Breaking In by Jeff Alexander

(View entire post here)

There's a (likely apocryphal) story about a famous author who addressed an audience full of people who aspired to literary success. "You want to be writers?" he asked them. "Then go home and write." End of address. Of course I can't remember who the writer in question was, so I guess the joke's on him.

 

Still, since there doesn't seem to be any other one reliable way to "become a writer" -- beyond simply by writing, that is -- people tend to ask writers how they managed it. The answer isn't always encouraging to the aspiring scribbler, as it generally includes the difficult-to-fake elements of years of hard work and frustration combined with one or two bucketfuls of luck. Alas, I am no exception. I spent years flailing around hopelessly, rarely earning anything for stringing sentences together, until one day I was invited over to Garrison Keillor's house. So in my case, it was more like a swimming pool of luck.

I'd been told I had a way with written words since grade school, but it wasn't until my early twenties that I started my first novel, largely at the encouragement of my wife. I worked on the book for several years and through a number of life changes, got it as good as I could get it, shopped it around to some agents, and finally landed one. Eventually that agency went under, and I gave up on the book for a while.

I wrote other stuff, though. Short stories, mostly for evening college classes I was taking. A spec script for Xena: Warrior Princess, when that show was still on. A Jacobean revenge tragedy in five acts, written in iambic pentameter. You know, the kind of stuff everyone does. Meanwhile, at my day job, I kept trying to figure out how to transition into a role where I could do any kind of corporate or marketing writing. This proved quite a challenge, as none was being done there.

Eventually, after getting nowhere with my second Project Greenlight screenplay submission, I decided to start a blog. This was in 2002, when it seemed like everyone was already doing it, but before everybody actually did. And meanwhile my wife, whose job was helping people find jobs, e-mailed me a notice for a "Staff Writing" gig at Minnesota Public Radio.

Although the ad didn't specifically say so, I quickly decoded that the job would be at A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor. I sent my cover letter and resume, then dashed off some samples when they asked me to, and then one Saturday morning there was an e-mail in my inbox from America's Storyteller asking if I could come by for a chat.

Well, I did, and a couple of weeks later I was hired. I believed, and still do, that the thing that impressed him most about me was that I had been writing consistently, five days a week, on my little blog, and maintaining certain standards of quality and humor.

Now, as it turned out, the staff writer position I had applied for was essentially an experiment. After 29 years of writing the show more or less by himself every week, he hired me because he wanted to back off from that a little bit. Neither of us should have been surprised when a 29-year habit proved difficult for him to kick.

But I'll be forever grateful to him for that one-year-plus gig he gave me, which was likely the biggest break I'll ever get. It led to my fulfilling my long-term goal of landing a regular recapping gig at Television Without Pity (check out my recaps under the handle "M. Giant"), which in turn led to me being approached by an agent, which in turn gave me the impetus to write and eventually publish A TV Guide to Life. Plus it was enough of a resume boost that for the past several years, my day job is doing corporate writing like I was trying to do all those years before. It's hard to imagine how any of that could have happened if a venerable national treasure hadn't taken a chance on some green kid.

But it's not all luck. As green as I was, I was ready when the call came. My advice to people who want to become writers is to be ready for that call. And if you're not ready, get ready.

In other words, like the man may or may not have said, go home and write.

View more information on A TV Guide to Life

Jeff Alexander, A TV Guide to Life, television, life lessons, couch potato, books, Penguin Books