The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/the-minds-eye).
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.
**John:** This is Episode 615 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, what are you seeing when you read or write or remember? We’ll talk about the importance of visualization for screenwriters, and the fact that some very successful writers can’t do it. We’ll also be answering some listener questions on choosing a medium and directors demanding writing credit. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, what’s it like getting what you always dreamed of? We’ll discuss the pros and cons of answered prayers.
**Craig:** Oh, my. Answered prayers, oh, okay. We’re into the power of prayer on the show now. I like it.
**John:** Answered Prayers was I think the famously unfinished or unwritten book by Truman Capote. I always loved that as a title.
**Craig:** Apparently, his prayers to finish were not answered.
**John:** They were not answered. A little bit of a news hook this week. An article was in the Hollywood Reporter this past week talking about Marvel changing its whole television model, moving the way that they’re doing their series from the features division to an actual television division and really treating the TV shows more like TV shows. Craig, what did you make of this?
**Craig:** It was a little bit like reading about a restaurant that said, “You know what? We’re not going to make spaghetti anymore using beef. We’re going to use pasta.” Their method was… Look, I’m sure they felt it worked for them or that it was going to work for them. I think sometimes when a company is very, very successful, it can begin to embrace the delusion that everybody else is done and their way is always better, and sometimes break things, move fast, break things.
In the case of the way they were doing their television, it wasn’t working. It wasn’t working creatively, I don’t think, for a number of those shows, by their own admission, it seems. It also wasn’t working procedurally for the people that were working on the shows, neither writers nor directors. It was kind of good to see, but also a little bit like, yes, you mean you’re going to move to the way that the rest of us do it? Yeah. It works.
**John:** Yeah. Some of these changes will be actually calling the head writer the showrunner and making it clear that they are more the person responsible for the overall creative direction of the series, which makes sense. People always talk about television is a writer-driven medium. Thinking about the series not just as limited series, special events that have to work like movies work, but also thinking about the season-to-season, ongoing longevity of a series, it just makes sense.
**Craig:** To be clear, even though some of this is about empowering showrunners to be showrunners, the prior system wasn’t particularly great for directors either. Hopefully, this turn towards the normal will reap benefits for everybody involved, and of course for the audience too. Marvel is capable of making outstanding stuff. I have every reason to believe that this will go well for them.
**John:** I hope so too. Obviously, a lot of these things happened before the strike. In the story, they talk through some of the challenges these series were having and the issues they were facing with the way they were trying to make the stuff. It’s also worth noting that some of the changes that are going to be just put in place by the new Writers Guild contract would’ve had an impact anyway. In terms of going from a mini room situation to an actual writers’ room, that transition is different now. It’s more contractually mandated than it was before. If you’re going to make changes, this feels like the right time to make changes.
**Craig:** I suspect that the pause gave them a chance to evaluate, more than anything. Just having a few months to stop and say, “How are we doing this? And why are we doing it this way again? And why aren’t we doing it the other way that other people are doing it?” must have given them a little bit of perspective that they didn’t have before. It is helpful that we have new terms that will help them as they move towards the normal. But like you, I suspect the move towards the normal predated the contract.
I’ve never worked at Marvel. We’ve had Kevin Feige on the show. He’s a terrific guest on our show and obviously an incredibly powerful guy who’s overseen one of the most successful runs in Hollywood history, period, the end. I’m only talking secondhand, but my understanding was that there was this sense that it was the executives that ran the show. I find that the most valuable television executives not only don’t run the show, they’re not interested in running the show. What they’re interested in doing is being an advocate for their audience. More than anything else, their job is to say, “We’re supposed to reflect our audience’s taste. Here’s what we think about what you’re doing. Here’s a suggestion we have, a request we have, a question we have.” That what they’re best at. I don’t understand a world where executives are running shows. That’s not what they’re supposed to do. Seems like they’ve made the correction there. Very pleased to see it.
**John:** Obviously, a challenge with what Marvel was trying to do – and I’m sure they’re going to still be trying to do it, but maybe a little less a mandate and a focus – is their movies and their series were supposed to dovetail together in very specific ways. Things would be set up in a movie that would then pay off in a series and then go back to a movie. That’s really challenging to do. Dates shift. The needs shift. You’re trying to make each individual project the best it can possibly be. That’s very hard to do when they all have to fit together in a specific, magic way. I would not also be surprised if there’s going to be less of a focus on making sure everything pays off from this series to that movie to this next thing. Just that may not be the best way to make the best individual projects.
**Craig:** I’m probably going to get in trouble for saying this, but when has that ever stopped me?
**John:** It never has.
**Craig:** Never has. I feel like the universeness is smelling like a relic of the 2010s. I think as we are progressing into the 2020s, the whole extended something universe, it just feels kind of done. I don’t think the audience needs it. I think what they want is a good show or a good movie, really. I don’t know why everybody feels the need for everything to be interlocking that way. Yes, it helps you promote things, but nothing seemed to help the ones that didn’t work. I think just something good is good.
**John:** Good is good. Marvel was not the only entity making mistakes, apparently.
**Craig:** Segue man.
**John:** In this bit of follow-up here, we get to learn that actually, even I can make mistakes.
**Craig:** What?
**John:** Drew, can you help us out with this?
**Craig:** No, no, no. Don’t do this to me.
**Drew Marquardt:** Eliza writes, “On occasion, John misuses reticence and reticent. In the recent replay of Episode 463, John says, ‘Just to get over people’s initial reticence to read this different kind of scene description.’ Although reticence can seem like a fancy way to say reluctance, it’s not. Reticence is a reluctance to speak or share of one’s self. The words sound and function like cousins, but just like cousins, they are not interchangeable. Since John is so wordily wise, I couldn’t let him continue this spread of linguistic misinformation. But no one’s perfect, not even Duo SN.”
**Craig:** That’s right.
**John:** Eliza’s absolutely right. She’s right. I looked it up. I went back through the transcripts, and not only did I use it in 463, Episode 569 I said it wrong. I said, “I wonder if some people who would otherwise make shows are reticent to do so because they are just not social people and don’t want that responsibility.” I was using it as a synonym for reluctance. Instead, it is a very specific instance of reluctance. I’ve learned my lesson.
**Craig:** I want to say that I knew this and declined to say anything out of just the milk of human kindness. While I don’t think I’ve made this particular error myself, I also did not catch it when you said it. It just sort of flowed, and I didn’t notice it. By the way, if I did, here’s a question for you, John. Let’s say you do misuse a word. Do you like it when people correct you, or are you like, “Just shut up. Leave me alone.”
**John:** In a podcast situation that is fully editable, I think it’s fair for us to make those corrections. Occasionally, we will make those corrections, if a misstatement of fact. I’m glad to know that I was using this word incorrectly, and so I’m happy to have that be fixed.
