THE MYTHIC RISE OF AN UNLIKELY BLUE COLLAR AUTEUR & other stories I tell myself in order to enjoy a career in a brutal industry:

I think talking about building & pursuing a screenwriting career is in many ways useless. There's only so much advice that can be given or taken, simply because there are so many variables.

Plus, I'm sure there's advantages I enjoy as a straight white dude w/ matinee idol good looks & a charismatic personality. So I can't really tell others how to approach their career. But I can try to explain my own thinking about mine for you to judge and/or possibly adapt.

My career, as far as I can tell, has been about authoring my own evolving self-myth while also methodically building bridges to each new phase of my career.

I’m not talking about art. I’m simply talking about how I’ve tried to make a living doing this, while also maintaining some sense of purpose & fulfillment.

My breaking-in happened suddenly, ten years ago. When it did, I wasn't thinking about myths or building bridges, or anything else. I was mostly just bewildered to suddenly be working in Hollywood.

That is, in my first couple years, I was in a state of stunned compliance. I was just happy to be here. Which is perhaps understandable. But isn't a practically efficacious operational self-orientation. That is, it wasn’t a useful story to tell myself about myself.

One of the harder things I had to learn after breaking in was figuring out how to take ownership of my career in such a seemingly randomized industry. Which is a weird thing to say, maybe. I don't know if it's my temperament, or class background, or what.

I think I operated as if my career was a gift bestowed upon me by mercurial gods, & could be taken away just as quickly as it had been given. And that might actually be the case! Who knows. Either way, I think my attitude was: just be silently grateful for whatever you get.

Maybe this was learned by spending my teens & 20s in a series of jobs where I just had to shut up & take it. I dunno. But silent, passive, stunned gratitude isn't a practically effective approach to take regarding your own career. Or, it wasn't for me.

I started gradually to realize this. & I started to change my orientation towards my own career. & that’s when my career started becoming less a source of constant anxiety, & started getting closer to being a source of enjoyment & meaning. It started going better, too.

That doesn’t mean I suddenly stopped having failures. It just meant that I began creating a story for myself: a self-myth about why I was doing the things I was doing. That changed everything for me. It gave me a context for all my actions.

But first, I had to figure out: What *is* the story I am telling myself about why I actually do what I do? And I mean for real. Not the altruistic, self-flattering reason I tell other people why I'm doing this. But the actual selfish reason that I know lurks down inside of me.

Am I doing this because I want to make money or have a better lifestyle? Am I doing this because I want the glory? Am I doing this because it feels good? Because I want people to think I'm special? Because I think it'll get me laid?

All perfectly valid reasons in my book. So, why *am* I -- Tony Tost -- doing this? I think I originally started writing because: 1) it's the only thing I've ever been truly exceptional at, 2) I have a great big emptiness inside me that I'm desperate to fill.

Self-myth time: in the '90s, I was a fat depressed 18 year old virgin living in a trailer park & working at a pickle factory. Then Nirvana & Pearl Jam & Tarantino & Spike Lee all sort of hit me at the same time.

This early '90s cultural wave pointed to a way out of my frankly unbearable existence. Basically, early on, I wrote because I wanted to become somebody else. As in, literally. To be specific, I wanted to become Kurt Cobain or Quentin Tarantino.

I wanted girls to notice me. I wanted to feel loved. I wanted to be special. I started taking creative writing classes at a community college, & I discovered I was better at writing than everyone around me.

My first real sense of feeling visible, or of even having self-worth, came through writing. Not just through writing, but from getting recognized by my teachers & peers as a uniquely gifted writer. & that has carried through my adult life.

My point here is this: I can't really separate my writing career from what I’m selfishly hoping, in my heart of hearts, my writing will do for me. My deepest wish has been for my writing to give me the sense of identity & self-worth that I wouldn't otherwise have.

Ok. So that's my psychological baseline. Talent exists. But whatever talent I possess can't be disassociated from this gnawing insatiable empty feeling. It's probably why I write compulsively. I have to write just about everyday. Otherwise, I start to wonder if I even exist.

Now, I also like money. I also like the process. I like collaborating & making cool shit. But I think I'm mostly doing screenwriting because it gives me an identity, both to myself & to others. Writing is my primary tether to my own existence.

In fact, writing is my argument to the cosmos that I deserve to exist. (TMI, but since I was told at the age of 9 that I was conceived in a sexual assault, I’ve struggled off & on with guilt & shame about even existing.)

