Sometimes I get questions about how to break in as a screenwriter. I don't have much in the way of answers or advice. I broke in when I was 35 while living in Seattle. I can try to cover how I did so, in case that's of any use (or amusement).

Short version: ten years ago, a writer pal of mine got hired as a TV staff writer. I wrote a couple of scripts and he shared them with his agents, who responded positively. They became my agents and set up a week and a half of meetings for me, which went very well.

Long version: after PULP FICTION came out when I was a teen, I wanted to become the next Tarantino/Scorsese/Spike Lee. But I lived in a trailer park in a small town in WA. I didn't know any writers or artists, let alone screenwriters or filmmakers. I didn't know the first step.

I worked at a pickle factory after graduating high school. Then at Burger King, then a drugstore. I was taking classes at the local community college when I really realized I had an unexpected facility with words. Especially in poetry.

After finishing my two year degree at the community college, I was living in a motorhome parked in my great aunt's driveway. I was very broke. My parents had moved back to the Missouri Ozarks. I decided to move back with them to save up for the next chapter.

I worked in a grocery store in the Ozarks & saved up enough money to apply to colleges. I got into a couple, but realized that only one was financially realistic: a right wing Christian college for poor kids, where you could work on campus to pay for tuition and room & board.

I didn't like the politics, yet I thrived. I discovered Shakespeare, Flannery O'Connor, Yeats, Wallace Stevens, etc. I wrote a lot of poems. I made really great artsy friends (fellow blue collar weirdos). I did a fair amount of theater (acting, directing, writing one-act plays).

Near graduation, I looked into film schools. Again, the financial realities hit me. There was no way I could afford to move to NYC or LA, let alone go to film school. So I looked to poetry MFA programs instead. I liked poetry, and it seemed cheaper.

To save up enough money to apply to MFA programs, I shared a single wide trailer with friends and worked for a year around Branson, MO washing dishes, cleaning hotels and condos, making funnel cakes, working as the night man at a hotel, etc.

After saving up some $, I could afford four MFA applications: Iowa, Johns Hopkins, U of Washington, U of Arkansas. I got into three of them (not Iowa). Upon being accepted, I realized I couldn't afford the gas to drive to either Baltimore or Seattle. So those programs were out.

University of Arkansas was a two hour drive. So I went there. A four year MFA program. The first year, I lived in the undergrad dorms because I couldn't afford the down payment on an apartment. (Also, I didn't know how to look for apartments.)

At Arkansas, I wrote and partied and played in sloppy rock bands. Made lots of friends with poets, fiction writers, musicians, artists. This proves key later.

My cinematic ambitions lingered in the back of my brain. A bunch of my poems were written in screenplay formats, or were about filmmaking. I condensed the BADLANDS script into an absurdist five page poem. I acted in a bad student film.

Then my MFA thesis got selected for the Walt Whitman Award first poetry book award. A good step to a poet-professor type gig. Perhaps even a decent career. I was a full-on, semi-professional poet now.

After finishing my MFA, I moved to North Carolina with Leigh so she could start a Ph.D. in poli sci. I started a cool, well-regarded online poetry journal with Zachary Schomburg, my close poet friend from the right wing college.

But none of the NC colleges were looking for a poetry professor. So, while waiting for my first book to come out, I worked counting traffic for the city of Chapel Hill. Then as a barista.

My poetry book came out. Not much happened (it was a book of poetry). I kept working and started hanging out with other poets. Played some music. Leigh and I married. Pretty good stuff.

Leigh switched from poli sci to business for her Ph.D. I decided to apply to English Ph.D. programs so as to read more books and not have to do customer service anymore after a decade plus of doing so. Somehow, we both got into Duke.

Another poetry book of mine was published (U of Iowa). I started a new online poetry & translation journal to teach myself global poetry. Then I started writing a dissertation on Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, & the influence of new technologies on the Modernist poetic imagination.

While writing my dissertation, I wrote and published a book about Johnny Cash. This got me thinking about more popular forms of writing than poetry. How could I make shit that'd connect to the people I grew up with? That the teenage me could find and dig?

Leigh finished her Ph.D. before I did, so we moved to Seattle so she could do a post-doc fellowship. In Seattle, I finished my dissertation, went on the academic job market, and got a tenure track creative writing professor gig that would start in the fall.