A thing I’ve noticed about podcasts, listening to a lot of podcasts, is a lot of time you hear people use a word that they’ve never actually spoken aloud, like a word they’ve typed a lot but they’ve never actually spoken aloud, and they will mispronounce it. I find that fascinating. Sometimes I will look it up. It’s like, “Oh, that is an alternate pronunciation, so maybe it’s valid they did it that way.” But in many cases, they clearly just-
**Craig:** They didn’t know.
**John:** … didn’t know how to use the word in practice.
**Craig:** I’m not going to say I like it when people correct me, but I appreciate when they correct me. What I’ve noticed is, when people do correct me, I remember that correction much more vividly and reliably than I would if I, say, read it in an email. I still remember the screenwriter Stephen Schiff telling me that I was using comprise incorrectly. It’s very common to say, “This is comprised of blankety blank blank blank. This sandwich is comprised of peanut butter and jelly.” But in fact, comprise is a transitive verb. “This peanut butter sandwich comprises peanut butter and jelly.”
**John:** Comprises.
**Craig:** It contains peanut butter and jelly. I didn’t know that. He corrected me. I was like, “What?” He is correct. I’ve never forgotten it. I use comprise correctly all the time now.
**John:** I hear that, and also, I do wonder if it’s comprises and is comprised of. I bet if you actually were to look it up, “it is comprised of” is such a common usage that it’s become almost default usage. While I agree with Stephen Schiff that this is the actual, correct way to use it, in modern usage it’s not that. You and I, we haven’t fully given up on, but we’ve softened over the course of our 10 years of doing the podcast… You and I, over the course of the last 10 years, have argued about begging the question, and I’ve just sort of given up trying to point out when people are using it incorrectly.
**Craig:** It’s just me and Peter Sagal left now on that mountain, fighting hand to hand. I will never. Never! But yes, these little-
**John:** It’s always fun when you get a chance to use begging the question properly. It’s just delightful.
**Craig:** It is, and then no one knows what you’re talking about. There are certain orthodoxies that I think are just enjoyable unto themselves. Certainly, I guess this is unlike Stephen Schiff, if I hear somebody say, “It’s comprised of blankedy blank,” I don’t say anything, because I don’t know them. Stephen knows me, so he knows I’m going to enjoy it. But a lot of people are like, “Just shut up.”
**John:** I think what you’re pointing out though is, it’s pedantic if you don’t know the person. If you don’t have a relationship, then pointing it out is pedantic. If it’s Craig or Drew, you talking to me, saying, “Oh, John, you’re actually using the word incorrectly,” that’s not pedantic, that’s actually delightful and helpful.
**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. Great.
**John:** Craig, back in Episode 612, you talked through your diabetes diagnosis, and we have some follow-up on that.
**Drew:** James writes, “My mother was diagnosed with diabetes later in life than you, and no one thought to check out the state of her pancreas. Unfortunately, her doctors assumed it was type 2, and consequently, they missed discovering its underlying cause, which, unfortunately again, was pancreatic cancer. It might be worth listeners being aware of this. The people are getting fat and lazy narrative is too often relied upon.”
**Craig:** I am so glad that James wrote in about this. I am kicking myself, because when we talked about my diagnosis, which is this adult-onset type 1 diabetes, one of the things I failed to mention and should’ve mentioned is that there are two typical causes of certain elevated antibodies. One is type 1 diabetes, and the other is pancreatic cancer. In fact, we had to check that out for me to make sure that that’s not what it was. I don’t know why it slipped my mind, but it is absolutely true that it’s going to be one or the other, typically, when you have these certain elevated enzymes. Pancreatic cancer is brutal. It’s just a killer.
James has put forth one of the best arguments for antibody testing when dealing with evidence of diabetic pathology. I don’t care what age you are. If they tell you that you are prediabetic even or diabetic, you have to talk to them about testing these antibodies to see if indeed you are type 2 diabetic or if you are either type 1, which is a different treatment, or if you have hopefully what would be a very early stage of pancreatic cancer. Sorry to hear about what happened to James’s mother. I am terrified to imagine how many people this has happened to, but I suspect a lot. A lot.
**John:** One more bit of follow-up here.
**Drew:** Christopher writes, “I appreciated your openness in sharing your story about diabetes. It resonated with me, as I was also diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder as an adult, and similarly, only after a thoughtful doctor ordered proper testing. The diagnosis changed a great many things, but many months after life leveled out and I started feeling like myself again, I realized I was now one of around 27% of Americans who have a disability. And I mention this only because I didn’t hear you use that particular D-word during the conversation.
“I realize that being a straight white man with an invisible disability is complicated, but still, that shouldn’t be a reason to deny or minimize your experience. In my case, I initially dismissed the idea of being part of the disabled community, because I had always considered myself perfectly able-bodied and physically fit, and it felt incongruous with my identity to change that as an adult. I took great inspiration, however, from your episode with Jack Thorne. His advocacy motivated me to make some overtures to other disabled individuals to see if it was a place in which I fit. What I found was perhaps the most accepting group of people who I have ever encountered. None of them ever questioned my place among them or seemed dismissive of one’s struggles relative to another’s. We were all in it together.
“Publicly being willing to identify as disabled is a big step, and I’m not sure if you fully realized that when you volunteered the information about diabetes, that this is part of what you are doing. Going forward, it might feel a little ridiculous to say things like, ‘I am a disabled person,’ or check the accompanying box on standardized employment forms, but I encourage you to do so whenever possible. Put simply, when you identify as disabled, you naturally encounter more disabled people. You share stories together, and everyone’s experience is better off for it. We learn from and support each other most when we directly engage. You have already always demonstrated empathy in your work and a desire to be inclusive, so you should allow others the courtesy and opportunity to extend the same to you as well. Thanks for being so brave and sharing your experience with the Scriptnotes audience.”
**Craig:** Christopher, fascinating. I must admit, when I saw this statement here, the first thing I thought was, is it a disability? Obviously, we know diabetes is a disease, but is it also a disability? I went to the Googles, and the Googles sent me to the American Diabetes Association. And they have a page that says the following. “Is diabetes a disability? The short answer is yes. Under most laws, diabetes is protected as a disability. Both type 1 and type 2 diabetes are protected as disabilities. People with diabetes can do any type of job, sport, or life goal.”
That got me thinking about what Christopher was saying, because there are some bioethics here. Disability we can look at as a binary question, which I think is sort of the way Christopher is approaching it. Either you are disabled or you’re not. I’m saying all this to explain why I didn’t use the word disability. It wasn’t even a choice. It just wasn’t something that seemed in my brain to align with what was going on. It may be because I don’t necessarily see it as a binary, but more as a continuum. There are places you get to where, yeah, it’s a thing. Look, if I’m walking around with an insulin pump and I need time at work to go and change the pump or replace a tube, yeah, then I’m a disabled person who needs an accommodation to do my job. People around me need to be aware of that.
The question is, right now, given where I’m at, should I be checking that box, as he says, or not? The balance here is, am I going to be taking resources or opportunities from someone else who has a more impactful disability than mine, because there are some disabilities that are more impactful than others.
My instinct is, currently, Christopher – and I appreciate what you’re saying, and I thank you for it – but I don’t think that I’m comfortable checking that box yet, because I don’t need to. I don’t think I need any accommodations right now, and I’m very wary about taking them from somebody else who does. If anyone says, “Look, I have a disability. I want to check the box,” check the box. I have zero problem with that. But I guess this is mostly me explaining why I didn’t say it, because I don’t necessarily think I’m there yet. What do you think? This is a tricky one, John. What do you think?
