The car door creaked a little as I stepped out into the dark. I was wearing dress clothes and a leather jacket, a resume in one hand. I was 18 years old, job hunting around Colorado Springs.
Not much had happened so far that summer. Some weeks before my sister had shown me a contest to write a stage play, and we both entered. I pushed and sweated until I produced a fourteen-page play, my sister produced one that was over thirty pages. That was when I discovered she was, in some ways, a better writer than I was.
I had already gotten an email telling me my script wasn’t accepted but that one of the judges would call me to talk about it. I had shrugged and continued applying for jobs online, usually following up in person everywhere I applied.
Which brings me back to the night .
I began walking through the dark parking lot towards the restaurant I had recently applied to work. I had been job-hunting all day, and this was my last stop.
Then my phone rang. I stopped walking, got the phone out and found myself talking to one of the contest judges. He graciously informed that my script had a great concept -- it took an alien invasion and turned it on its head -- but that it had seemed more like a film script than a stage play. I admitted I had actually based my script on an idea on a partial script for a short film. The contest judge said something encouraging and politely hung up.
Good concept, I thought. Film scripts. Suddenly I had new direction as a writer.
Ultimately I never got the job at that restaurant, and I spent two years teaching myself to write screenplays before I realized I wanted something else and switched to writing graphic novels. So it would appear experience didn’t mean much in the end.
The reality, though, is that night was a real turning point even though I ultimately chose another path. I learned that night that I had a gift for interesting concepts and for writing scripts over prose. Some of the principles I learned from film scripts still apply when I write graphic novels.
I’ve discovered I’m not the only artist who’s benefitted from an apparent wrong turn -- in fact, there are some very successful artists who’ve made “mistakes” which paid off in the end.
Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman are two artists who met in the 1980’s while working for an editor who was conning them both. Since then, they have collaborated on everything from children’s books (“Coraline”) to comic books (“Sandman”) to movies (“Mirrormask”).
Danny Elfman, one of the most successful composers in Hollywood, learned to write orchestral music while he was in an avant-garde musical theater group. Then he joined a new-wave rock band and didn’t use that knowledge for seven years -- at the time, Elfman didn’t think he would ever use it again.
It’s so easy to discount the wrong turns, the little moments that give you new direction and then fizzle out. But those moments always bring you a little bit closer to being the best artist you can be.