Thread by @ChapTaylor2

This is the story of how a troubled, wannabe punk rocker from Seattle became a professional screenwriter. (Warning: epically long thread to follow.)

I always loved movies. I was a kid who lived through the stories in my head. Gangster pictures. Westerns. Disney flicks about ghost pirates or goofy scientists. My mother would drop me at the revival house with enough money for a ticket and popcorn. Movies were my safe space.

When I was 16, a kid in typing class was drawing storyboards. He made Super 8 zombie films in his backyard, complete with exploding oatmeal brains. He wanted to be a director. I realized you could dream of a career telling stories. From that point forward, I never had a Plan B.

High school was not good. Jail was a possibility. College was not. So I joined the Army. I went to Korea, jumped out of airplanes, served briefly in a National Guard Special Forces company. After my discharge, I worked on fishing trawlers in Alaska.

I managed to get admitted to a small college in Washington state. I got good grades and applied to transfer to film school at NYU. I’m pretty sure the only reason they let me in was that I was a vet.

This is New York in the 90’s. The year I arrived, someone was murdered every four hours. I got a job in a Mafia-linked bar, took loans, got help from family. I did whatever I had to do to eat and pay tuition. I worked the day of my graduation. I have never worn a mortar board.

There are two kinds of people who attend film school: The kind who call themselves “director” even though they haven’t directed traffic. And the kind who find a way to claw their way into the industry. For the next two years, I worked as a set PA on the streets of New York.

Fourteen hour days, rain or shine. I was slashed with a box cutter, shot at, an old lady hit me over the head with her umbrella like I was living in a live action Bugs Bunny cartoon. But I learned more about filmmaking in those two years than I did at NYU.

All this time I was writing screenplays. It’s hard to write after a 14-hour day, so I wrote on weekends. One Monday morning, the producer on the film I was working on asked me what I did over the weekend. I told him I was writing a screenplay. He asked to read it.

This is important. This was pure, unearned luck. But I put myself in the position to get lucky by grinding out 14-hour days. And when he asked, I had a screenplay ready. He read it. And passed.

This is equally important. My script wasn’t for him but he liked my writing. All of the things I had experienced - the bad teen years, the Army, Alaska - were in my writing. I sounded different than other screenwriters. I sounded like me.

He passed me on to his development executive who got me a manager who got me an agent. I wrote a spec script. An action picture. We slipped it to the producer. And he passed again.

I was broke. I had failed to get this producer to say yes on two separate occasions. I felt like I was blowing my Golden Ticket. But he liked my persistence. He still thought I might develop into a writer. So he had his home studio give me a blind deal at WGA scale.

That blind deal became CHANGING LANES.

It took nine months to write. The deal was so small and I was so unimportant they literally just forgot about me. I reappeared with a first draft. And the producer loved it. He worked with me on two more drafts. Then he fired me and I didn’t hear from him again for three years.

To be clear, the end of our relationship was my fault. I had personal issues that convinced him he would be better off not working with me. But my draft of CHANGING LANES circulated around Hollywood. It gave me a career. Five years later, the movie was in theaters.

A writer brings four things to their work; talent, effort, and imagination filtered through lived experience. You cannot manufacture talent (or luck) but we all control our effort and imagination.

I have been a professional screenwriter for two decades. I work all day, every day, to develop my craft. But my greatest strength is the authenticity of my writing. I do not sound like other writers. I sound like me.

Everyone who reads this will not succeed at becoming a professional screenwriter. But all of you have a chance. If a troubled kid from Seattle with no money or connections can do it, so can you. And I want every one of you to try.

You don’t have to work on fishing trawlers or become a paratrooper. You don’t have to work in a Mafia bar. Each of us has experiences unique to our lives. Each of us has a voice. Your job is to make the world listen.