At this point, I kinda loathed academia and was burned out on poetry. But I was also 35, had two children under the age of three, and had never made more than $23,000 in a year. The tenure track professor gig was my first chance to make middle class type money.

Then one of my buddies from my MFA days in Arkansas, Nic Pizzolatto, had his first novel published to rave reviews. Nic of course would go on to create TRUE DETECTIVE about four or so years later. But circa 2010, he was a creative writing professor looking for a way out.

When a pair of Hollywood lit-to-screen agents at a boutique agency reached out about his novel GALVESTON, Nic seized the opportunity: he wrote a bunch of TV scripts (including the pilot to TRUE DETECTIVE) and shared them with the agents, who flipped out for them.

They repped him, brought him out to visit LA, & he ended up selling some pilots & getting a staff writing job on THE KILLING. This blew my mind. Nic came from a similar background as me. He lived in IN. He didn't know anyone in LA. And yet he was suddenly a working screenwriter.

When my family flew down to visit LA (in 2011, I think), we stayed with Nic and his family. I could tell he greatly preferred this new line of work. Back in our MFA days, we'd talk over drinks about screenwriting and the new age of TV, etc. But now he was doing it.

When we talked about this stuff this time, he said if I wrote anything he could pass it along to his agents, who were at a small but well-respected boutique lit agency called RWSG.

My family flew back to Seattle, it was my last semester as a Ph.D. student. I had pretty much already finished writing my dissertation, so I gladly set it aside and started writing some scripts. Nic suggested writing one original pilot and one spec episode of an existing show.

I started writing the pilot for an original cop show set in the Ozarks. My intent: THE WIRE in a rural setting. I shared it with Nic. He thought it was okay, maybe strong enough to get me representation and maybe meetings. He gave me some helpful notes and I refined it.

I also wrote a spec episode for the show LIGHTS OUT, the short-lived boxing show on FX. I liked the show and I was also going to a grungy boxing gym in Seattle about three days a week at this point, so I felt like I could bring some texture and color to my script.

The spec was better than the original pilot, but both seemed...pretty good. But just before Nic was about to send the scripts to his agents, I asked him not to. This was my shot. It was maybe going to be my only shot. And I realized that I wasn't heads-over-heels for my pilot.

It was too intellectual and academic and not dramatic or emotional enough. It felt more like an educated meditation on crime shows than a really dramatic, moving, surprising crime show with great characters. It didn't feel special.

I started over, scrapping the Ozarks crime show idea. Instead, I tackled something much more personal. It ended up being a pilot for a show I called TANGLE EYE. I uploaded the script here, if you're curious: https://www.scribd.com/document/485687511/Tangle-Eye-Pilot. It's the script that broke me in.

I just reread the script for the first time in forever. Structurally, it's more dispersed and scattered then I would do now. Some spots are pretty indulgent.

But I think I see what people responded to: it's quite specific in its characters and world-building and tonality. And there's a poet's joy in the use of language (sometimes too much, maybe). I think those are decent introductory calling cards.

How the script came about: I remembered Leigh telling me a story about a boyfriend she had in Arkansas. When he was about five years old, his mother abandoned him for a few days in a camper trailer with his infant brother. That anecdote haunted me.

I also realized that I most wanted to write omething in the vein of Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name, or Mifune in YOJIMBO, or the Continental Op in RED HARVEST: the dangerous, seemingly amoral stranger who comes to a corrupt town & sets the villains against each other.

I also realized that the blue collar world that I grew up in and around Enumclaw, WA was a great setting for this story. And that I could give a ton of specificity to the locations and characters by basing them on everything I saw growing up.

So I started writing the script, beginning with Leigh's anecdote of the abandoned brothers as the teaser, then starting out act one with one of those brothers arriving into town decades later in Eastwood/Mifune fashion to solve the mystery of the other brother's murder.

That's basically all I had in mind at the start. I'd write a scene to keep myself entertained. Then when the scene seemed over, I'd dream up the next one, letting my love of pulpy westerns and samurai films mingle with memories from childhood.

Halfway through, I started realizing that this pulpy story was also accessing something highly personal. As it turns out, my biological father was not a good dude. He was a criminal who spent most of his short life in prison. I grew up away from him, with my mom & adoptive dad.

I had no real contact with my biological dad. But he did have two more sons born shortly after my birth. I never met either: one would commit suicide in his 20s and the other has spent most of his adult life in prison.

