Once upon a time, I wanted to be a novelist. I wasn’t finding the stories I wanted to read and the solution was to write them myself. The craziest thing about that is after excelling in math and science in all of my schooling, I did just that and decided to go to Emerson College to study Creative Writing. Recently, I declared my concentration as fiction, which means my BFA thesis will be either a novel or a few short stories strung together. It’s everything I could have ever wanted… except in senior year, I am dabbling in film and TV. This is not what I planned, at all.
I was going to write novels and short stories, a blog if that did not work out, strictly fiction, after all, it was my dream, and what I studied. But, creative writing is creative writing in my mind, and I wanted to try writing a TV pilot script last year. Turns out I loved it and so did everyone else. It felt natural, not unlike writing a story, the format was just different. I went along with it. I read scripts now for a film production company in LA and tell them what works and what doesn’t. I just wrote another pilot script and am planning more.
And I have not stopped writing novels and short stories. It is all the same to me. It does not matter the medium that it will turn into. I could take the same story and make it into a story, a novel, poem, TV show, or film, it is the story that means something.
Does this mean I changed? Made a leap into the entertainment business rather than staying in a little writing/author bubble? Honestly, “no,” but “yes.” I am still a writer of stories, I am just molding them into different mediums and styles. At the end of the day, I chase stories, I make stories, life is made of stories, some real and some fake, and it is up to me to decide how I want to tell them.
To a small me who wanted to be a novelist, I think that was simply because she did not know how else to tell a story. Now, I have told stories in standup comedy, stories on the street to friends, over text messages, the medium is nothing to me as long as the story is there. Here’s to a life in entertainment, novels, wherever life takes me, as long as it is creative and as long as I get to tell my story.