**John:** I think you’re right that it’s tricky and that it’s hard to have blanket advice here. Looking back at Episode 530, we had Jack Thorne, and he was talking about how as somebody with an invisible disability, he’s had it hard to speak up for himself and advocate for himself. Then he’s really talking about the importance of having a disability advisor as part of a production, just to make sure that anybody who’s involved in production, be it cast or crew, feels like they have a person who they can go to, to talk about the accommodations they may need or to help them think ahead for a production going forward, which is great and smart. In the UK, they’ve been able to enact some of those rules, which is great.
I hear you, Craig, in terms of, I think the choice of how you identify is a personal choice. It applies to disability, but it also applies to many other issues. The fact that you have a diagnosis doesn’t necessarily, to me, mean that you have a responsibility or a requirement to identify as that diagnosis. I just want to make sure that we always leave space for people to say what they want to say about their situation.
**Craig:** Look, I have no doubt I’ll get there. Clearly, I don’t have any shame about it, because I talk about it on the show, nor do I think anyone who has diabetes, type 1 or type 2, none of them should have any shame. On that front, I agree. If Christopher’s point is you shouldn’t be ashamed, shame shouldn’t keep you from identifying as disabled, I completely agree, 100%. There may be other things, but shame is not a good reason. You do not need to feel shame about having any disease or disability.
**John:** Pulling back a little bit, I think your ability to publicly identify as what you want to identify as feels like a fundamental right. I just want to make sure that whether we’re talking about disability or someone’s gender, sexuality, or ethnic background, you are going to present yourself in the world a certain way, but you also should have some measure of autonomy in what you are saying about yourself. I just want to make sure we always leave space for people to be themselves and to speak up how they want to speak up. I honestly hear you, Craig, too, in terms of you don’t want to pull resources away from folks who may need more accommodation than you. It’s tough.
**Craig:** I certainly want to do my part to protect the workplace for people who need accommodations, but we do live in a world with limited resources and limited opportunities. I think we all understand if there is special consideration or opportunity for people of a certain class, I think we all understand that that protected class, that’s about helping people who really do need the help. It’s not simply about helping people who satisfy some superficial criteria. Steve Wynn, the guy who owns Encore, did he die?
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** I can’t remember. I think he died. But he was blind.
**John:** He was blind.
**Craig:** Did he need special financial accommodations? Probably. He was a billionaire. Yeah, I’m sure he did. Should he be getting grant money and such? I don’t think so. I think it’s reasonable to do a needs analysis, especially when we’re dealing with limited resources for a lot of people.
**John:** Agreed. Our last bit of follow-up is related to Episode 610, where we talked about what do studios actually do.
**Drew:** Mallory writes, “How do successes like Sound of Freedom and the Taylor Swift movie figure into the major studios being the only route to successful distribution?”
**John:** These are two examples of movies that were made outside of the traditional studio system. I guess Sound of Freedom was actually made inside the studio system, but then that got released outside of the studio system. Of course, the Taylor Swift movie is making a bazillion dollars. It was just self-financed and put together. I think there have always been those oddities of things that were just done outside the system, but when we’re talking about alternatives to the studio system, it’s really about an ongoing basis, not just one-off projects.
**Craig:** First of all, Sound of Freedom, the success is in dispute, because-
**John:** It’s a real question of how many people were actually in the theaters watching that versus buying tickets.
**Craig:** That’s right. Hard to say exactly. But yeah, there have always been these strange things. In the case of Taylor Swift, she really is an independent film studio. She has enough money to finance… I think it was $20 million budget. What that means is that she can finance anything and then release it however she wants. She’s also her own studio, because she can advertise and promote her own material. She goes on tour, and that’s how that works. Taylor Swift is her own business empire. That makes sense that she can compete with movie studios.
The major studios are not the only route to successful distribution. I don’t think we’ve ever said that. There are independent studios that do it. There are one-offs. We find them notable for a good reason, because they’re rare. Really, I guess the position that I’ve had, that I’ll maintain, is that major studios are, generally speaking, the most effective and most prominent way to distribute a film.
**John:** Yeah. In that episode, we talked about how, obviously, the studio is bankrolling things, but they’re also providing the marketing function. They’re providing the collection of funds function. Sound of Freedom, it made a lot of money. Did it actually pull that money back out of theaters? That’s going to be a little bit more challenging for them, because they don’t have the next movie coming down the pipe to say, “Okay, we’re not giving you the next thing until you pay up what you owe us.” Same with Taylor Swift. Apparently, it’s a deal with AMC Theaters, which was probably the bulk of the incoming money. But shaking that money back and bringing it home will be more challenging for her company than it would be for Sony, because she has no next thing coming out.
Obviously, the Sound of Freedom marketing function and the viral way they were able to make that happen was exactly perfect for their movie. Taylor Swift is her own marketing machine, so she didn’t need that function of the studio.
**Craig:** Correct. And she was smart, because what Taylor Swift, who is overtly, apparently a savvy businessperson, understood was that distributing the movie through a studio was going to cost way more than it would earn her. Way more. The studio’s cut is massive. Why do you need to go have a bank finance the purchase of your car if you are a billionaire and you want to buy a car? Don’t. Just buy it.
**John:** Just buy the car.
**Craig:** Just buy the damn car.
**John:** Our marquee topic this week stems from a series of tweets that John Green, the bestselling author, put out at the start of the month. He’s the author of The Fault in Our Stars, Looking for Alaska. Some of these books have become movies and series. His tweets read, “It’s baffling to me that some of y’all see stuff in your mind. You see it? The way your eyes see? I always thought visualize meant thinks of the words, ideas, feelings associated with the thing, not actual visuals. This may be why I’m so often wrong about what’s behind a particular cabinet in our kitchen, even though I’ve lived in this house for a decade. I also cannot tell you the layout of a room unless I’m in that room and looking at the layout. And I have no sense of direction. None.”
Somebody writes in the Twitter thread, “So when you’re reading, does it turn into a movie? Can you see the characters?” He says, “No, it’s just text. Very occasionally – I count the number of times it’s happened on one hand – I will suddenly feel as if I can glimpse something visually that’s in a story, but 99.99% of the time, it’s just text. Is that unusual?” And it is unusual, but it’s not actually unprecedented. It’s actually more common than I thought.
We’re not a science podcast, so aphantasia as a condition is not a thing we’re going to go into much detail about. But it’s hard for me as a writer to envision myself being able to do my work without being able to visualize. I thought we’d spend a few minutes talking about visualization as part of our process.
**Craig:** It’s an incredibly important part of my process. I can see how if you were aphantasic, being a novelist wouldn’t necessarily be problematic. The reason we who write for screen I think really do rely on our ability to visualize is because somebody’s going to have to actually make it.
Also, we are writing things for people to portray and act in three-dimensional space. Where are they standing? This is the great Lindsay Doran question that she would ask all the time when I wrote a script with her. Where is he standing? Where are they standing? How big is the room? How do they get from here to here? Describe the space, because there are going to be a thousand meetings where someone is going to have to figure out how to build that thing. The more you can see…
You may not be able to put every detail down on page. First of all, it’s not advisable to do so. Second of all, you just won’t have the room. The more you know, the more you can answer the question, and also the more internally consistent the work will be, because a scene is written in a space, and the scene follows the rules of that space. It doesn’t just change in the middle of the scene. For me, not only is it important, but it’s kind of essential. If I can’t see the space, I can’t start to write the scene.
