Perhaps we are all unlikely writers. Who can say with any certainty how, where, or why they have been visited by the creative impulse? What we know is that when it arrived, largely unbidden; having infiltrated our psyche, we were transformed. This was my experience, although unlike most of the writers I know who were busy making up stories when they were old enough to pick up a crayon, my creative life did not begin until my 45th year. And that beginning was as surprising and profound as what was to follow.

The year was 1993, and the country and the psychiatric field had fallen in love with a new little pill by the name of Prozac. I had been practicing psychotherapy for 15 years and was as curious as the next person about this new wonder drug and the dramatic stories circulating about its effectiveness in treating chronic depression. Being the descendant of a long line of depressive men, I decided to experiment, allegedly to find out for myself what my patients were experiencing, but secretly hoping for a miracle that would remove the lingering cloud of melancholy shadowing my life. My primary care doc complied and handed me a few samples like he was handing out candy.

Someone's finally getting real.

That's what I first felt, reading Don Lee's Rumpus essay itemizing the brutal realities of the writing life.

Lee lays it down hard: “Pretty much everything about it  –  the act of writing, the act of publishing, especially the act of promoting –  is miserable. And it only gets worse as the years unfurl.”

Acknowledging upfront that his own writing has made a bit of money as well as given him a solid teaching career with a decent salary and benefits, Lee names the sibling truths:

• Making the work is a perilous journey, haunted,  self-doubting.

• Self-promotion, “pressure to perform and be charming and sell [oneself],” can be agonizing.

So can waiting for reviews, receiving bad reviews, or (worst?) no reviews.

Lee notes that “being a midlist writer is the most tenuous position in publishing...” He may not have considered how it feels to be a small press/literary writer, whose sales and fan base seldom register on any agent's or publisher's radar.

The pitch is your foot in the door, getting someone to be interested in your script/book.

I’m that door. My job is to find projects and submit them to the decision-maker.  

I work for Muse Productions, Inc. You’ve seen our films: American Psycho, The Virgin Suicides, Spring  Breakers. We are pre-production; we find a script, marry it with a director and actors, and find the money. Everything we do is finding the project and selling it to everyone. Pitching is the most important aspect of our job. 

It starts with my pitch of your pitch. I read your proposal and then if I’m interested I read your script. If I like your script, I turn it into two or three paragraphs to sell to my boss.

The unfortunate thing I’ve learned is that a bad pitch can hide a good script.

Your goal with a pitch is not to simply get me to read your work, you want to have already sold your script/book to me (publishers/producers) with the pitch. By reading the script I am simply getting the details and checking that it is as you have described.

With this article I can help you avoid common mistakes.

It wasn’t easy. In fact, it was one of the hardest things I have ever had to face. I was twenty-three when the demons of my childhood stepped out of the shadows and my world came crashing down.

When I was a child, an adult in my life sexually abused me. It went on for a while, and then it was over. I did what any child does when they find themselves shaken with fear. I hid. I somehow pushed the memories back into the deepest corners of my mind and I acted like the monsters were from a bad bedtime story rather than my life. I never found the courage to tell anyone, so I locked away the memories and did my best to forget.

Suddenly, and without warning, I was facing those demons again. For nearly twenty years I had found ways to avoid them. I had all but forgotten what happened, but now they had reappeared from the darkness and were showing their sharp teeth.

Six months into the search for an agent and publisher for my first book, I found myself singing this line from a John Prine song, “…felt about as welcome as a Walmart Superstore.” Indeed. A negative tailspin followed that will be recognizable to most writers: “You can’t write. Who are you kidding?” Sound familiar? I considered stuffing the manuscript into the lower drawer of my desk. Writers die a thousand deaths in this way.

In thirty years of practicing psychotherapy, I have worked with countless authors and artists who were under the spell of self-reproach. These were talented people who struggled with persistent feelings of inadequacy. In nearly as many years as a writer, I have faced my own dark hours suffering from the internal narrative that proclaims, “I am just not good enough.” Even our most successful writers are subject to troubling insecurity and episodes of self-doubt, ultimately undermining their creativity. 

I was leaving the gym the other day, feeling good, occupying that unique moral high ground between having just exercised and not yet eaten a cheeseburger. Theoretically, I could still eat kale for dinner and maintain my elevated moral status over the non-exercisers of the world. This will never happen, of course. Kale is disgusting and cheeseburgers are heaven, but I am not opposed to feeling theoretically happy and morally superior to enormous numbers of people for short periods of time.

As I made my way past the smoothie bar, already thinking about cheeseburgers, my keys slipped from my fingers and dropped to the floor, landing squarely on my foot. Before I could bend over to retrieve them, a woman walking into the gym bent down, picked up my keys, plopped them into my hand, and continued moving past me, so fast that I didn’t even have a chance to see her face. As I turned to proffer a thank you, she entered that medieval torture chamber where unfortunate souls ride stationary bicycles to nowhere while authoritarians in spandex shout at them for not going nowhere fast enough.