The Artist's Way

“Gain disguised as loss” is a potent artist’s tool. To
acquire it, simply, brutally, ask: “How can this loss serve
me? Where does it point my work?” The answers will
surprise and liberate you. The trick is to metabolize pain as
energy. The key to doing that is to know, to trust, and to act
as if a silver lining exists if you are only willing to look at
the work differently or to walk through a different door, one
that you may have balked at.
“In order to catch the ball, you have to want to catch the
ball,” the film director John Cassavetes once told a young
director. Hearing this, I took it to mean, “Stop complaining
about the lousy curves you get thrown and stretch, reach for
what you really want.” I have tried to follow this advice.
For years, I played studio roulette. Repeatedly, original
scripts were bought and not made. Repeatedly, fine work
languished on studio shelves, the victim of revolving studio
doors. Go pictures became dead overnight, except in my
filmmaker’s heart—which was breaking.
“That’s just the way it is,” I was told repeatedly. “If you
want to see your films made, you must first sell yourself as a
writer and then if one of yours scripts is made and if that
film is a hit and if the climate warms up a little, then you
might get a shot at directing....”
I listened to this conventional wisdom for a long time,
racking up loss after loss, writing script after script. Finally,
after one loss too many, I began to look for the other door,
the one I had refused to walk through. I decided to catch the
ball: I became an independent filmmaker.