“The real you shows up everywhere but the page.”

A veteran writer once told me, “The real you shows up everywhere but the page.”

It hurt, and it took me a few years to make sense of what he said. It wasn’t just that I was hiding on the page, I didn’t know how not to hide. I didn’t know how to convert the parts of me that held depth, meaning, and candor into the bones of story. I didn’t know how to make my characters a reflection of my deepest fears and hopes. How to make the theme a reflection of my darkest secrets.

Until I did.

It’s so easy to hide as writers. We hide behind vagueness - because we’re not exactly sure what we want to express. We create intricate mysteries with no real answer because we’re not sure what the mysteries we devise reveal about the world. We attempt to explore many themes because we’re afraid to stand behind just one. We craft protagonists that hide their motives because, like them, we’re scared to verbalize what we really want.

For executives, producers, and people who assess our work this shows up in notes as “couldn’t get into the characters,” or “didn’t feel compelled to read on.” Or we get the “goose chase” notes, where the assessor says they liked one small snippet of our script, so we blindly take their note as gospel and rewrite to please their whim.

Then, after some time of sending the piece to agents, and paying to submit it to script competitions, we archive the script in the draft folder and move on, repeating the same mistakes.

We begin our process unclear and end it, always, in heartache.

It Doesn't Have to Be This Way

If you feel you keep getting the same note in your writing, you have to get clear on how you’re hiding. When I work with someone new, we start by detailing - with painstaking accuracy - the vision of what their career could be. We find a uniquely personal and intensely specific theme, and then we set a clear course to achieve their goals.

The secret sauce between laying out your goals and achieving them? Visibility. Letting people see, clearly, who you are and what you care about on the page. And for some people, they don't know exactly who they are in their work. My coaching is a deep exploration designed to fortify your narrative identity and bolster your authorial confidence.

The Results of Not Hiding

My clients have gone from being a recurring actor on a TV show to being staffed as a writer on that same show, and from never writing a pilot to having their series repped at CAA. From getting notes from classmates and friends on their screenplay to getting notes from the top executives at Apple Film Originals.

Those clients became powerfully visible in their work.

Writing a great screenplay or pilot is the practice of turning what’s uniquely yours into something others can feel.

When you’re ready to stop hiding, let’s talk.