The L.A. Dime

I’ve been asked many times why I’m teaching. People say I’m relatively young for the profession (in terms of teaching writing, anyway, but by no means am I an unheard of aberration), and should focus all my effort on building the most successful writing career I can muster.

Well, truth is, I could have probably done a good bit more writing by now if I weren’t teaching, but whether that writing would have sold, or led to new work, or faded away after a weekend read around town, or simply gathered dust in my manager’s “maybe once you’re more established drawer” — no one knows. And while I have many writing/filmmaking dreams left to accomplish, and while the teaching may slow my advance toward those goals in some ways, they’re going to have to pry the dry erase marker from my cold dead hands before I’ll ever quit. And here’s why–

The most rewarding moments of my career have been in and around the classroom. Helping a student crack a story, see the light, understand the stakes, change their tune, relax, fess up, buck up, break out, take the hard path, dig deep, commit, endure, persevere, grow, and ultimately, hopefully, “get it” — those moments are soul-satisfyingly good. And, the most rewarding of those rare moments are not the ones for which I have lesson-planned, but the ones that crop up on the fly, where inspiration strikes mysteriously much the same as it does on a good writing day, and I know exactly what to say (or not) to help someone climb one more step toward their dream.

I often lament that I rarely see or feel the physical product of my day’s writing work — a few electronic pages, a couple of new ideas, a problem solved, worsened, or created….. It’s not like plowing a field where the end result is visible. (And believe me, I know a writing life beats digging ditches on most counts.) But with teaching, if I’m patient and I pay attention, if I plow as hard as I can every day (especially on the bad ones, of which there are plenty), eventually I can see growth and change spring up from that tilled earth, and in a cold, calculating, soulless industry such as Hollywood, it’s the time I spend in the classroom, at the plow, that sustains my writing and reminds me of my craft and to practice what I preach.

Ultimately, if I am ever to achieve any of my more lofty goals, I’m sure those successes will come in some way as a result of teaching. And if I fail to advance my career further, certainly there will be disappointment, but not regret, as I hope to always have a white board, a marker, and a field to plow.

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