**John:** 100%. I think one of the reasons why people may not immediately click to that in terms of screenwriting is because we’re not describing the whole space. Sometimes we are more, but sometimes it’ll be a slug line. It’ll say interior house, this, and it may give a little painting of what the space is like. But even if I’ve not put out all that scene description there, I have to, in my head, know where this scene is.
The first step of writing a scene for me is literally creating the space in which the scene happens, figuring out roughly the layout of the room, wherever this is, putting people in that space, figuring out their general blocking, and only then do I start being able to observe what are they doing, what are they saying, what is the movement, how does it all work. I call this looping in my head. I’m just seeing the scene play out. I can’t imagine writing a scene without that. If I’m doing a surgical rewrite on someone else’s script, I do need to build that space out in my head, or else I can’t do it.
It may have been Aline who said it first on our podcast, the joke that the screenwriter’s the only person who’s already seen the movie. Yeah, I’ve definitely already seen the whole thing before I’ve put it down on paper.
**Craig:** Oh yeah, I’ve seen it. This is this thing that’s happened to me a thousand times. When I get to a set or a place, everything’s always the other way. I don’t know why.
**John:** 100%, yeah.
**Craig:** It’s always the other way.
**John:** The phone is on the wrong side of the bed. How could you not know that?
**Craig:** It is so routine that I just laugh, and everyone’s like, “Wrong side?” I’m like, “Yeah.” Obviously, it’s not relevant. If it were relevant, I would make a point of it. The episode with Bill and Frank, I had their house in my head. This was the entrance. That’s where the dining room. That’s where the kitchen is. When you walked in the front door, the dining room was on the right, and then the kitchen was through the door, past there. And when I got their plan, they had put it on the left. They put it on the left for a reason. I couldn’t remember what it was. It had to do with something and building and blah blah blah. Every time without fail. Without fail, every single time. I think I’m very good at visualizing things, but I visualize them in the opposite direction from everybody else. The chirality is off.
But yeah, it’s essential. It’s just essential. Also, visualizing spaces allows you to write beyond the limitations of dialog. It gives you what are actors looking for, how to use the space, how to move through the space, picking objects up, what does it smell like, what is the humidity in the air, what do they lean against, can they tap their fingers on something that makes a sound, all of these things that you could do. None of them are there and accessible to you as you’re writing a scene if you can’t see the space. For what we do, I think it’s essential.
**John:** You said at the start that as screenwriters, obviously that visual thing is so important, but in writing the three Arlo Finch books, I would say that visualization was just as crucial to me, the ability to not only see what Arlo’s house was like and what the layout was and know where everything was in that place, but also what it sounded like, how the floorboards squeaked, and in the book, what did things smell like, what was the texture of stuff, how did things taste. In my head, I can do all those things. I can create tastes that I’m not experiencing. I can create smells that I’m not smelling. That was really important for me in writing those books, to just really ground you in what those spaces were, which in books have more than just what you see and what you hear. John Green is a very successful novelist who’s done all this without the ability to do that.
He’s not the only very successful person who has this condition. Ed Catmull, who’s a big Pixar director and animator, he has that same kind of mind blindness. Some very successful architects have it too. That doesn’t seem possible to me. Just me thinking about how my brain works is that these very, very visual people can’t see things in their head. They actually have to do it on paper to see the thing. That’s true. Clearly, the condition is a spectrum. They have a rating here from one to five. We’ll include it in the show notes. It’s not a disorder. It’s just a situation, like left-handedness. It’s not anything is necessarily wrong. It’s just that most people can visualize, and some people can’t.
**Craig:** Oh, I think there’s something wrong with lefthanded people.
**John:** Yeah, disaster.
**Craig:** Something needs to be done. We gotta get our country back, John.
**John:** This is just a wild theory I’m going to throw out there, and maybe somebody has tested this. I don’t feel a particularly compelling need to rewatch movies. Given a choice between rewatching a movie and watching a new movie, I’ll always watch a new movie. I wonder if some people who compulsively rewatch movies, it’s because they actually can’t see the movie in their head, and so the only way they can experience the movie is actually watching the movie, versus me, I can pull up any scene in one of my favorite movies and I can see the picture. I can tell you exactly what it is. I remember what direction characters are facing. A person who doesn’t have this visualization ability, it’s not just they can’t imagine new things. They can’t pull up memories of old spaces and times.
**Craig:** That may be true. If The Godfather comes on, I’m watching it, most Tarantino movies, and I can remember them. I can play them back. I can play back the entire scene where Samuel L. Jackson is yelling at Frank Whaley. I know where everyone is. But I still like watching it, because it’s fun.
**John:** I do wonder if down the road, algorithms will be able to figure out who is aphantasic, because it seems like the word choices we’re using and how we’re describing things ultimately may reveal… The same way they could figure out that Robert Galbraith was actually JK Rowling. I do wonder if there are certain patterns in people’s usages that will point to what’s actually happening inside their heads.
**Craig:** This is the next frontier, interfacing directly between our brains and the hardware that our brains have devised and created. I don’t know if I want to stick around for it or if I want to check out. I don’t know. The next few years are going to be nuts.
**John:** Ryan Knighton, a friend of the show – he’s been on a couple times – is a blind writer. He once had vision, but he lost his vision in his early 20s. I do notice that in talking with him and emailing with him, he uses visual words all the time. He was like, “I see what you’re saying. I’ll have a look.” He’s still using those things. I haven’t talked to him about this recently, whether in his writing he’s still seeing things in his mind, or if it is just all metaphorically seeing things rather than actually visualizing stuff.
**Craig:** I’m sure we have blind listeners. I’m curious. If we do have blind listeners who have been blind from birth, so they’ve never seen, I suspect they are doing some kind of internal visualization. Not all of them. Maybe some of them are also aphantasic. But what is happening for blind folks when they visualize things? Are they visualizing them based on the heard description or the read description? Curious. I’d love to know.
**John:** It’s good to see. Related, also there’s the phenomenon that some people don’t have internal monologues. They don’t hear things in their head. Sure. Again, there’s nothing wrong, but it’s just really unusual. I can’t imagine not being able to preview a conversation, not being able to have some ongoing chatter in your head.
**Craig:** I don’t actually hear it, hear it, but it’s there.
**John:** For sure. Let’s get on to some listener questions. Drew, help us out.
**Drew:** Oh, I feel the umbrage clouds on the horizon on this first one.
**Craig:** Here we go.
**Drew:** Greenhorn writes, “I’m a repped screenwriter but rather in limbo at the moment, since I’m switching reps, and I don’t have the appropriate person to speak to right now. A few years ago, I was introduced to a second unit director who has worked on some big movies. He’s looking to make his directing debut, so I pitched him a few ideas. One of them he loved, so I worked up a four-page outline and was in touch with him through that process. Indeed, he gave some feedback along the way, but to be frank, his contributions were minimal. The idea, title, characters, story, and set pieces are all mine. And indeed, every word on the existing document was written by me. As far as I understand, I am therefore the writer. All this writing I did pre-strike, by the way.
