A very tired, very stressed Christian hedgewix and artisan who is nonetheless more than happy to talk about their pursuits and help anyone who wants/needs it. Agender, they/them pronouns.
Having just finished my first year of my screenwriting masters program, i wanna share this thing that I was told at the very start of the year that I have not been able to stop thinking about
they got all 28 of us screenwriters in a room on like the second day and straight up told us—
“you will suffer for your entire career if you make this into a competition.”
they told us that, while we might like the write similar things, like in the same genre, or same settings—we’d never be in competition, simply because we were all different people.
from our big differences in life experience and in personality, down to our smaller differences in story preferences and writing style, it all made everything we all did unique.
and while we were all one of a million people trying to achieve the same goal of making writing a career—individually we were the only ones who could tell our stories.
You are the only one who can write like you, who can draw like you, who can cosplay like you, who can sing like you, who can make art like you. Don’t ruin the love you have for your craft by comparing yourself to others, by putting yourself in competition with them just because you want to be “the best”.
And finally, here’s the tough love part that we all got reminded of constantly—
The moment you decide you are better than everyone, is the moment you fail. Because you will have closed yourself off to valuable critique. You will have inflated your ego so big that the second you get rejected you’ll spiral. You will have become so high and mighty that one day you’ll look around and realize you have pushed all of your peers, and your entire support system, away.
There literally is no “best”. There is only growing with others as artists, supporting your peers, and telling your story in the way only you can. That’s how you succeed.
You know what? This actually isn’t funny at all because this really does happen. Baby boomers can’t afford to retire; that’s a big part of why millennials can’t find jobs in their fields. And if they lose their jobs (which can mean a variety of things, including their companies finding an excuse to fire them so they don’t have to pay anything for their retirement, which happened to my uncle and 5 people he worked with over one year), they aren’t as desirable because they’re retirement-age. The world has changed a lot since they got jobs they thought were supposed to be secure, and now their old strategies that used to work for finding a job don’t work anymore and they don’t know what does work. So a lot are desperate; I recently talked to a woman who had to be in at least her mid-60s who was begging on a street corner because she was replaced by a younger person and lost her job of 18 years, and it’s not the first time I’ve heard a story like that. A lot of people who were never rich to begin with lost a lot in the 2008 financial crisis and never fully recovered. Baby boomers didn’t all just magically become financially secure as they got older.
This generation war bullshit is 100% manufactured to keep our anger misdirected. It’s not baby boomers screwing over millennials. It’s rich capitalists of every living generation screwing over baby boomers, their parents, gen x-ers, millennials, and gen z-ers all at once and all in different ways. And if we collectively realize that we’re not enemies and that we actually have a common cause with common enemies, it’ll be really bad for the people doing this to us, which is why they’re pushing the generation war thing so hard.
^ wisdom on Tumblr. That’s rare.
Yep.
This generation war bullshit is 100% manufactured to keep our anger misdirected. It’s not baby boomers screwing over millennials. It’s rich capitalists of every living generation screwing over baby boomers, their parents, gen x-ers, millennials, and gen z-ers all at once and all in different ways.
Bolding and underlining the really important bits.
You heard of divide and conquer used in imperialistic wars, now get ready for D&C used against your own peoole.