So I can't really advise anyone else about how to think about their screenwriting career. Because I don't know what's truly motivating you. Or what holes you're trying to fill along the way. I don't know what you're selfishly expecting your writing to do for you.

When I started writing, I desperately wanted to become the next Quentin Tarantino or Orson Welles. I wanted to be a young genius in the world. That ship has kind of sailed. I'm now a middle-aged man. But I still have grand ambitions.

If I was to be honest, these days I want to have Taylor Sheridan's career. I don't actually want to be him. I don't know what he's like. Maybe he's a miserable bastard. Maybe he's a prince. I don't know.

I have a beautiful marriage to a great wife & two amazing sons & a great dog. I can afford to buy blu rays & order UFC pay per views & takeout. I don't actually want to be someone else anymore. I actually managed to write my way into a new life & I really quite enjoy all of it.

So thankfully, I'm not operating from the same drowning existential despair as in my teens & twenties. Which means I'm not placing the same psychic demand on my writing to give me a reason to keep living. Which is good for my career! And, also, probably just good in general.

But my ability to contribute positively to my marriage, & to be a good enough dad to my sons, is probably inextricable from the sense of identity & security that my writing career has brought me. If I suddenly wasn't a writer, I know I'd become a worse husband & dad.

But I'm also not at a spot where I'm thinking, "okay, I just want to stay in this place & cruise around for the next 20 years." I've done some cool shit. Three books. I've created & run my own TV show, been paid to write some pretty great feature scripts, etc etc.

I'm proud of all of that. But to be honest, it's not enough. I want more. If my career ended today, I'd publicly say that I was grateful for it. Maybe at some point, I would be. But to be honest, I'd mostly be bitter for a good long while. Because I know I can do bigger & better.

So when I say I'm aiming for something like Taylor Sheridan's career, it doesn't necessarily mean that I want to have the biggest show on cable, like YELLOWSTONE. Tho I certainly wouldn't mind.

What I mean is: I want to write & *direct* my own rural, muscular material for both TV & film, ideally with the sorts of budgets & casts that Taylor Sheridan now works with. I'm not there yet. I'm still gathering materials to build the bridge to get from here to there.

No one gave Taylor Sheridan those casts & budgets. He wrote his way to them. Which is why I admire what he's done so much. He wrote SICARIO & HELL OR HIGH WATER on spec, for free. Two fantastic fucking films.

Those two films made him a name screenwriter. But he didn’t rest at that, or just repeat it. He used his new industry buzz as a bridge. He parlayed his hot writer status into WIND RIVER, which he wrote & directed himself on a modest budget.

WIND RIVER established Sheridan as someone who could capably direct his own material. It was well-received. It made some money. So Sheridan parlayed that into another leap: writing & directing YELLOWSTONE.

The massive success of YELLOWSTONE, & his previous track record, has led to Sheridan to now having an even bigger budget & bigger stars for his next film starring Angelina Jolie. Bridge to bridge to bridge.

If I had to guess, based solely on what he's done so far, unless he burns these bridges Taylor Sheridan should be able to command the budgets & talent to write & direct some version of whatever he wants for the next 20 years. Within limits.

To be blunt, I want my version of that. In my own quiet way, I've kinda been making my case as the plan b Taylor Sheridan already. I mean, what is WIND RIVER but a film length LONGMIRE episode with a bigger budget & bigger names?

But I still need to build the rest of the bridge from where I am now -- a working screenwriter without name recognition but with I think a good rep as a blue collar writer in some Hollywood circles -- to where I want to be:

Someone who can credibly write & direct his own muscular blue collar flyover state stories & gain access to the sorts of budgets & collaborators that'll help get those stories to a large enough audience so that I can keep writing & directing this sorta shit for another 20+ years.

Underlying all of this is that old gnawing need to have an identity. There’s this mythic self I’m building in order to see myself, & (to be honest) to be seen, as a kind of blue collar auteur.

A working class poet of muscularity & soulfulness who beat the odds & who now tells stories about his blue collar flyover tribe, primarily for that tribe. That’s my in-progress self-myth.

I know myself pretty well by now, I think. So I also know I also need a daily sense of feeling like a notable writer to keep me from cartwheeling down some inner embankment. So I have to prop up my lesser daily self while also trying to build this mythic self. It’s…a process.

