Dan Harmon’s advice for young writers
My suggestion for young writers: find your voice and shout it. Know who you are, know what you love, know what you hate and why. Take a piece of paper and press it to the top of your brain and share that map of your universe with anyone who will bother to look at it. If that doesn’t appeal to you, the problem solves itself, because there are those among us who are compelled to do it, and they are the ones that should be doing it…
Yes, I believe in my heart of hearts that, to quote Stuart Cornfeld, a producer working for Ben Stiller’s Red Hour, “talent will out.” Talent will out. If you should be doing what you are doing, either by grace of God or the industry’s greed, you are going to be discovered. The difficulty is that you can’t control when.
—Dan Harmon, on Reddit
I like the last two lines of the quote. It can be applied in whatever it is we do. You work hard, showcase your talent, but you have no control when you will be discovered (or hired, etc).
NicolesArtsResource
August 27, 2012 at 11:38 am
Exactly. As David Mamet likes to say, everyone who spends twenty-five years in Hollywood gets a break sooner or later—but you don’t know if it will come at the end of those twenty-five years, or the beginning. The key thing is to stick around until everyone else has given up and gone home.
nevalalee
August 27, 2012 at 11:50 am