apatow movie.  You had Apatow himself writing and directing.  You had strong supporting players in Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman.  You had cameo appearances by half the comedians in show business.  And yet, when Funny People was released, the audience stayed away.  What happened?  Was it bad marketing?  Was it bad timing?  Was the movie swamped by some giant blockbuster disaster movie that came out the same weekend?  Or was the real problem with Funny People that the creators never honestly asked themselves, “Who are we writing this movie for?”

The string of successful R-rated sex comedies that started in 1999 with American Pie and continued through The Hangover all have important story elements that are appealing to the target audience of young adults.  I participated in a seminar at UCLA a year or two ago on the subject of writing comedy for the screen.  I shared the dais with several other veteran comedy writers including a guy who was teaching a course titled, “Writing the R-rated Comedy.”  This writer said that R-rated comedies are based on one stupid act, such as getting drunk at a bachelor party or going to bed with Seth Rogen.  (The One Stupid Act in The Forty Year Old Virgin was Steve Carell revealing to his male friends that he had never had sex.)  The story that follows becomes the hilarious consequences of that One Stupid Act.  (In my book, Elephant Bucks, I refer to a similar moment in a sitcom script which I call the Unwise Decision.  One Stupid Act or Unwise Decision, it’s the same critical plot element.)  I’ve also noticed that even though R-rated comedies are marketed as broad and offensive - That’s the hook, right?  You’re going to see something offensive - the fact is that almost all of them turn out to be very sweet stories about growing up.  At the end of the movie, the socially inept main character has matured significantly.  Like most good stories, successful R-rated sex comedies are about redemption.  The main character ends up a better, happier, more complete person as a result of going through the ordeal that follows the One Stupid Act.  (In The Hangover, the main character is all three of the guys.  Since the three characters act in tandem throughout the movie, they really count as only one inept main character.  The One Stupid Act is drinking the booze laced with the blackout drug.)

In watching Funny People, I noticed that these vital story elements – inept main character, one stupid act, and redemption - were not clearly defined.  I think the reason these elements weren’t defined is that Mr. Apatow never decided who he was writing the movie for.

Who is the main character in Funny People?  Is it Adam Sandler or is it Seth Rogen? Adam Sandler’s character is hardly inept.  He’s rich and famous.  He has sex with any woman he wants.  Yes, he’s lonely and miserable, but that isn’t because he’s socially backward.  It’s because he’s a selfish jerk. 

Is the main character of Funny People Seth Rogen?  Rogen’s character better fits the successful R-rated model.  He’s inept.  He’s a struggling comic working in a deli, bombing on stage, and striking out with women.  But he’s also the second banana in the story.  You don’t usually make the second banana the main character.  Sandler and Rogen can’t be counted as a single character since each of them has a separate story.

So right away Funny People is in trouble because the audience doesn’t know who or what they are rooting for.  The audience doesn’t know what the goal or problem is.  Sandler has a potentially fatal disease, but so what?  He’s a jerk.  We don’t care if he dies.  Rogen is working for Sandler, but so what?  We don’t care if he succeeds at his degrading job.

What is the One Stupid Act in Funny People?

If there is One Stupid Act for Adam Sandler’s character, it is the pursuit of his ex-girlfriend who is now married to someone else, but that plot line doesn’t get going until halfway through the movie. 

If there is One Stupid Act for Seth Rogen’s character, I guess it’s when he agrees to work for Adam Sandler.

But there is no clearly defined One Stupid Act in Funny People.  Without One Stupid Act early in the film – Katherine Heigl getting pregnant in Knocked Up, Jason Segel checking into the same Hawaiian hotel as his ex-girlfriend in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the three guys waking up in the trashed Las Vegas suite in The Hangover – you don’t have any hilarious consequences to play out in the rest of the story.

Before the audience is fifteen minutes into Funny People, two of the three critical elements in a successful R-rated comedy – inept main character and One Stupid Act – have been either irreparably muddled or simply tossed aside.

Is there redemption in Funny People?  At the end of the movie, Adam Sandler is slightly less of a jerk than he was at the beginning, but he hasn’t really changed very much.  Seth Rogen is somewhat less of a wimp, but he still goes crawling back to Adam Sandler.  So where exactly is the redemption? 

Did all of these mistakes result from the creators of Funny People not knowing who they were writing the movie for?  I think so.  If they had been writing the movie for their usual audience, they would have included the critical elements that would have made the story work.  I think Judd Apatow was writing Funny People partly for his regular audience, who he perhaps took for granted.  But mostly I think he was writing the movie for the critics and the award givers, the same tiny audience that Tina Fey is happy to court with 30 Rock.

Here’s the problem with writing for critics and award givers: There aren’t enough of them to justify a $70 million movie or an expensive single-camera TV series.  And surprise for Judd Apatow, the critics mostly hated Funny People, and it isn’t going to win any awards.

There are elements that I can admire in Funny People.  It’s pretty realistic and unapologetic in its depiction of people in show business.  Most creative people in Hollywood are soulless, vain, selfish, uncaring jerks, just like the characters in the movie.  The only character in Funny People who isn’t a complete jerk is Seth Rogen.  But he’s such a wimp throughout the movie that you can hardly admire or root for him.