“He called me last week to say he just pitched the idea verbally to a major studio who love it and who want to see the outline. But he’s saying that he’ll only pass it on if I say he co-wrote it. This doesn’t feel fair, let alone true. From the conversation we had on the phone, I know that he’s doing this out of fear of the studio buying it from me and then just hiring a more experienced director to replace him.
“I’ve told him that the solution to this is for him to just option the project from me. I also told him that it isn’t fair for him to try to claim co-writer credit. He has responded petulantly and with a hostile tone, doubling down on his claim to being co-writer. And more worryingly, he said he’s now pitched the idea to another studio. But even though I’ve asked him, he won’t say which. I’m now concerned to protect my idea, since it’s the kind of high-concepty, laugh-out-loud kind of idea which you can imagine suspiciously resurfacing at a studio a little later down the line. And there’s no paper trail if he’s pitching verbally and indeed refusing to tell me where he’s pitching. So my questions: am I right to deny his claim to co-writer credit? And short of getting a lawyer on the case, how best do you reckon I respond to him while I don’t have a new rep yet?”
**John:** Greenhorn, a couple things to do right away, and then we can also probably back up to more general advice. I thought Greenhorn’s suggestion of, “You could option it from me, and that’s a way to attach yourself more fully to it,” that makes sense. He should’ve said yes to that. But he didn’t say yes to that. Now you’re concerned that he’s going to, having gone out to pitch this to different places, he’s going to try to set up this idea without you. That seems kind of like a thing he might try to do. This is a time where you actually need to make sure your outline, your four-page thing is actually… I would say actually register it with the Copyright Office, which we don’t often say. But you do need to protect yourself here and make sure that it’s clear that this really was your idea. You also have all the emails back and forth between the two of you. It sounds like there’s emails. That’ll also be in your defense. But you don’t want to be going into this planning for a lawsuit down the road. You want to stop this now if you possibly can. Craig, I’m curious what you think he should be doing right now.
**Craig:** Right now, we’re dealing with crisis management. Let’s jump in our time machine first and talk about what should Greenhorn have done. You pitched this idea that you had, and then you wrote an outline. Now, by the way, we’re not talking about an idea. Now we’re talking about a unique expression in fixed form. Now we have-
**John:** Literary material.
**Craig:** … literary material. “He just pitched the idea verbally to a major studio who love it.” I don’t believe him, by the way. Don’t believe him. I’m just going to say that right away, Greenhorn. Do not believe that.
**John:** He’s lying to you in other ways, so he’s probably lying about this.
**Craig:** “Verbally to a major studio who love it and want to see the outline.” They love it? Really? “But he’ll only pass it on if I say he co-wrote it.” Now, at that point, Greenhorn, I would have lawyered up, right then and there. I wouldn’t have offered options or anything. I’m like, “That’s it. You’re out. You’re done. Bye,” because he didn’t co-write it at all. That’s not what he did, nor do I understand why he needs to.
Greenhorn, your theory is that he wants to do this so that they can’t kick him off the project. They kick writers off of projects way easier than they kick directors off. They kick writers off of features on a daily basis. They hate kicking directors off of features. So, no, that’s not going to help him at all. At all. This is just lame. It’s not even a discussion, by the way. It’s literally not even a discussion. I’m sure he is petulant and hostile. Don’t care.
He’s a second unit director, so what do I know? I know then that he does not have experience necessarily developing material with writers as a first unit director. Second unit directors, by the way, are incredibly important, and the best ones are remarkably skilled, so in no way am I undermining what they do. They are necessary and amazing, but they do what they do.
**John:** We should say for our listeners who may not know, second unit directors generally, particularly on bigger action movies, they are filming a lot of this stunt work. They’re doing a lot of stuff that doesn’t involve the principal actors doing the main scenes. Every action movie you’ve seen has had an amazing second unit director doing that stuff. In television, they’re also doing a lot of pickup stuff for things that aren’t being hit by the main unit, so they’re crucial to things, but these are not people who are generally doing big storytelling scene work kind of things.
**Craig:** Yeah. If you go to a movie and you see a big car chase, all the shots where they’re cars, so not inside the car… Mark Wahlberg’s inside the car. The director, the first unit director is directing Mark Wahlberg inside the car. He’s going, “Whoa. Huh.” All the other stuff, zoom, ram, rah, crash, smash, that usually is the second unit director. Second unit directors sometimes are also stunt coordinators, because they are shooting fight sequences and things like that. The guys that went on to make John Wick were stunt coordinators who operated second units and then moved up to make John Wayne. It can happen, but it sounds like this particular second unit director does not have experience working with writers developing things, because if he did, he wouldn’t have said any of this.
Now, John is right, you should submit your work to the Copyright Office, and then you should call a lawyer. Now I know you say, “In short of getting a lawyer in the case,” but this is the frustrating part, Greenhorn. Sometimes I feel like John and I have a medical show, and people write in and say, “I’m bleeding out of my butt. Short of going to a doctor, what do you reckon I do with this?” You’re like, “I think you need to go to the doctor. You’re bleeding out of your butt.” You’re sort of bleeding out of your butt here. You need to go to a lawyer. It is going to cost money, but do you care or not?
The bottom line is, look, if you read about this thing happening in a newspaper, you can call a lawyer then and say, “Look, I’ve got this thing.” Then the lawyer will be like, “Great. Okay. I’m taking this on contingency, because it’s going to work, and we’re going to get money.” Or you can do it now. Personally, I would do it now. If that guy happens to be listening to this, if Greenhorn’s account is accurate, dude, act like you’ve been there before. This is ridiculous.
**John:** I would suspect Greenhorn’s lawyer will send a letter to this second unit director saying, “Stop misrepresenting your involvement in this project. To clarify, you did not write any of this project, and do not represent yourself as a writer on this project, and maybe don’t contact my client again.” There’s no salvaging this relationship. Greenhorn, I wouldn’t worry about trying to make good with the second unit director. You’re not going to end up in a happy place with this guy.
**Craig:** No. Also, to be clear, this guy is trying to sell property he doesn’t own. Once you start thinking about this like property, you can realize how offensive this is. He was like, “Hey, I want to be a car racer,” and you’re like, “Great. I like building cars. Here’s my plan to build a car.” Then he’s just going around going, to car companies, “I have a car that I made.” No. No. It’s not yours.
**John:** There are producers who are pitching projects they don’t own, but they are producers pitching projects they don’t own, and they’re not trying to claim that they are the co-writer on the project. That’s where they overstepped.
**Craig:** Correct. Also, producers that are pitching projects that they don’t write, generally speaking, have the consent of the writer. I’m not aware of any producer that’s going around there pitching IP that they have no association with. That’s just scumbag stuff.
**John:** There are a lot of scumbag producers who do that.
**Craig:** I guess that’s true. They’re scumbags.
**John:** Here’s the thing. They’re scumbags. This is a scummy thing to do.
**Craig:** Yeah, so lawyer up.
**John:** Sorry.
**Craig:** Sorry, Greenhorn. Lawyer up.
**John:** What else we got, Drew?
**Drew:** Ripley writes, “One struggle I continually have is what medium to write in. I feel with any idea I have, I can see how it would work as a cartoon or a horror feature or a comedy series. I’ve so far written a sci-fi comedy feature, an animated pilot, and a scattering of mostly drama shorts. I’m currently working on an idea that I’m on page 20 of and am still not sure what it is or should or will be. I suffer from ADHD and am often paralyzed with decision. I can see how a hundred different ways could work and never know how to narrow it down. Do you have any specific advice for this dumb issue?”
