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Every writer or creative is trying to break in. You might be a writer trying to get your first piece into pixel or print, you might be an actor trying to land a part in a high-profile production, you might have been walking your path successfully for a while, but now are trying to open a door off your corridor of success.
How do you do it?
There is a simple formula that is outlined by editor Andy Schmidt in Peter David’s excellent Writing for Comics and Graphic Novels:
‘Any two of the three attributes (talent, persistence, and luck) should get you your shot eventually.’
The essence being that you can’t control luck, you can just be subject to it, and that the more you persist, the more attempts you make, the more chances you have of luck coming into play. All fair and good, but there are better and worse ways of applying this model. Stubbornly submitting your material over and over again is a fine entry point, but it’s not going to be hard. You will be gutting it out, battering against the door you are trying to break through with just your will to persist, and your chances of success are going to go down not up. Why? Because you might well break before the door does. It’s a game of time and endurance, so, making your ability to persist stronger and developing your talent is vital.
Develop Your Craft
I prefer to substitute craft for talent in Andy Schmidt’s rule of three for breaking in. Why? Because there is a general idea that talent is a fixed property of you as a person. Talent in this case though, means how good your work is. Not how good you are, but the quality of your craft. If you have talent within you but you never express it, you are not going to break into your field. Talent is not fixed either. You can develop it, you can make it stronger, grow its scope, develop its depth of expression. That is your craft, and you can absolutely develop it. How you do you go about developing craft? Have a read of these.
Persistence is Spelled Endurance
You can’t control if you break in or not, or when or how you do. That means that you might have to persist in your efforts for a long time. And that can be tough. After twelve months of auditions, or querying agents, or trying to get a role, your morale may have dipped a little… or a lot. After the same amount of time again you might be ready to quit. And if not then, at some point you will be. Persisting is not an easy thing. Simple stubbornness will get you so far – your decision to keep going through rejections and setbacks – but stubbornness is relying on the raw power of your will, and that, while heroic, does not actually make you likely to succeed.
The Emotional Cycle
What makes persistence hard is the emotional cycle. You might begin with determination. Then move into excitement as you progress with your work. Then tiredness comes for you. You complete a piece and send it off with hope. You wait and hear nothing, and the hope thins to uncertain disappointment. You start again, you work, you hope, you slump back to disappointment. Each time, the downs might be deeper than the heights, and the the cycle keeps turning, and as it does, it grinds your morale thinner with each revolution. Eventually you either break, and give up, or you break in.
How to break the cycle? If you care about what you are doing there is always going to be an element of hope and disappointment at play. Making the cycles less wicked is possible though, and you can do that by making the process of what you are doing routine, and taking success into your control.
Make the tasks routine
Make what you are doing a routine rather than a quest. If you are sending queries, or auditions, or samples, or making calls, schedule them. Make it a rote task, with a time and date attached. This has two effects – it makes you keep going when you might otherwise not, and it takes a lot of the emotional fluctuation out of the process.
Take success into your control
For each of the actions you are taking – sending a query letter, re-drafting a manuscript, recording an audition – write them down and put a line through them once you have completed each one.
Updated query letter – done. Success.
Sent query to another agent – done. Success.
Went to a literary convention to get to know people in the publishing industry – done. Success.
What we are doing here is framing success in terms of what is within our own control. Sending a query letter to an agent is in your control – how they respond to it, or if they do at all is not. You have taken the action you can control and therefore that is success.
There is one other thing that you can do, that is not part of the classic triumvirate of luck, persistence, and craft. It’s all to do with people, and we’ll be diving into it in Part II.
John French
Last thing…
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Edited by Greg Smith
Written without AI