This brings me to my whole bridge-and-materials metaphor. I think I know exactly where I am right now, & where I want to get to. I think that gives me a huge advantage in an industry full of confusion & misdirection & desperation. I have a story about myself I've committed to.

So, career-wise, I now divide my projects into two camps: 1) projects that can be direct bridges to my mythic blue collar writer-director self, 2) projects that can help me gather materials to build that bridge. That’s it.

If a project doesn't fall into one of those two camps, I'm not interested in it. Not right now. At this point of my career, a potential big paycheck wouldn't lure me to try & pitch on a Marvel movie. (I say pitch because they wouldn’t offer me a script.)

Nothing wrong with MCU films I guess, but I'm not in this for the payday. I'm in this to fill the big yawning inner void by forging myself into this mythic blue collar storytelling auteur! Getting rich on an MCU movie won't help me do that.

But writing & directing my own HELL OR HIGH WATER or A PERFECT WORLD or THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE OF EBBING, MISSOURI, or creating, running & directing my own JUSTIFIED or YELLOWSTONE? Maybe that would.

Or at least, that’s the story I keep telling myself. And as a believer of the power of myths, right now just believing in that story is good enough for me.

To be honest, now that I'm ten years into my career, I'm only now at a place where I think I can credibly build a bridge from where I am to actually attempting my own version of the blue collar writer-director auteur thing. It’s taken 10 years simply to get to this bridge.

If I get myself into position to write & direct my first film, it’s 99.9% likely to be some variation of the western, most likely a modern day one. It's my favorite genre. But it's also the iconography I’ve worked in for most of my TV career.

That is, if I’m going to make the leap from writer to director, I don’t think I should also be suddenly trying to make a leap into a new genre. One reinvention at a time is plenty enough.

Maybe that’s a repeated motto for me: dream big while putting my energies into a jump I can actually make right now. Enjoy that landing spot, but also think about it as a place to gather new materials for my next jump.

And by materials, I mean: new skills, or new relationships, or a new uptick in status or buzz based on the quality or marketibility of the new project, or simply a new sample that can better show the industry what I’m capable of doing.

All these materials can then become the basis of a new bridge: to a new project, or a new genre, or a new phase of my career. Sometimes, I’m just buying myself time &/or paying this month’s bills, but if I’m not gathering bridge-building materials, I’m also probably burning out.

Example: while I was working on LONGMIRE, I knew that simply plugging away at being a good writer on someone else’s show wasn’t going to be a bridge to where I wanted to go next: creating & running my own show.

So while writing on LONGMIRE, I also wrote two episodes of DAMNATION. I wrote them on my own, for free & in secret, because at that time it was the only way I knew. how to write fully in my own voice.

I believed that writing in my own voice was the best way to create a bridge from being a staff writer to becoming a showrunner. Luckily, I was right. It took a couple of years to get it on air, but those DAMNATION scripts led me to selling & showrunning my own show.

I was no longer just a TV writer, I was now a showrunner. Which is obviously a fucking awesome opportunity. But it also placed me in new territory, where I could gather new materials & try to build even more ambitious bridges than I could before. Bridge to bridge to bridge.

One new bridge: I didn't want to only be in TV. I also wanted to have a feature career. I still had my writer-director ambitions. I had a lot of TV bridge-building materials by now. But no features ones, other than the ability to write scripts, plus a degree of self-knowledge.

So with those materials in hand, how could I build a bridge into the features world? In the process of pitching DAMNATION, my manager approached me about possibly adapting an Olympic rower's memoir into a feature.

He told me there were two ways we could do it: we could 1) go out & try to find someone to pay me to write it, & develop the script with them. Or, 2) I could write it on my own for free, but fully in my own voice.

I chose door #2. Practically, I could do this because LONGMIRE was paying 1/2 the bills (my wife's professor job was paying the other 1/2). But I also knew that each leap forward in my career had happened via a script written for free, without any meddling, done in my own voice.

Here’s a pattern: every time I've wanted to build a bridge to the next phase of my career, the way I've done it is by writing a script on spec. Meaning, for free. On my own, in my own voice, in my own chosen genre, w/ my own chosen subject matter.

But it's never been just any ol’ script, written just to be sold or even just to be made. Each spec script that I've written that's changed my career was specifically written to do just that: to be a direct bridge from where I currently stood to the next phase of my career.

