It was never about the money…

Or my need to become famous or a want to see my name up in lights. (Although, in fairness, the chair of my department at UCLA, Richard Walter, said mine was the type of name that could fit nicely on a marquee) Still, I didn’t desire working in Hollywood to feed my ego or to make exorbitant amounts of money, (Although, that would have been a nice addition to my bank balance, you know, to be able appreciate the word “residual” first hand.) Truly, my writing career was all about passion and love that I was blessed enough to become a screenwriter three decades ago and it’s still this character’s main and transparent motivation. Truly.

To be honest, my career was fueled by love. And that was the love of a mother for her child. If I had it my way, I would have been just as pleased to teach the third grade as I would be to pen a script. But, my late mother was an extraordinary parent (as many are) who wanted to insure the absolute best for her kids. She recognized my ability to spin some tall tales as a young child and my propensity for penning many a comedic short story. She very naturally came to the conclusion that I should have a world class education and a career that was exciting and equitable while filled with opportunities for raw self expression. To her, there was no chance at failure grasping for the brass ring because, to her, I was gold.

When I talked myself out of the classroom (becoming a teacher) and into thinking I should become a lawyer as I was a Political Science major as an undergrad, my mother reminded me of how lucky I was to be at UCLA when their film school was ranked the best in the world. She encouraged me to take a couple of film classes before I even apply for my MFA there. She knew that this would be edifying for my soul when I was more excited about getting into a class dedicated to film majors than I was about having lunch on Kerchoff Plaza with a boy I thought I wanted to marry. She knew which of those two things I would need to insure my happily ever after.

Ah, the knight on the white steed, the hero for this heroine. I really wanted, too. I’m a hopeless romantic, what can I say?

I recently came across Steve Martin’s 1990s classic, Father of The Bride, and I remember, after watching that movie a million times, fantasizing about a similar, tented reception for my wedding. My only excuse is I was a naive teenager at the time. And yet, somehow that Hollywood ending didn’t materialize in the way that I had penned in my mind’s eye, so I wrote more. And more and more hoping those scenarios would jump off of the page for me the way they did for my characters. Romantic comedies abounded, many that were optioned by some of the most successful producers in Hollywood. I had some pretty remarkable meetings and opportunities. I wrote scripts and made suggestions for some of the biggest power players in Hollywood and that made my mother proud. She believed all of that made me happy. Which it did for a really long time. I just didn’t realize a lot of that professional pride of accomplishment was so strongly intertwined with my love and respect for her.

That became crystal clear however when she died prematurely, six months after her harrowing cancer diagnosis.

And that’s when the pages of my life were thrown perpetually up in the air.

I couldn’t connect to my career anymore. I had lost the engine that was driving my success and I didn’t know how to kick start my creativity without that motherly motivation. See, my interest in writing was funnily enough just to write. Not for power. Not for ego. Not for prestige. But for love. To make my mother happy, to prove how much I appreciated everything she had done to insure a life for me that made me feel daily I was living in Technicolor.

And so I keep writing. For the memories I made and for the ones still left to be crafted. I’m not so good at selling my scripts or peddling my talent. I don’t have moxie or chutzpah the way that could benefit me on a professional level. My mother, my agent, my manager, and my lawyer were all responsible for that aspect of my career. But, I do know how to season a great word salad, how to toss creativity up in the air and hope that it sticks somewhere, somehow, for someone. I love to watch it land.

So, I keep doing it. And I love doing it. And I hope, one day, just as my mother did for me, I can nurture somebody else’s talent simply for the love of their writing and its longevity.

Words, after all, are a currency that’s as inexplicable as it is priceless.