In my childhood and teen years, I'd grow up wondering what these two unseen brothers were like. Then later, I'd wonder if I would've ended up going on similar dark paths as them if I'd been raised by my biological father instead of my mother and adoptive father.

So maybe halfway through writing this TANGLE EYE pilot, I realized that the two brothers in the pilot -- one a hardened criminal seeking revenge, the other a more domesticated writer who's been killed -- were kind of like two alternate versions of myself. This surprised me.

I think there was also underlying guilt going on as well (I'd gotten out, they hadn't). So instead of an intellectualized meditation on crime shows, I now had something that was more entertaining and pulpier, but that also had genuine psychological stakes and specificity for me.

I think this combo supercharged my writing. The first original Ozarks crime pilot I wrote took months to figure out. I wrote TANGLE EYE in less than two weeks.

I sent my scripts to Nic, who passed them along to his agents while vouching for me. Within a few days, I got an email from them. Let's talk on the phone. We did and they told me that they loved TANGLE EYE and offered to rep me and try to set up meetings. Bewildered, I accepted.

They also asked if I had any more material, or episodes of TANGLE EYE. I told them no, but that I could write more. So over the next few weeks while they sent my materials around town, I sat down in Seattle and wrote three more episodes of TANGLE EYE.

My agents shared my scripts with a prominent manager who they thought would respond to my writing. They were right. He loved TANGLE EYE and we talked on the phone and hit it off. He became my manager.

To round out my team, my agents and (now) manager suggested connecting me with a prominent entertainment lawyer to also represent me. They felt that hitting the town with a very strong team would help get me more attention. I hit it off with the lawyer. I had a team.

At this time, my agents' tiny agency had a total of four agents. While they were setting up meetings for me, the son of one of the other agents came across my TANGLE EYE script (I think he randomly picked it up while visiting his dad), read it, and really responded to it.

At the time, this son was working with producers who had an overall deal with a big studio & were trying to find someone to write a pilot for a specific actor who had an idea for a show set in Texas. The son thought that my pilot had the right tone and feel for this actor's idea.

Also, I'd be cheap. He passed my script along and I got on the phone with the producers while waiting for my first round of LA meetings to get scheduled. That went well enough that we planned on meeting in person with the actor whenever I came to LA.

Eventually, my reps got a week's worth of meetings scheduled for me: some with studio executives, some with producers, some with showrunners looking to staff. A big array of industry types.

I flew from Seattle to LA and stayed with Nic while taking 3-5 meetings a day. This week of meetings turned into a week-and-a-half of meetings and I stayed in my agent's pool house the last half-week.

These were mostly general meetings, introducing me to executives and producers who either liked TANGLE EYE enough to be interested, or who maybe owed a favor to my reps. Plus a couple staffing meetings.

I didn't have much strategy going into these meetings beyond "don't be desperate" and "don't be a dipshit, an asshole, or a bore." (Still kind of my strategy.) Anyway, what I found: people were as interested in my personal story as much as they were in my script. Or even more so.

I realized my reps had basically described me as though I'd sort of crawled out of the Ozarks with a hatchet in one hand and a copy of, I don't know, ABSALOM! ABSOLOM! in the other, and was now arrived in LA as an authentic product of hillbilly country.

This was fine by me. I didn't start laying down some kind of country accent or start making up shit, but I didn't shy away from telling stories either. I think the combo of blue collar trailer park on one hand, and Ph.D poetry award winner on the other, made me stand out.

Luckily, my pilot script also leaned into a blue collar aesthetic, doubling down on my perceived rural authenticity. And in meetings, I pretty much guilelessly told industry folks that my ambition was to tackle subject matter that was considered white trash & to raise it to art.

I didn't realize it, but I was kind of successfully branding myself: here's a guy from rural blue collar America, who writes about rural blue collar America, and who wants to do more of it.

Without realizing it, I was presenting myself as a guy with a specific niche. So going forward, for some industry people, if a blue collar intellectual property crossed their desks, I was on the list of possible writers.

Also, looking back, I think some LA people felt like I was an underdog and liked my story. And maybe wanted to play a part in the next stage. I think others liked my writing. I think others thought I was a bore or a fraud and forgot me as soon as I walked out the door. All good.