Frank Capra, the three-time Oscar winning director and producer of the classic comedies It’s A Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and You Can’t Take It With You, said that you can’t be successful in movies unless you are entertaining.  Funny People is not entertaining.  At two hours and thirty minutes of cynicism, bitterness, and ennui, it’s an ordeal.  Who did Mr. Apatow think was going to be up for this ordeal?  Who was he writing this movie for?

Keep these things in mind the next time you start a spec pilot or screenplay.  You need to know who you are writing for.  The writers of the CBS comedies on Monday night know who they are writing for.  The writers of practically every other sitcom on TV don’t.    

I was poking around the house earlier this afternoon, trying to find my copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers.  I think it is in that book that Gladwell talks about tenacity as one of the key elements of success.  I wanted to see if I could find a pithy quote for you because I was thinking about tenacity this afternoon.  Well, I can’t find the book.  I gave it to my wife many months ago.  The book has disappeared into the black hole of her stuff.  It could be anywhere.  If I were more tenacious, I’d keep looking, or ask her where it is.  But right now let’s move on to talking about tenacity rather than demonstrating it.

Lest you think that I spend my days peacefully basking in my own success, I want you to know that I spend my days writing, and I haven’t enjoyed success in a long time.  I was a hot-shot TV writer and producer from 1976 until early in 2000.  At that point, my long lucky streak ended, rather abruptly I might add, and I went back to being the struggling writer I had been in 1975.  I’ve been struggling ever since.  In the last nine years I have written or co-written ten spec screenplays.  I have sold exactly none of them.  I wrote four spec TV pilots.  Again, no sales.  I wrote one book, Elephant Bucks, which, according to the publisher, has sold about seventeen copies.  I am in the process of writing my fourth play.  No productions are yet scheduled.

With success becoming more and more a faded memory, I still spend some part of practically every day writing.  Seven days a week.  (There are vacations here and there.  Last week my wife and I went to Lake Arrowhead, a man-made body of water in the mountains about an hour and a half drive east from Los Angeles).  I do all of this work, tenaciously, not because I am such a great writer (because I’m a pretty mediocre writer) or because I have so many ideas that it takes me all week to jot them down (because I struggle for ideas) or because I’m so self-disciplined.  (I am self-disciplined, but that is hard-wired in me.  It has nothing to do with character or will.  My inborn self-discipline has also caused me to miss out on all kinds of fun over the course of my life that I could have had were I a little less self-disciplined.  My personal self-discipline has a Puritan, self-punishing quality to it that I don’t really enjoy all that much.)  The bottom line is: I write because I can’t think of anything else to do.

Is this tenacity?  And if so, is tenacity something that helps you to succeed as a writer? 

Pretty much every day during the last nine years, I’ve asked myself the same question about writing: “What in God’s name are you still doing this for?”  And the hectoring voice that poses that question goes on to place the following argument: “You’re never going to sell anything ever again.  You had your shot.  It’s over.  Move on to something else.  Be like Ed Begley, Jr., and get into the ecological household cleaning products business or Dick Van Patten and sell organic dog food.  But for heaven’s sake, get over the writing because you’re finished at that.  And frankly, you were never that good at it to begin with.”  When I’m done with the self loathing, I go back to the writing.  You may have noticed that self loathing and writing get along really well together.

As I continue to write, day in and day out, month in and month out, year in and year out, approaching decade in and decade out, and continue to not succeed at writing, am I being tenacious?  Am I laying the groundwork for future success?  Or am I kidding myself?  Am I merely being stubborn and delusional and mono-focused on something that isn’t ever going to go anywhere?

Dunno.

My wife found Outliers.  She found it in two minutes.  How tenacious of her. 

I thought I remembered a section in Outliers about a writer who had toiled for many years without success and then suddenly found it.  I paged through the book, perhaps not as tenaciously as I might have, but I didn’t find the story about the writer.  I think that story is not in the book but rather in an article that Gladwell wrote for The New Yorker magazine when he was promoting Outliers.  I’m not going to get on The New Yorker website to find the article about that writer.  You can if you’re tenacious enough.

I did find the chapter in Outliers on "The 10,000 Hour Rule."  That rule states, basically, that if you’re willing to work at anything for 10,000 hours, you’re bound to get good at it.  So there’s a vote from Gladwell for tenacity.

On the other hand, here’s a quote from another part of Outliers:  “People don’t rise from nothing.  We do owe something to parentage and patronage.  The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.”  In other words, on the road to success, accidents and dumb luck can also be a huge help.

So, as I sit here writing without success, am I being tenacious, putting in the rest of my 10,000 hours, approaching a second career as a playwright?  Or am I foolishly swimming against a tide of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities that are destined to lift and carry someone else?

Well, here’s the thing:  I don’t know what else to do.  I’ve gotten used to this writing thing.  I’ve been at it, almost non-stop, since 1972.  At this point, giving up writing would be like giving up Scotch and baseball and chocolate and sex and Mexican food and Preston Sturges movies and Hawaii and Gershwin and my dogs.  I might be able to give up three of those, but I can’t give them all up.

Tenacity?  I don’t know.  It’s just what I do.