Not winning is hard enough, not placing is even harder. Even if you have placed once, or twice, or however many times sometimes it becomes meaningless if you don't win. A part of you is angry or depressed because you have felt it was you who should have won. You start to doubt your ability as a writer, but you manage to hang on. You keep at it, because in your heart of hearts, you are a writer, a modern day storyteller. Your vision is so important to you, that as much as it hurts you to keep pushing on, it would almost kill you to stop. So you persevere. You listen to reviews and take what you can from them, and crank out another draft. This one has all the improvements, and even less mistakes than the last. You submit it to contest, or to a reader or a producer acquaintance of a friend of yours. And then you wait...and wait...and wait.
Only to find out that the brass ring has escaped you once again...and again...and again.
People tell you to keep at it, but the depression has passed the point of settling in, it has sunk and hardened in your heart like concrete. Your friends and family try to tell you to keep at it (if you are lucky) or they tell you they never believed you would succeed (I can relate) and that you should get a real job. A nine-to-five job.
A part of you thinks they are right. Another part of you feels they need to stuff their opinions. Your resolve quickly returns. The fire to write and to succeed comes back and you throw yourself into your work, but you expand your horizon. You start thinking about directing or producing your own work. You start trying to gather attention to your work and any accomplishments that you have managed to scrape together.
But no one notices. Sometimes it seems as if you are invisible. As if no matter how much of yourself you bare, no one notices. And the depression returns as bad as its ever been. Some how you just can't shake the feeling of failure and it's grip on your heart. You don't seek the money or the fame as much as you seek the ability to share your stories with the world.
The depression is harder to shake this time around, but you manage and try to persevere. You cannot shake the feeling of despair. Your desire to succeed and to prove that all the time you spent writing wasn't a waste of time is a small part of what continues to drive you forward. You start on another screenplay, another story to tell, another world to create, and you create another one after that. Soon you have written a dozen screenplays but you feel that you are no closer than when you started.
Soon you feel that contest be damned, I'll do this my way. After all every screenwriter knows that few others can match their own vision. You start looking for other to involve into the project again.
Same results, different day.
The process just seems to repeat, but as long as you have that spark in your eye, and that fire in your heart, you keep pushing forward, fighting off depression as though it were an invading army of orcs at Helm's Deep.
Depression is an inevitable side of effect in the search for the brass ring of success. You desperately want success and won't let depression keep you down for long, but it tends to be a hard roller coaster ride for not only the writer, but those around him. Emotions run high when you are anticipating whether or not you have placed in the finals, or even the semis. The feeling of dissapoint time and time again can push some to their darkest days, because a writer worth their salt puts a bit of their soul into everything they writes. The need for validation is so important that it becomes almost like a drug. Success feeds that feeling of validation, but failure is like going through withdrawls (or as close to it as I can imagine) But somehow we keep going. We stop for a while, pick up the shattered remains, and rebuilt.
Heaven forbid that real life throw a curve ball into your life. Sometimes that curveball is something worse than not placing. In my case, it was a lot of things. Though none was more painful than the loss of my daughter Halie three days before Christmas last year. Tragedies like that only make the depression worse as you find yourself carrying the weight of your own goals (or failure to meet them) but also what ever has happened to you. The real world is what makes the depression bad in the first place, because it is the real world away from screenwriting that you want to make it in, and sometimes it is the real world that crushes you the hardest.
We imagine the world of a successful screenwriter is almost a magical place, where dreams are realized and every screenplay you write is the golden goose. We forget that even once we have arrived, that Hollywood is a very treacherous place that eats noobs and the unaware like fresh meat in a rabid dog cage. Even once you have sold one, you have to be careful of things like this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
Or your dreams will turn into nightmares faster than you can say "never take net."
We all write for different reasons and I feel it is impossible to avoid depression. It's possible to stay positive through the bad times, but I don't think anyone can do it for ever. Just remember that this is what you have chosen but when it works, it works well. Sometimes you get the high from just doing it, motivated by that thing inside you that makes you a screenwriter.
Or as a screenwriter from the film Dreams On Spec said "the thing that is so wonderful about the creative life is that it feeds you, you don't just feed it. 56:00
Sorry if I rambled on. Just have a lot on my mind and I wanted to get it out. This seemed like the appropriate place to do so. Thanks for listening.
Kenan
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