You have to create your own stuff. It's really exciting to create something, sell it, and feel like I'm not just a pawn waiting to be cast.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
But you have to be creative on how you sell yourself and market yourself.
I've always developed all my own pieces, and they're time-consumers.
I've always been creating my whole life, you know. I've just had a need to create, whether it was sculpting or writing or directing. It's just ever since I was a kid, I don't know.
I just create, that's what I do.
It is important to make your own stuff. Even if you are not an actor, it is important to not stop involving yourself as a creative person.
I started writing my own plays, and I would sell out, but after everything was said and done, I'd break even. That's being successful.
I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I've never been able to sell. I'm known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre.
I'm not somebody who is going to build something for a few years, sell it, and then go off and just have fun.
Making a show is such a long process. You go through a TV production house that will commission scripts, and if they like what you've written, they take it to a network and sell it to them. It has always felt very far away from something that's actually real.
It takes a lot of help - nature, friends, family, craftsmen - for me to make what I make.