Ask Chaz: How do I get people to know about me?
Read to the end for an idea that should be handled with care.
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Today’s installment of SSWAPAT is an advice column! Toward the end I’ll include a little ditty about something that I really do think would make a wonderful play, but as I write this it is moody and cloudy outside, I’m listening to smoooooooth morning jazz, and I’m feeling advicey. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 80+ years as a writer (number exaggerated for effect) it’s to follow my instincts. So here we go!
How to Get Over It: Just Do It.
I have and have always had a volatile relationship with social media. Who hasn’t?? For instance I have a Facebook, but I haven’t used it for personal use in…god like four years? I’ve had various jobs in which I needed to be able to log on to Facebook to post things to the employer’s page, but I haven’t engaged with Facebook the way Zuck wants me to in years.
I do have an Instagram (yes yes I know: Instagram is part of Facebook which is actually Meta now, blah blah blah) which I’ve had for years. God help me but I loved the original Instagram. The hipster filters, the chronological posting, the socialness of it. Then of course it got worse for so many reasons that are not the subject of this newsletter, but the big one was the capital-A Algorithm. Nothing spells doom like an algorithm. Particularly for an artist.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. At this point in the story, I was still not using Instagram as an artist. I was still clinging to the halcyon days of it being a social media rather than yet another advertising channel. All around me I saw my peers using the app as a way to tell the entire internet what they were up to: comedy shows, plays, crowdfunding, life on the set of a gazillion indie films, comics, illustrations, doodles that became comics and illustrations, their laptops open to a particularly good page of their script at that cute cafe…and on and on and on. This was advertising. I knew it…
…and I loathed it.
It felt icky, what can I say?
Astute readers will see through this immediately and realize that there were two other things at play: fear and jealousy. Although I never saw anyone launch a full career from just their Instagram page, I did see them doing guest posts on blogs, or upping their game to process videos, attracting hundreds (sometimes thousands!) of followers, having their work shared all over the place, and building connections and friendships on the internet. I wanted those things! But I didn’t want to stoop to the level of using social media as a way to do it. Ick!
And I was afraid. Of course I was. I’m a writer for god’s sake, and one who was still very young and precious about their work. I wasn’t going to show anyone what I was writing. Can you imagine?? The vulnerability! And anyway, a visual medium like Instagram wasn’t suited to my particular art form. (Yes, I’ve said that aloud before. I am so sorry to anyone who had to listen to me say it. Ugh.) So yeah [loooooong BFA sigh] I guess social media just wasn’t something a writer like me could use as a tool in growing my career. Back to my little desk in the attic where I was toiling away at………..oh wait.
This was the other, more deeply and darkly held fear: what was I working on, anyway? Not nothing, but not anything anyone would ever know about. I wrote outlines for things I might write someday. I wrote sketches and short scenes. I wrote short stories I never wanted anyone to see because I thought they were “just for me” (again: what?????).
I was writing, that was true. But without any particular goal in mind, I was writing as a practice, not as a career. But I wanted that career.
And so one fine day (after listening to hours upon hours of the podcast Creative Pep Talk) I got real with myself for the first time ever and wrote this in my journal:
You have to get over your own bullshit.
What this meant for me was that I had to get over the ick-feeling about using social media as a career tool. I had to get over the judgy thought that people who used social media to their advantage were somehow not “real” artists. And I had to get creative, which happens to be something I’m good at. There’s no warm-up regimen for getting over your own bullshit, I discovered. You have to actively decide that it’s standing between you and what you want or are even curious about maybe wanting. And then you have to make that decision one billion more times.
How to Show Your Work: Remember That You Are A Creative Person.
I’m stealing the phrase “show your work” from both every math class I’ve ever taken (and one ill-fated chemistry class), and Austin Kleon’s book by that name. Read it.
I read that book years before getting over my own bullshit, and it apparently didn’t stick. But during this renaissance, I read it again and was like “Ooooooooooooooooooooooooh, I see.”
What I’d missed before and was now understanding was that “showing your work” could mean many, many things. It could mean showing the process, the final product, or both of those things. But the goal is all the same: get people to think of you when they think of _______, and vice versa.
I wanted people to think of me as a writer. Specifically as a screenwriter.
“But if you’re a writer that means you have to get on Twitter which is so foul and unknowable and ugh I don’t want to can’t I just do this on Instagram where I already get it?” I bemoaned.
The answer was yes. Of course I could. In fact, it’s probably a good idea to stick to the platform you know best and can stomach interacting with on a daily basis. When you’re just starting out, why make it miserable?