Now, that's not the only reason each was written. I try not to write anything I don't 100% believe in. I'm not good enough to cynically write something without any emotional skin in the game & have it come out good.

When I wanted to break into features, I didn't go around town trying to randomly score an open writing assignment. I wrote a blue collar sports story because I believed that having a script fully in my own voice circulating around town would do more for my career than anything.

Plus, after defining myself almost exclusively to anyone paying attention as a guy who specialized in blue collar crime stories w/ a neo-western bent, it felt after 5+ years like a good time to show that I could write in other genres as well.

I ended up writing the blue collar sports feature script for free, with total creative control (with helpful input from my management company). I called it THE OLYMPIAN & it got passed around town like crazy, & tied for 2nd place on the Black List about 5 years ago.

That script has led to a run of paid feature writing gigs, & is still probably my main calling card around town. It's gotten me the most meetings & industry fans. Largely I think it’s because it’s written in a different voice than most sports stories. It wasn't over developed.

Also, I think it moved some people: it’s about a blue collar rower who takes on the entire elite rowing establishment in order to prove his greatness, largely so he can justify his own existence to himself. Basically, it’s spiritual autobiography masquerading as a sports biopic.

So, this spec script served me well in a way that a studio developed one wouldn’t. Plus, I even ended up getting paid for it a few years later, for several times more $ than I would've gotten beforehand. Win, win.

It was a story I believed in. But there was always also a strategic reason why I wrote each spec script when I did, with that specific subject matter. It was all about building a bridge linking the distance b/w where I was in my career at the time & where I wanted to go next.

A lot of working writers refuse to write unless they're getting paid ahead of time. I get that. I have a different approach. When I want to push my career to its next phase, I feel the best investment I can make is taking time to write something fully in my voice, to my liking.

That doesn't mean I'm going around writing shit for free, willy nilly, tho. My attitude is this: I will write something for free, but only if I think it'll be the main bridge to the next phase of my career.

When I’ve thought a spec script would help me jump from staff writer to showrunner (DAMNATION), or from TV into features (THE OLYMPIAN), or from screenwriter to writer-director (TBA), I've happily written it for free. But it’s all depended on where I was standing at the time.

So at this point of my career, I won't write a TV pilot script for someone else for free. I don't need that bridge right now. Same reason why I'll no longer write a feature script on spec for someone else to direct. Don't need that bridge either.

So what will I write on spec, for free? A feature script for me to direct, that I control. Or an original pilot for a show I would run, based on my own original idea, or on a property I have optioned & control myself. (With the underlying goal of directing episodes myself.)

So I guess that’s how I think about my career. I think about the bigger self-myth I’m actively creating for myself in my choice of projects & what materials I’m gathering up along the way. That's the big picture. That's the destination on the (forever shifting) horizon.

I also find ways to tend to the less glorious day-to-day story of being this person whose sense of his own existence & self-worth is inescapably tied-up with his identity & daily practice as a writer.

And here’s the kicker: all of the above might very well be bullshit. I could have the career that I have right now totally out of sheer chance. It could’ve been mostly random good luck (or bad luck) guiding my career so far, regardless of this myth & bridges shit.

I don’t think it matters. What matters is that I believe that I’m creating my mythic self. That means I take total responsibility for the good & bad of my career, & that I fold each failure or victory or neutral draw into this myth of the unlikely rise of a blue collar auteur.

This self-myth keeps me going. It supplies me with meaning & direction. It gives me a throughline I can return to when I'm puzzled about what projects to chase, or what projects to write on spec, or what opportunities to politely decline.

When I find myself in a state of frustration, or depression, I reorient myself so I can gather materials to build a bridge to the next phase of this myth.

I see a lot of writers who seem to have almost trained themselves to just passively hope for the best. Or randomly chase projects or randomly choose what to write. Or sort of roll their eyes at the powers-that-be like teenagers wishing mom & dad would up their allowance.

I did those things, too. But they were all feeding into this self-story of a writer who was powerless to write out his own story, or determine the course of his own career. It wasn’t the story of someone actively building bridges — however modest — to the next step in his career.

The unlikely rise of the blue collar auteur self-myth I’ve created for myself could be 100% bullshit. But if it’s keeping my head above water, & driving me to a richer & more fulfilling experience of my own career, then it’s a fairy tale that’s much preferable to the truth.

Per usual, there's an EVEN LONGER video version of this particular novella here: