‘Don’t Get Your Hopes Up!’

the well-intentioned advice it’s best to ignore

I am a writer.

I create original content for television and film.

I have a business, Word Ninjas (www.wordninjas.com.au), which I operate with my partner, Ruth Estelle. We work in a world where we often survive on the smell of an oily rag, and we’re not mechanics!

It’s a roller-coaster, full of feast and famine. Our projects command industry respect, but respect don’t pay the bills, baby. Content being produced does.

People — colleagues, family, friends, random people at dinner parties asking what we do — tell us, constantly, ‘don’t get your hopes up!’.

They don’t want us to get hurt by the industry. They don’t understand.

Hope is our drug.

Without it, we would have stopped writing for our industry long ago.

We chose the path of original content early. One, we’re good at it — our work now has immediate access to various distributors and network and television executives in Australia. And two, attempting to crack the established writer network as writers for hire here was well-nigh impossible.

This was the only way for us to get into a writers’ room — create the show ourselves.

And we have done that. We have created many shows.

Of the many, two have been looked at by a major streaming service and turned down, not for the quality of the show, but for one of the three million other reasons that exist for getting a rejection.

Another two, a drama and a comedy, are about to go into another global streamer for consideration.

One drama sat with a national cable channel for almost two years. They loved it, said ‘yes’, had a shift in commissioning policy (see three million other reasons, above), and then finally left it.

Two years. Every day we tried to have our hopes up, but it was hard to sustain. We still hoped they’d say ‘yes’ again, right up until they said ‘sorry’.

Our shows get optioned, we have great producers who believe in us and the project, and execs who push the project up the line. We all get our hopes up.

A kids’ drama at a free-to-air network where everyone loved it, GFC hit, it fell over.

A two-minute animated interstitial received network development funding, then the staff changed. Boom. Gone.

Creating content and writing scripts and pitch documents for it in our industry means you get judged. A lot.

I do stand-up comedy, as well, and I can be judged by a room of 200 people, then turn them around so they love me by the end of my set.

People say it’s the hardest job because they view it by their own ability to perform, which is often low.

If you’re good, however, and you know your craft, which I do, a stand-up gig is a pure pleasure, and the judgment is all positive. Because I’m in control.

As writers with a new show we have crafted and molded for the market, once our work is sent out our control evaporates and the judgment begins, and it will not stop until everyone is dead.

We hope the judgment will be good.

And these days, it mostly is. But the truth of the industry is that there will be many more rejections than there will be green lights. So, for sanity’s sake, it would seem reasonable to only send out one or two projects.

Ruth and I do not take that reasonable line. We are hope junkies. We send a project out, we create another, we manage the other six that are already with producers in different stages of development.

Between us, the number of strong shows we create with actual potential to be made is large and growing.

Our ‘hope’ drug means we have got better and better at our craft.

Our short documents, the pitches that get us in the door, are pretty damn fine these days.

Our pilot scripts demand attention.

Last week we hit a low — a funding rejection for a teen drama we love. Won’t stop us or our producer, but it was a road block.

Then, in the space of a few hours, we got updates on four separate projects from different producers and a distributor, with all of them moving forward.

Suddenly, we were mainlining hope. Again.

This morning we had a video conference for a TV drama we’ve been tinkering with for a while. We were getting writer’s catnip from the three industry professionals discussing our show: ‘fresh take’, ‘brilliant characters’, ‘great storylines’ and my favourite, ‘sophisticated writing’.

They were on board.

Then we were out of the loop for a while as they discussed pathways forward, tossing major names around — HBO, Universal, Paramount, and others — and a wonderful thing happened…

Our hope turned into their belief.

People with our best interests at heart will keep saying to us ‘Don’t get your hopes up!’.

We will smile politely, but continue to get our hopes up, because where else is there for them to go?

Without hopes and dreams, this industry would disappear into a puff of smoke.

To any other writers out there, my best advice is: keep your hopes up!