**John:** It’s not a dumb issue. I think a lot of people struggle with… I’m re-framing your question. It’s like, I don’t know what project I should write. Really, what it comes down to is you have a general story area, but you’re not sure what specific version of it you should write. That’s a really common situation. I think you just need to let yourself sit for a second, really think about what do you want to write. Is there a genre that particularly speaks to you, that you really enjoy writing, that you actually feel connection to? Is there something you’ve always wanted to try that you’ve not had a chance yet to do, that you want to experiment with? The things you write for yourself can truly be experiments. They’re a chance to take a flyer and see what works. Don’t be afraid to do that. Just try to be deliberate in your choices.
**Craig:** I think that’s excellent advice. I would only add this. Sometimes we struggle with the quantity of possible decisions, because we’re making the decisions kind of backwards. You have an idea, and then you say now, could be a cartoon, could be a horror, could be a comedy, could be animated, could be live, could be drama. Okay, sure, it could be a thousand things. We all have the same thousand things, so what’s the difference between people who are migrating firmly towards one thing, as opposed to you, Ripley, who are just like someone at Cheesecake Factory going through that massive menu, is that you are trying to stick that on top of what you’re doing. But it really shouldn’t be a decision. It should be a therefore.
You think about your idea, and you think about what the point of that idea is and what you’re trying to say with it and who you’re trying to reach, who you’re trying to talk to, and how you want them to feel. You think about all those things. As you think about them, it should begin to emerge that it would be best as blank. Anything that you and I have done could be a cartoon or a live action. Literally, Chernobyl could be a cartoon if you want it to. It wouldn’t be good, but you can do it. We make our choices for reasons. I think that’s the key is you need to figure out what it wants to be by asking what it is.
Sometimes the decision paralysis, and I’m not discounting the fact that you have an additional challenge because you have ADHD, but beyond that additional challenge, the reason you’re asking us is because you feel like, “Hey, I can get there.” I believe you can too, if you dig a little bit deeper into what exactly the thing is about. Then I think maybe you’ll have more clarity. I hope you will.
**John:** I agree. Looks like we have time for another question here.
**Drew:** Taylor from Arkansas writes, “I wrote an eight-page script that is part of an anthology feature film. The film is in post, and the producers are in talks with multiple streamers to buy it. I am not part of the WGA yet, and I cannot find on the WGA website how I should receive credit or maybe points. Any insight would be appreciated. To clarify, I wrote this script specifically for this film. These are not preexisting short scripts or films pieced together.”
**Craig:** Just to be clear, Taylor, at least this is how I’m reading your question, the project itself is a WGA-covered project. It’s just that you’re not in the WGA yet, I think.
**John:** Possibly. It’s not entirely clear from Taylor’s question. Let’s take that as the premise, and then we can modify at the end if we need to.
**Craig:** Taylor, you’re trying to figure out essentially how to qualify for full WGA membership, and indeed it works on a points system where certain kinds of work earn certain amounts of credits, like tokens, kind of, towards membership. And once you hit, I think it’s 24 of those, boom, you become a current member in good standing for, I think, seven years.
There is a manual that you can find on the WGA website, and we can, I’m sure, find a link for that that does show that. But you can also call the Membership Department at the WGA. They are there to help, because what you’re writing is a quirky little thing. It’s part of an anthology feature. Okay, so does this qualify as a short? Are you credited instead for the time you are employed? You need to call the WGA Membership Department and ask them this question, and they will give you the full answer.
**John:** Yes. Thinking about this project, whether it’s a WGA project or not a WGA project, your question of how you’re credited on the film is going to be relevant. I’ve seen anthology films where in the end, they list the different segments and then the writer and director of that segment and what the crew is, and they treat it like this was a bunch of shorts all put together. They may be an appropriate way of crediting writers in this project. Alternately, they could choose list all the writers together.
If it’s a WGA project, what’s going to happen is it’s going to be a list of participating writers, so you’ll be one of the participating writers in this, and then figure out how to assign credit. It’s tough in an anthology. Even having been on that committee, I’m not quite sure what the consensus decision would be, how they’re going to assign that credit. My guess is this is ultimately not going to be a WGA project, but we’ll see where it shakes out.
**Craig:** If it’s not a WGA project, then it doesn’t matter, Taylor, how much work you do. It’s not going to earn you towards membership. If it is a WGA project, the good news is, your credit credit, meaning written by or not, is actually irrelevant.
**John:** Absolutely.
**Craig:** It’s just employment. The question is, were you employed under a WGA contract? Even if you’re not in the WGA, if it is a WGA project, you have to be employed under a WGA contract. Let’s say that’s a yes. Then the next question is, what was the structure of that deal? Were you paid for time? Were you paid for a draft? Were you paid for a polish? What were you paid for? And then lastly, how long did that run for? Did you do two polishes? Did you do three rewrites? All of that stuff ultimately gets processed by the Membership Department.
Since we’re missing a whole bunch of details here, easiest thing would be for you to call the WGA. But don’t call them if this project is not covered by the WGA, because then it’s sort of like calling… You might as well call the US Post Office. We will have no more information or relevance to you if the production company is not signatory to the Writers Guild.
**John:** I would ask the producer or whoever it is who’s making the film whether it’s a WGA project. Also, take a look around as to who the other writers are. If none of the writers involved in the project are WGA writers, I think it’s a good guess that it’s not being done under WGA contract.
**Craig:** Agreed.
**John:** Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a series of, I think they’re originally TikToks, but I saw them on Instagram reels, by this comedian named Bonnie. I don’t know her last name. Her handle is Boobie Klapper, which is-
**Craig:** That was my handle.
**John:** That was your handle. The premise of these videos, it’s a class in teaching product packaging. It’s in that form where she’s talking to camera, but then she’s also playing the other two characters in this class. They’re really good. I’m going to play one little clip here so you get a sense of what this feels like.
**Bonnie:** Next on the list we have chips. They come in large bags, so most people aren’t going to eat the whole bag at once, and any exposure to moisture in the air will cause them to go stale. What are we going to package this in, you guys? Dylan?
**Bonnie as Dylan:** A resealable bag?
**Bonnie:** Good guess, Dylan, but no. Ruth?
**Bonnie as Ruth:** A non-resealable bag so that everybody has to buy other tools specifically designed to seal off the big gaping hole at the top?
**Bonnie:** That’s exactly right, Ruth. We want to create a headache so universal that an entire market of products emerges to try to address it. Well done.
**John:** She’s done this as a series, as an ongoing series of things. I just like the form of it. It reminds me of the Ikea cashier kind of thing. It’s just creating a premise and a situation, and the little three-man sketches are just the perfect way to manifest them. Loved it.
