that's just Hollywood...

I will never forget the moment I finally told members of my extended family that I was writing a book. I received mixed reactions. My parents were supportive from the start, almost too supportive. I remember my mother working on a short story when I was younger, and how she sent it off to some magazine seeking publication. A few months later, she received her first and only rejection letter. She gave up. So when I told her my news, she jumped immediately saying things like, “You’re going to be rejected but don’t let that stop you.” Now going on five years later, my mother is worried I will give up on my dream because she has this preconceived belief about the publishing industry. The process from writer to publisher to print is as fast as the movie industry depicts.

I also received the typical reaction, “How are you going to make money at that?” and “Shouldn’t you be working towards a degree with more opportunity?” My brother’s only question was, “So when you going to start drinking, smoking pot, and divorce your husband? There are many state parks and cabins you could hole up in while your life disappears.” Now my brother was joking. Jamie has always supported me just as I have supported him, but when he said these things, other family members were quick to back his comments.

Reading this week’s assignment, Box Office Poison by Wendy Bishop and Stephen Armstrong, forced me to examine not only all the movies I have watched based on writers but these comments as well, and I saw for the first time how they influenced my own life as a writer. We all know that Hollywood romanticizes certain occupations. When I see a writer portrayed in a movie now, I find some of them laughable. Hollywood’s betrayal of how easy it is for a writer to reach publication and the speed in which their book hits the market, is one reason people, who are not writers, think that taking several years to write a book is plan lazy.

The article asks how we can change these Hollywood depicted images of our craft. I agree that it needs to start in writing programs. The learned writer must pass to the novice the images they have discovered about writers, but the novice must be willing to accept these new ideas. However, will this erase the Hollywood images of the public, the outsiders to our profession? That will take much longer to change. In a way, those writers who are household names in our society feed into these images.

The public only see these writers after the books are written, after the countless hours of revisions, after all the hoops they had to jump through to satisfy the publishing house, and at the book signings and television interviews. In a way, the same Hollywood images that blind the public and potentially hurt novice writers are fed into by the writing community. We helped birth the monster and need to help in its taming. We have to be the first in our society to change our self-image. Only then can we reasonably expect Hollywood to change.