More Cowardice
Monday, October 03, 2005
Here's Mat Coward on luck:
What happened? Well, since you ask.
I'd been working for Reuters in Singapore for a little over five years and had had my fill of the sweaty shopping mall and cultural vaccuum that serves as the smallest independent republic in South East Asia. It was time to return to the UK and I also felt it was time to make the effort to get serious about writing. That was the extent of my plan, I'm ashamed to say. It didn't occur to me to do much in the way of writing because I wasn't sure what to write and I didn't really know what to do with it should I complete anything.
This is NOT A PROFESSIONAL APPROACH. Needless to say, it worked. Really.
A close friend of mine from school is a writer. At university he met and then later married a woman who went into publishing. She became a friend, too. From publishing she moved into script editing for TV shows like The Bill and Soldier, Soldier. And then The Bill again. When they divorced I kept in touch with both (a clever move, as it turns out) and, shortly before I left Singapore the friend who was the script editor on The Bill asked me if I would like to try and write for the show. (That's how I remember it, of course. Ask her and she may tell you of nightly long-distance drunken phone calls full of pleads and threats. Not that I'm going to name names here. So you'll just have to trust me: I'm trying to make a point, after all.)
So, no desperate months of crafting spec scripts and sending to faceless executives at TV companies. No begging letters to production companies. Here I was being asked to try and write something. This wasn't complete madness on the part of my friend. She knew that at the very least I was literate and that there were still a few years remaining before the worrying streak of insanity that has laid waste to both sides of my family tree would claim its next victim.
There was one small glitch, however, in the process at this point. In order to prove to her own bosses - Thames Television, at that point - that she was not being blackmailed or suffering delusions or a bad reaction to an over-ripe prawn, she asked me to forward her a sample of my writing. And she didn't mean my signature.
What happened next? Tune in later for what happened in Boston, how I ate lunch with the actors from The Bill, and how alcohol finally scuppered my first show.
People who say 'you make your own luck' are usually people who have reached a position of some eminence, at least in their own eyes, and who are reluctant to admit, especially to themselves, that luck got them where they are at least as much as hard work, genius or perseverance.This can be a hard lesson to accept but lets's face it; there are probably people buying lottery tickets every week who genuinely believe that it's only a matter of time before their numbers are chosen and they will never have to struggle to round up the cash for ciggies and a new shell suit ever again.
Hear me now, young ones: luck is everything.
You might be very good, very hard-working, very well organised, but if you're ever going to make the transition from someone who manages to place the occasional poem in an underground SF mag to someone who makes a proper living freelancing, then at some time in your life you are going to have to hit a quite incredible piece of good luck; incredible in the sense that you'd never get away with it in fiction.I know; I've had my bit of luck. Unfortunately, she only stayed for a while before deciding she'd got the wrong person. I wasn't quite the sort of guy she'd been looking for, apparently. She didn't quite go so far as to say, "It's not you, it's me," but it hung there, unacknowledged, in the embittered gap between us.
What happened? Well, since you ask.
I'd been working for Reuters in Singapore for a little over five years and had had my fill of the sweaty shopping mall and cultural vaccuum that serves as the smallest independent republic in South East Asia. It was time to return to the UK and I also felt it was time to make the effort to get serious about writing. That was the extent of my plan, I'm ashamed to say. It didn't occur to me to do much in the way of writing because I wasn't sure what to write and I didn't really know what to do with it should I complete anything.
This is NOT A PROFESSIONAL APPROACH. Needless to say, it worked. Really.
A close friend of mine from school is a writer. At university he met and then later married a woman who went into publishing. She became a friend, too. From publishing she moved into script editing for TV shows like The Bill and Soldier, Soldier. And then The Bill again. When they divorced I kept in touch with both (a clever move, as it turns out) and, shortly before I left Singapore the friend who was the script editor on The Bill asked me if I would like to try and write for the show. (That's how I remember it, of course. Ask her and she may tell you of nightly long-distance drunken phone calls full of pleads and threats. Not that I'm going to name names here. So you'll just have to trust me: I'm trying to make a point, after all.)
So, no desperate months of crafting spec scripts and sending to faceless executives at TV companies. No begging letters to production companies. Here I was being asked to try and write something. This wasn't complete madness on the part of my friend. She knew that at the very least I was literate and that there were still a few years remaining before the worrying streak of insanity that has laid waste to both sides of my family tree would claim its next victim.
There was one small glitch, however, in the process at this point. In order to prove to her own bosses - Thames Television, at that point - that she was not being blackmailed or suffering delusions or a bad reaction to an over-ripe prawn, she asked me to forward her a sample of my writing. And she didn't mean my signature.
What happened next? Tune in later for what happened in Boston, how I ate lunch with the actors from The Bill, and how alcohol finally scuppered my first show.