I don't think I tried to impose a narrative on the meetings. I'd let conversations evolve. I met with the president of one TV studio and we mostly talked poetry. When I said I did my dissertation on Ezra Pound, he picked up a copy of THE CANTOS from his bookshelf. Pretty cool.

I also met with other people who felt like outsiders to LA, who grew up in say Kentucky or Ohio or in blue collar circumstances, and who I felt an immediate kinship and comfort with. Maybe they felt likewise. And maybe that helped my cause.

Overall, I think my plan in these meetings was to present the best version of my authentic self. To be a decent 30-50 minute conversation. To be alive to the other person as a potential creative partner, or maybe just a future drinking buddy.

As it turned out, this week and a half of meetings went well. One TV studio I met with wanted to acquire TANGLE EYE as part of a two-pilot deal. That was a good outcome.

Also, a producer team I met and connected with had an overall deal with a different TV studio. They wanted to hire me to adapt a series of Scandinavian crime novels as a crime show. That was a second good outcome.

Also, I met with the actor and the producers who wanted to do the show set in Texas. That meeting (early in the week) went well. Later that same week, we went to a third studio as a group to pitch the show.

The executive we pitched the Texas show to was the same executive who had Ezra Pound's CANTOS on his shelf. He bought the pitch in the room. That was a third good outcome.

Finally, one of the meetings I had was with Greer Shephard, the showrunner for an upcoming show that'd just been ordered to series: LONGMIRE. My meeting with Greer went fantastic. We had an immediate kinship. And I did a decent job of communicating how I understood this world.

I came back for a second meeting, this time including the head writers. It went really well. Going into their first season, LONGMIRE was looking for a freelancer to fill out their writing staff and write two episodes in season one. They offered me the gig. A fourth good outcome.

So, I'd flown into LA hoping to take a step towards a screenwriting career and a week and a half later I flew back to Seattle with what seemed like a new career. I quit the professor job and jumped in with both feet.

That's the very long roundabout story about how I got started as a TV writer. I started with the long circuitous backstory because I think it fed so much of what happened later so quickly.

First of all, because of my small town class background, I didn't pursue an industry career for 15+ years even though it was what I wanted. & I probably never would've pursued it if Nic hadn't done it first. I didn't feel entitled to it, maybe. Or maybe I was too intimidated.

But the 15 years I spent not pursuing my dream got me very well prepped for when I did. I worked a ton of different manual labor & customer service jobs. I went to a community college, a right wing Christian college, a public university, then a fairly elite private college.

I learned how to navigate every personality type. I also evolved as a writer, developing a pretty specific voice as a poet and critic. And developed an excess of self-confidence and learned to trust my inner voice.

Once I sat down to write my first real scripts at 35, I'd written and published three books. I'd also researched and written a book-length dissertation. I had a unique set of chops and a personal POV.

But there was also a shit ton of luck. None of this happens if Nic doesn't break in first. Or, if he's not the kind of good, loyal friend to connect me with his reps and vouch for me.

In fact, for years after breaking in, I'd have a producer or exec tell me that I first got on their radar via Nic bringing me up to them. (He never told me about doing this, and likely wouldn't dig me sharing it. And I know I'm not the only friend he's done this for.)

Also, I was lucky that I happened to write TANGLE EYE and try to break in at the exact same time that LONGMIRE was looking for a freelancer who had life experience in the same kind of rural blue collar world as the show.

My TANGLE EYE pilot takes place in the overlap between a rural sheriff's department & an Indian Reservation, & focuses on the crime & corruption lurking behind moneyed exteriors. Similar to the LONGMIRE world. & living in Seattle wasn't a handicap since it was a freelancing gig.

But it's not like my pilot was the only viable sample. LONGMIRE actually was going to hire two *different* freelancers before they settled on me: the first one got his own show ordered to series, and the second one got his feature film green lit. So they weren't available.

So, I was the backup's backup on the one show looking for my type. Lucky lucky lucky. But, I also like to think that I was well-prepared for each time the lucky breaks happened. And that I've bounced back pretty well each time I gotten knocked on my ass.

And that's my break-in story, as I recall it. Years and year of accidentally great prep. One industry contact, but it was a doozy. One sudden big opportunity that played out really fortunately. Lots of grind since then.

At some point, I might share the story of the next steps in staying semi-afloat after breaking in, and how I got into the world of feature writing a few years after breaking into TV....