**Craig:** Excellent. My One Cool Thing is the most mundane One Cool Thing I’ve ever had. But John.
**John:** Yes?
**Craig:** I bought a whole bunch of socks.
**John:** You deserve socks.
**Craig:** I deserve them. I’ve always been just like, buy the white socks. I’m trying to spiff myself up. I want some colored socks. Dress socks are too thin. I don’t like the way they feel. They go too high on your leg. I like a comfy sock, but I also want a splash of color, John, so what do I do? I go to Uniqlo,Uniqlo in the Beverly Center, but they’re all over, of course.
**John:** They’re everywhere.
**Craig:** In the Beverly Center, they have a wall of socks, 5,000 different colors. The specific kind of sock, it’s called Uniqlo Colorful 50 Socks. I don’t know what the 50 stands for. Gotta be honest. Maybe they have 50 colors. I don’t know. Don’t care. They’re cheap. They’re comfy. They come in every possible color you can imagine. I bought a big mess of them. Secondary One Cool Thing. I get all these socks. I’ve never been to Uniqlo. By the way, I haven’t been to the Beverly Center in like 20 years.
**John:** Now that you’ve moved to our neighborhood, you’re closer to the Beverly Center.
**Craig:** There you go. I’m in there with Melissa. We bought our socks. She got something. I got a hoodie. All right. Great. So we have all of our stuff. Where do we go check out? Oh, no. All they have is self-checkout. That’s all they have. I’m like, “Ugh.”
**John:** Wow.
**Craig:** I have all these socks, because there was a deal where if you buy four pairs of socks, it cost $8, something stupid, which is great. We’ve got to scan all this. There’s a guy waiting there, and he goes, “Oh hey, have you used these before?” I’m like, “No.” He goes, “Okay. You just dump all your crap into this huge white bucket that’s connected to the machine, and that’s it.” John.
**John:** Amazing.
**Craig:** I am still freaked out by this.
**John:** Does everything have an RFID tag, which is how they know what it is?
**Craig:** No. They’re fricking socks. Here’s how the socks are packaged. There’s a sticker on them that you can peel off. Then there are these two little metal brackets to hold the socks together. That’s it. There’s nothing.
**John:** Does the sticker have an RFID [crosstalk 00:55:42]?
**Craig:** No. It’s a fricking sticker.
**John:** Wow.
**Craig:** Sometimes you could see inside, oh, there’s some sort of… No. I don’t understand what this machine is doing. We dumped in 20 pairs of socks, a hoodie, and a bra, and it somehow knew exactly what was in that bin instantly.
**John:** That’s incredible.
**Craig:** It’s amazing.
**John:** I like it.
**Craig:** I’m terrified.
**John:** When I was in Boston a couple weeks ago, I did buy something at Uniqlo, and the checkout was a hassle and a pain. I’m happy that they found some way to do it.
**Craig:** Get thee to the Uniqlo in Beverly Hills and try out this technology. It’s pretty remarkable. My One Cool Thing mostly is the socks, but secondarily-
**John:** Mostly the socks.
**Craig:** … the magic bin that knows what you bought.
**John:** I’m debating on how I think about this, because we mostly have white socks. We mostly wear white socks, and so we don’t have to match them. As we do laundry, any two socks are their pair. With colored socks, you do have to match the pairs. It’s not a huge hassle.
**Craig:** It’s really not. It’s really not.
**John:** I’m excited for your socks. You deserve colorful socks.
**Craig:** Thank you.
**John:** That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Han Lundberg. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for the weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. Someone actually wrote in specifically about the new Scriptnotes University hoodie and how much they love it. I’m so happy people love the hoodie. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we’re about to record on getting the things you always dreamed of. Craig, thanks for a fun show.
**Craig:** Thank you, John.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** Great. This had a prompt. Drew, somebody wrote in with a question for us.
**Drew:** Yeah, a photojournalist wrote in. She wrote, “Craig talks about his career and how he knew he could do something like The Last of Us but didn’t know or imagine he would ever be given the opportunity. I think about myself in a different industry. I spent years, jealously, I hate to admit, watching other people do what I wanted to do. I looked at their work and thought, ‘Just put me in, coach. I can do it.’ Then one day, while I was standing in the middle of a river, photographing migrants as they crossed into Mexico on their journey north, I had a realization that after 10 years of hard work, I’d made it to the opportunity I’d always hope I’d be given. And for a moment, it was like getting a case of vertigo, like glancing down while you’re extraordinarily high on a very dangerous mountain climb and suddenly realizing where you are. Can y’all talk about if you ever had that moment and how you emotionally reassured yourself so that you didn’t suddenly lose your footing and tumble back down from where you came?”
**John:** Oof.
**Craig:** Heavy.
**John:** I have a lot of stories, anecdotes, and related feelings about that. I became successful pretty early on in my career. I got my first movie made. I definitely remember walking up to set for the first day of Go! and thinking, “Wow, there’s all these trucks around. Oh, these trucks are for my movie. Oh, crap, I’m making a movie.” I felt like I wasn’t worthy to be there, and overwhelmed that I was going to be found out. There’s definitely a lot of imposter syndrome, and then realizing, “Oh, no, actually, I do know how to do this. This is going to be fine. This is going to be okay,” and a series of those sort of steps, like being on set for my first TV show and all those issues, being around famous people and being in those rooms and realizing, “Oh, this is sort of the dream. This is what I’ve always wanted. It’s kind of what I thought it would be, but also just a lot of hard work.” Craig?
**Craig:** It’s an incredibly common thing, and I think if you don’t experience it, you might be a sociopath. It’s pretty normal to think, “Wait, I’m the thing that I was dreaming of being. If I was dreaming of it, then I shouldn’t be it. That’s why it was a dream. Now what do I do?”
There’s a couple of things that hopefully will help. One is, at some point you begin to realize, I haven’t changed at all. The key is, like you said, “Okay, I had made it to the opportunity I had always hoped I would be given.” That’s a great way of putting it. What you didn’t say, and I’m glad for it, photojournalist, is, “I became a success.” You’re the same person. The circumstances around you are changing.
But one thing that’s happening is a re-balancing of the karmic scales. You’re being evaluated in a different way. Sometimes it’s not fair. Particularly early on in our careers, we can be discounted. Later on, we may be over-counted. There’s this thing that happens where suddenly you can do no wrong, until of course you do. Then it’s important to remember again, I haven’t changed; the circumstances have. The way the world evaluates you is not necessarily your worth. It almost always isn’t. It’s important to remember you’re the same person. That’s good news. What it means is what you were doing then, which they might have looked down on, came from the same brain as what you’re doing now. Keep that continuity in mind.
I run into this all the time when I’m doing interviews for press for our show. I can’t tell you how many times, a million, someone has said, “You used to make comedies, and now you do this. What? How? What? How?” I’m like, “Okay, here we go again.” See, have you never met anyone? You never met anyone who was a funny person who also felt sad sometimes or got angry or about something or had moments of seriousness? Do you think that Jim Carrey walks around all day like he’s in Liar, Liar? What? What do you mean? We hold multitudes with ourselves. But it’s hard for people. I understand why they ask me this question, because they evaluate us by what we do and then imagine that we had to change to do this thing. We did not. They did. They had to change.
