As I watched the end credits flash across the screen on my beat-up college laptop, I remember thinking, holy shit, this is so good.

I was 24 years old and my friends and I were watching the final cut of our short film, Un Clavo Saca Otro Clavo, for the first time. The production process had all the markings of a classic guerrilla filmmaking story – a group of scrappy twenty-somethings decide they’re not going to wait for permission from some Hollywood suit to make their movie, so they wrangle their photographer buddy who owns a nice camera, along with a few local actors they found in the classifieds, and shoot the whole thing themselves.

Some of my favorite movies — Slacker, Clerks, El Mariachi — have been made that way. And by the time I’d finished editing Un Clavo Saca Otro Clavo, I was convinced I was the next Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith, and Robert Rodriguez all rolled into one nerdy, afro’d Panamanian.

So I submitted the short to South by Southwest, TIFF, and every other film festival I could think of. We’ll premiere at South by, then hit the rest of the festival circuit, and by the end, all the major studios will be begging us to make a feature-length version.

Given that you’ve never heard of the indie darling, Un Clavo Saca Otro Clavo, I think you can guess how this story went. We didn’t get into South by. Or TIFF. We didn’t even get into our local film festival — our “safety” festival.

Title Card Reads: Ten Years Later

I was in a bit of a funk recently for a very dumb reason – I didn’t get chosen for a screenwriting fellowship that I’d somehow convinced myself I was a shoo-in for. Like a lot of screenwriting fellowships, this one selected ten finalists out of around a thousand applicants. And you don’t need a degree in STEM to know that ten out of a thousand equals a 1% acceptance rate. Sadly, I do have a degree in STEM, which makes my misplaced confidence all the more ridiculous.

This is something that happens to me often as a writer. You could call it being hopelessly optimistic (the DSM-5 calls it “Delusions of Grandeur”). I constantly think everything I strive for is going to come to fruition — my book is going to be a bestseller (it wasn’t), I’m going to get that writing fellowship (I didn’t), Taika Waititi is finally going to call me and ask me to co-write his next movie (this one is going to happen, I’m 100% sure of it).

I turn 34 next month, and it’s funny to look back at Un Clavo and realize I’m still the same starry-eyed dreamer I was ten years ago. I’m still making stuff — secretly convinced I’m a genius — and winding up with egg on my face.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent Ego

Becoming a professional writer, in any discipline, requires a certain level of cognitive dissonance. Somewhere in the range of 2-5 million books are published annually. The Austin Film Festival screenplay competition receives over 10,000 submissions each year. To genuinely believe that your work deserves to be anywhere near the top of either of those gigantic piles requires, arguably, some level of narcissism.

And yet, to become a professional writer, you also need to recognize the limitations of your talent and improve on your weaknesses, which narcissists can’t do (hence why narcissists screw up everything they’re put in charge of, like, say, the U.S. government).

So how do you begin to develop the right mental framework to be sure of yourself (i.e. full of yourself), yet remain objective about your areas for improvement, all while trying to do something nobody in their right mind would ever do (convince people to give you money for the words that fall out of your brain)?

For me, it starts with a simple seven-word mantra:

After Un Clavo got rejected everywhere, it would have been easy to throw my hands up and say, “Well, the judges just didn’t get it.” Or, “If only I’d had a bigger budget.”

Instead, I searched for every flaw in the film I could find (there were many). I watched award-winning short films to learn what worked and why. And, most importantly, I kept writing and making more stuff.

At the same time, I had the self-confidence (unjustified as it might have been) to believe that, with an ass-ton of work, I’d get to where I wanted to be eventually.*

*Of course, if I’d known I’d still be trying to break into Hollywood ten years later, I’m not sure I would’ve ever started. So maybe add “Sunk Cost Fallacy” to the list of required cognitive dissonances.

While not all of my pipe dreams have come true (yet), some of them have.

In 2017, I decided I wanted to write for The Onion, despite not knowing anybody who wrote for the site and having no idea what their hiring process was. In 2021, I became a contributor.

In 2018, I made it my mission to write satire for the humor site McSweeney’s. After two years of rejections, I got my first piece published at the beginning of 2020. By the end of 2020, I’d written three of their top 20 most-read articles of that year.

Both of these milestones seemed impossible at one point and yet I accomplished them. Which gives me hope that I’ll achieve my dream of writing for television. And while missing out on the fellowship was a small bump in the road, I’m still confident (i.e. delusional) enough to believe that I’ll get there.

You’ve Got to Admit, You’re Getting Better (A Little Better, All the Time)

A writing career can sometimes feel like you’re Tarzan swinging from vine to vine through the jungle and if you miss a single vine, you’ll fall into quicksand and never live to see Phil Collins write a bangin’ soundtrack about your life.

That can make setbacks (being passed over for that late night writer job, failing to sell your novel, getting that restraining order filed against you by Taika Waititi’s manager) feel particularly devastating.

That’s why it’s important to celebrate your wins and periodically take stock of how far you’ve come. Which brings me to another seven-word mantra:

If you’re ever in a funk, I highly recommend going back and revisiting some of your old work. I rewatched Un Clavo last week and, yes, some elements of it kinda sucked. But it was uplifting to see that it had some great moments, too — especially for something I did ten years ago. It was even more uplifting to see just how far my writing has come since then.

When you keep moving the goalposts, it’s easy to get frustrated whenever you miss a shot. And I periodically have to remind myself that, while it’s good to be my harshest critic, I also need to be my biggest fan.

So, rather than saying, I ain’t shit, maybe a better way to think about it is that I’m somewhere on the way to being the shit. I’m in a sort of liminal shit space — a superposition of both the shit and ain’t shit. Schröedinger’s scat, if you will.

This past weekend, I took a joke writing workshop so that, next week, I can go back and punch up the pilot I submitted to that fellowship. Then I’ll submit that pilot to other festivals and fellowships. And this time next year, I’ll be a better writer than I am now.

This week, though, I’m taking a break to simply enjoy where I’m at for the moment.

Of course, if Taika calls, I won’t be at all surprised. I am the shit, after all.

Bonus Content

If you’d like to watch Un Clavo Saca Otro Clavo in all it’s juvenile glory, I’ll be sharing it (along with some analysis) with paid subscribers in my next edition of La Ñapa, my roundup of extra comedy tidbits that don’t make the newsletter.

We can all have some good laughs about its shortcomings (I’m nothing if not a masochist) as well as some good laughs about the parts that have actually held up pretty well (I’m admittedly biased). You can upgrade to paid for as little as $10/year, which is easily the best deal on Substack (though, again, I’m biased).

Questions

Have you ever gone back and re-watched/re-read anything you made a long time ago (ex. angsty high school poetry, student films, etc.)? What did you make/write and how did it feel to revisit it?

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