Between the idea and the reality…
How do you get from speaking your truth to having your truth accepted into the world and made real?
As I learnt to my great cost when – as a little known Australian writer – trying to sell a movie script in Hollywood: “People in this town make movies with their friends. Who are your friends?” No friends? No movie.
Of the six movies I have written and seen through production and onto the screen only one was written “on spec”. I delivered it to a studio when the country was awash with investment money for films. 10BA was just hitting its stride as a tax incentive. The studio bosses needed a local script for political reasons. They bought mine and had me substantially alter it in search of a “surefire hit”. It bombed. I had the choice of going with the changes or walking away. I chose to stay because I knew, no matter what the result was like, the film would give me the credit to allow me to make my own choices in the future – and work with my own “friends”.
There were writers who criticised my decision to compromise. Twenty years later they are still waiting to see a work into production.
Yes, be true to your voice. It is all you have. But to see that work into production you must also work with others. At that point you shift from expressing your inner voice to listening to it as you judge who are the people who will be true to your vision – and who with you will create a joint vision greater than that from which you started.
With my new book I am working with a team that is passionate about its contents. They believe in my voice. (Ten other publishers rejected that voice.) But they want me to rewrite sections. They would like me to think about a new title. They want an epilogue. I am now shifting from creation to collaboration. Or from “creation” to “innovation”.
It is quite possible to be true to your own voice and to be, “a voice crying in a wilderness.” That is the risk we run, not just in art but also in science. Think of the years Kepler labored to realise his vision of a perfect solar system of perfect circular orbits – before he ‘compromised’ his vision and made them elliptical.
We work in the world as it is and we work with the world as it is.