Just reconnect with the consistency of who you are, and the fact that when you were doing the things that you were like, “I’m doing this for money. I wish I could have better opportunities,” that you did that work well enough to get you into this place, where people are now giving you the opportunity to do this. Just keep doing the work. Keep growing. Always be humble. Always remember you can get better, always. Study the people that do what you do, and do it so beautifully that you love it.
And never lose that excitement for other people’s good work. That’s so important. You see somebody else crushing it. Okay. You said you used to be jealous. Fine. But now you are where you are. Stop being jealous. Start appreciating it, because it makes you better when you see these things. It makes you better. You learn. It inspires you to up your game, which is fantastic.
Then don’t worry too much about the fact that you are, like you said, on a very dangerous mountain climb. You’re not. There is no mountain. There is just this long walk that we begin when we’re born, and we end it when we die. The walk is going well for you. Keep walking. Keep looking at it.
**John:** In the initial setup for this, I said answered prayers, that sense of, oh, you had this wish, this hope, this dream. You were a protagonist in the story. You had this vision of what you wanted to achieve. In that vision of what you want to achieve, you probably had markers and milestones and, “Oh, if I’ve done this thing, then I will have made it.” In the case of you as a photojournalist, if you’re being hired and sent off on these assignments to do these things, that’s great. In the case of people who want to make movies and TV shows, you’re on set, you’re at the premiere, where you have those pinch me moments.
The same way Craig was saying you’re still the same person, I think one of the dangers is that in that vision, in that prayer you put out there, you were going to achieve these things, and in achieving these things, you were going to be happy. You were going to feel good about yourself. You were going to feel like you were worthy, that life would be good. I think one of the things you notice over time is that the most successful people you end up meeting in their fields aren’t necessarily the happiest. In many cases, they are not happy. We know many very successful people who are kind of miserable.
There’s a certain thing that happens when you’ve achieved that success and, “Wait, I should be happy, but why am I not happy?” I can point to all these things that I have achieved, and yet I still feel like a miserable failure.” I think you’ve got to make sure that you are aware that some success, financial success, career success, the accolades of others, they feel good. They’re useful, but they are not going to fundamentally affect your own self-perception or your ability to feel good about yourself, and in some cases, that kind of success can only emphasize and magnify those feelings until you become kind of monstrous. Just be aware of that too. Success is not going to make you happy. That’s a crucial thing to remember.
**Craig:** It’s not going to change you fundamentally. It’s not going to cure your shame issues. They will still be there. Everything that John just said is really important to understand. We, especially in American culture, imagine that there is a win. It’s not really that way. Here’s the best news, I guess, is that when you become a success at the thing that you are compelled to do, because I assume, photojournalist, there are days where you’re like, “Oh my god, it’s hot, and I don’t want to go out there,” but also, “Oh, if I see that, I got to get my camera.” Okay, there’s the compulsion. That’s the way I am with writing. That’s the way John is. You’re compelled to do this thing. When you achieve a certain amount of success, it becomes easier to pursue your compulsion. It doesn’t become happier. It doesn’t become simple. You will still have moments where it hurts. You’re going to be doing it anyway, and now it’s gotten easier to do, because you can focus more on it. You don’t have to worry as much about other things, like paying the bills, being kicked out of a house, food, medicine, health care. Those things get solved by success, so that you can concentrate on the work you do.
With success also comes opportunities to work with better people. Working with better people is the instant Hamburger Helper to doing better work. Let’s say I get a call from Martin Scorsese. I haven’t, by the way, and I’m stunned. But let’s say he did, and he’s like, “Craig, I want to make a movie with you,” in his fun, fast-talking way. I would get better as a writer working with Martin Scorsese. How could I not? That’s exciting. There are all these benefits to success, but none of them include happy. That’s not the end result here.
**John:** Looking at this last paragraph here, she writes, “For a moment, it was like getting a case of vertigo, like glancing down while extraordinarily high on a very dangerous mountain climb and suddenly realizing where you are.” What I hear in that is also fear of loss, loss aversion, like, “I made it to this place, and now it’s all perilous, because I could fall from this high of place. I worry about losing it all.” I definitely see that happening among some of our peers. They’re really worried about, “If I don’t maintain this pace, if I don’t maintain this level of success, it’s all going to come crashing down.”
I think over the course of our 10 years, we’ve tried to be consistent about saying, “Listen, be ready to be successful. Here’s some things to be thinking about when you actually achieve some financial success, when you achieve some career success, but you can’t let that paralyze you, and you can’t get stuck or trapped in this way of thinking.”
Craig, that’s one thing I want to commend you for is that you were a successful comedy writer, you weren’t happy doing it, and you said, “Listen, I’m not going to worry about losing my status as a comedy writer. I’m going to do some other stuff here and scratch the itches I actually really have.” I would say the same to Photojournalist. Don’t worry too much about losing what you have. Keep thinking about the kind of work you did to get to this place, how do you keep that work going.
**Craig:** All true. I guess I’ll finish with my one last bit of, I don’t know if it’s advice, but commiseration, one human being to another. When you arrive at this place that you’ve imagined arriving at for so long, you can also get depressed, because there is no cake. The cake is a lie. If you have something to dream about, that is warm and comforting and exciting. If you get there and, as John suggests correctly, it doesn’t make you instantly happy, it doesn’t change who you are, transform you from inside, you can get depressed, because suddenly you start to wonder, what’s the point of all of this? We are trained to have a destination. There is no destination. If you think that you have, quote unquote, arrived, and then you look around and go, “Wait, is this it? It’s a lot like when I hadn’t arrived, just better hotel rooms,” that’s normal. You have to mourn the loss of that childlike hope.
Then on the other side of that hopefully brief spell, there is something better, which is an acceptance of the way things are and that the work itself is, he said cliché-ably, the work itself is the reward. That’s the reward. There is no other reward. Hopefully, we have helped a little bit there, photojournalist. We’re certainly very proud of you. Keep walking your walk.
**John:** Indeed. Craig, thank you very much.
**Craig:** Thanks, John.
Links:
* [‘Daredevil’ Hits Reset Button as Marvel Overhauls Its TV Business](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/daredevil-marvel-disney-1235614518/) by Borys Kit for The Hollywood Reporter
* [Episode 530: The One with Jack Thorne](https://johnaugust.com/2022/scriptnotes-episode-530-the-one-with-jack-thorne-transcript)
* [John Green Tweet](https://x.com/johngreen/status/1708515024275189884?s=20)
* [Discovering aphantasia](https://austinkleon.com/2023/10/03/discovering-aphantasia/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email) by Austin Kelon
* [Aphantasia – A Different Kind of Blindness](https://leelefever.com/aphantasia-blindness/) by Lee LeFever
* [Here’s What It’s Like To Not Have An Internal Monologue](https://www.bustle.com/wellness/does-everyone-have-an-internal-monologue) by Caroline Steber for Bustle
* [WGA Membership Department](https://www.wga.org/the-guild/about-us/contact-us/departments/membership)
* [Boobie_Klapper](https://www.instagram.com/p/Cwv-uusPR5D/) on Instagram
* [Uniqlo Colorful 50 Socks](https://www.uniqlo.com/us/en/products/E434187-000/00?colorDisplayCode=62&sizeDisplayCode=027)
* [Uniqlo RFID Automated Checkout](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqPfYnVKwGI)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Han Lundberg ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
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