June
25The Art of Facing Upward
I thank my colleague Anne Thompson for blogging J.K. Rowling's brilliant commencement address at Harvard. In it Rowling described the value of failure - and the message is relevant in a town like Hollywood, where rejection is a day-to-day experience.Having become the richest non-royal woman in England, Rowling recalls what it felt like earlier in her life to have a marriage implode, to be jobless, a lone parent and a failed writer.
In retrospect, she says, "Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. I discovered that I had a strong will and more discipline than I had suspected. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity."
Read that again, folks, next time a casting director says "you're wrong for the part" or a development dweeb tells you your script sucks. You, too, could become a billion-dollar novelist.
Subscribe to Peter Bart's Blog Feed
Thanks for posting this.
I used to be a novelist with Simon & Schuster until I imploded from working too hard, too much, and for too little (have you ever SEEN one of those book contracts up CLOSE??? oy... the percentages.)
anyhow, I spent the past four years working on a script based on one of my books while i ran out of cash and ended up on the dole.
Now i'm up for welfare fraud because i lived on credit and I've had it, feeling like a maid in san francisco, so i'm BEGGING them to bring me up on charges and soon, so i can have more "character."
i WISH people would talk more about failure and tests of faith and still saying "no" to a bad deal (i have no kids).
but instead, failure is like a bad smell. a fart at a winter party in minnesota, where all the windows are tightly closed against the outside elements.
thanks peter bart. failure's also fun once you laugh about it. what have you got to lose?
then you actually find yourself SWAGGERING... first a little... then A LOT.
--e
Posted by: ERIKA LOPEZ | 6/25/2008 4:49:21 PM