More Juice

Last week a producer told me that I had shown more juice in our last meeting than any writer he had seen in the past six years.

I told him this meant a lot and I would hold onto this to get me through the entire next month of toil in the Hollywood salt mine. And I have. I’ve turned this phrase over and over in my mind.

I have more juice ….

I had drinks with a producer the other night who told me she heard someone say “writers are like tubes of toothpaste. You squeeze one out till they’re done, then you get another.”

This business will try its best to squeeze you out till you’re done.

I am not the kind of writer you replace.

I was thinking today about why I have more juice. How? Lord knows this business has tried its best to squeeze me out (watch this space in the coming months to find out how. I have quite a story to tell). So how is it that I feel more potent — more alive — more juicy — than ever now?

It’s liked I tricked ‘em into preserving my humanity.

Here’s the working theory: writers (including me) get desensitized by the process. The more we find that familiar, surface-layer work that feels like stuff we’ve seen before moves through the system, the more we’ll turn that shit in. It’s the path of least resistance. Because if we show up repeatedly with our juice — the stuff of who we are — and it gets rejected or worse, sneered at or backed away from or weird stuff gets back to our agents — we become highly unlikely to show our juice ever again. Why would we? When we know we can just show up and deliver a recombined version of something else we’ve seen, throw in some shallow detail from your life or the news and you’re done.

But you’re not done cuz that’s not juice. That’s not what you’re made of.

I realized that what allowed me to really show juice in that one meeting is the fact that it had been the third or fourth meeting on the same project — we have a strong, nurturing creative relationship — and we’ve known each other for years. I felt safe.

I was thinking today about how many people in relationships never show juice because they have been rejected in the past. They no longer feel safe. So they show up and deliver retreads of other relationships they think the other person wants to see and never even know how to show juice because they are stuck on the surface, communicating in relationship-memes.

They just keep pitching the shittiest version of what their relationship could be, based on others they’ve seen, instead of showing their soul.