But still I was wringing my hands because Instagram was a “visual” medium and screenwriting is not. And god help me if I was going to contribute more “laptop, notebook, coffee mug, and candle on a desk, captioned with #writerlife” content to the world. So what to do…what to do…..
I had to make the platform work for me. I was not, I realized, beholden to its main objective of sharing photos and videos (there were blessedly no reels at this time). This required…get ready for it…getting creative.
I created a puzzle for myself: how could I do the least amount of behind-the-scenes work (so that this could be sustainable for a long time) while also getting flex my creative muscles in public and could I make it visually interesting?
Lucky for me, screenplay format is strict and immediately recognizable to those in the industry. It’s not flashy, but it is specific. And to those who aren’t familiar with the format, I thought, maybe it would be exciting to see it in the wild (read: on their Instagram feeds).
And it would be fun to see if I could write teeny tiny screenplays that I’d post in Instagram’s native 1:1 format!
And I can do it all from my phone!
Yes! Maybe this could work!
So I downloaded the mobile Celtx app. I wrote a few tiny dialogue exchanges to see what they’d look like when I cropped them down to 1:1 images. I experimented and re-drafted some of the scripts until I had about a dozen ready to go, and then I posted the first one:
Reader, nothing happened.
For a couple of weeks, I posted these pre-fab scripts and nothing changed about the likes, the comments, the shares, my follower count—nothing.
But I kept doing it anyway, deciding (one of those one billion aforementioned decisions) that it would be a good way to force myself to get over my social media fear and to make sure I wrote something for public consumption every day. If it never attracted anyone’s attention, so what? At this point I was excited about it enough for myself. I’d cleared a lot of personal hurdles already…why not keep going and see what else I could do?
This was the right decision.
In half a year, I doubled my follower account. Huzzah!
Even better? As my follower count grew steadily, I was starting to get real, actual, work as a writer. I co-wrote and dramaturg’d, peers and strangers alike reached out to me to commission a couple of scripts. I guest-blogged! My Instagram scripts got shared all over the place!
What I’m trying to say is: people were thinking of me when they thought of writers and screenplays, and vice versa.
It worked.
The Takeaways.
I’m not under any illusion that my Instagram project got me everything I have going on today. But it did help me build a lot of the relevant muscles.
Nowadays I’m not afraid of social media, and understand that it’s a tool I can use to put my work in front of people on a regular basis. Even though I don’t use Instagram on a regular basis anymore, I do try to keep this newsletter consistent. And I’m slowly accepting that TikTok might be worth a look. Maybe.
I’m so much more comfortable with “writing in public”. I can metabolize rejection much quicker than I used to (essential!!) and if something doesn’t get the reaction I was hoping for, I tinker with it instead of burying it in a shallow grave where no one can ever find it.
I also know now that being searchable and findable and instantly knowable (to a degree) on the internet is a good idea. I mean, have boundaries!! Of course! But also…when, say, a literary manager comes looking for you, be findable at the very least. And even better: reward whoever finds you in the wild, wild algorithmic west of the internet. Have something waiting for them. If nothing else, it’s a great way for people to start a conversation with you! I can’t tell you the number of times people would DM me in my Instagram salad days and start with “OMG I just read like fifty of your scripts and I love them! So I’m working on this thing that I’d love for you to look at….” And so on and so forth.
And that doesn’t have to be social media, I suppose. But I also learned this: social media can be fun. It is designed with gamification in mind, so it’s supposed to be fun. Sure: that can lead to ruin. But it can also be fun. Let it be fun, if you can. You don’t have to set out to go viral or make money off your TikTok or whatever. You can just enjoy making things and sharing them with people. Isn’t that why you got into this whole thing in the first place?
Someone Should Write A Play About…
One more thing before you go. (Arguably the thing you subscribed to this newsletter for. Sorry.)
Last night I had the extreme pleasure of seeing Philly legend Scott Greer in Every Brilliant Thing at The Arden. I will say nothing about it except that if you should go see it. Right now. Especially if you’re in Philly. There’s really no excuse not to, unless you hate to feel feelings and laugh. If you hate laughing, def do not go.
Anyway, I’m lucky to call Scott a friend, and after the show we went out for a drink, where he told me about a man who killed his wife after 65 years of marriage.
Is this a tragedy? Yes!
But is it also kind of like…what was the one thing that made him snap after 65 years? Also yes!
We agreed that we want this play. Badly. And we’re both inclined toward it being a comedy, if someone is up to the challenge of writing a comedy about a tragic, probably horrific murder.