Network Notes - Guest Column From Ben Blacker
Happy Tuesday!
You probably already know my friend and special guest Ben Blacker from his excellent podcast, The Writer's Panel.
But did you know that he recently started a newsletter called Re:Writing?
It's a natural extension of the podcast, drawing on the thousands of hours of conversations he's had with people at all levels in the business, as well as his own present day, boots on the ground perspective as a writer for film and television. It's great, I would have subscribed even if he wasn't my friend, and I highly recommend it.
Last week he reached out with the idea of doing a guest column for each other's newsletter, focusing on the idea of "networking." I loved that idea because you'll get a perspective that I never would have come up with in a voice that's all his own.
I'm running his guest column today, he'll run a part two from me in Re:Writing later this week.
There are links to Ben's newsletter and podcast below. Go check them out!
Without further ado, here's Ben Blacker...
The One with the Pizza Club
I’m lucky to call Mickey Fisher my friend. And I’m not just saying that because this is his turf.
Mickey and I met ahead of Extant’s second season when he guested on my podcast The Writers Panel, a show about the business and process of writing TV. Mickey was so kind and complimentary and so excited to be making TV that talking directly to him hurt like looking into the sun.
We hung out a few times—because ultimately he is irresistible and that enthusiasm for MAKING STUFF and storytelling is earnest and undeniable—and our friendship became fully baked when we both started making pizza around the same time. Since then, we meet often to eat, to gossip, to talk pizza and writing. Mickey has become a good friend in a town where that word—“friend”—can mean many things.
Sometimes my wife will mention a new movie or TV show, and I’ll respond, “My friend wrote that.”
“What friend? Do I know them?” is her frequent, skeptical reply.
“They played Werewolf at our house!” or “I met them for drinks last month!” or “We hit it off when they did Writers Panel and we’ve been trying to make plans for coffee but we’re both too busy!”
These are all legitimate Hollywood friendships.
But the phrase “Hollywood friendships” makes it feel shallow and acquisitive. Because I genuinely do consider these people my friends. I want to hang out with them. I want to spend time in bars or coffeeshops or writers’ rooms with them because I admire their big, brilliant brains. I think they’re funny or insightful or they have an interesting perspective on the world.
I’m lucky in that I like meeting new people and crawling around in their skulls (happy Halloween!). It’s made networking easy for me, because I never really think of it as networking even though, absolutely, that’s what I’m doing.
Friend-Working?
First, though: I wish there were a better word than “networking” for the relationships writers form with each other. “Networking” is too transactional a word. Too provisional. In my experience, there is a genuine excitement one writer has when they are interacting with another in a way that only writers can interact. Embrace that. Talk about the stuff that writers talk about when they talk to each other.
Enjoy having conversations with other humans! Listen more than you talk!
The biggest piece of networking advice—and this goes for new writers as well as established ones, as I’ve seen the mistake made by both—is to just be a person. Meet people where they are. Showrunner Javier Grillo-Marxuach(The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance; Cowboy Bebop; Lost) says, “You know so well when you’re being networked, you just want to go ‘just leave me be! There’s someone who looks like they want to talk about Babylon 5 and you’re talking to me about surfboards and meat’.”
You can’t force clicking with someone any more than you can make someone fall in love with you on the first date. If the connection isn’t there, then it isn’t there.
Sleepy Hollow creator Phil Iscove put it well and bluntly when he appeared on the podcast some years ago:
You learn very quickly that relationships and information are really the only currency out here. I definitely learned how to not seem like you’re networking. You know, going to drinks with people and genuinely being a nice person that people want to help, as opposed to, you know, “Will you read my shit?” to everybody, which doesn’t work so well.
So when can you ask someone to read your work? There are a few answers to this.
First, make sure that your work is bulletproof. Unless they are a close friend who is also one of your “early readers” (say, from your writers’ group or someone who’s seen your work in many stages before), the draft that you give someone to read should be as close to finished as possible. Decisions made, mostly free of spelling/grammatical errors, you think the story works.
Secondly, don’t do it on Twitter. Don’t do it publicly or in their DMs. We can talk about the weird parasocial relationship that Twitter fosters some other time, but the bottom line to this is that if you’ve only interacted with someone on Twitter, you may have different ideas about the nature of your relationship. We see this a lot with people interacting with actors or comedians, right? It’s hard not to feel like these are real conversations, real connections. They’re not. I see this a lot with new writers interacting with showrunners on social media. You know a person’s work, their Twitter personality, and maybe you’ve had some nice online exchanges. You are not yet ready to ask for a read. Because, remember, that is a big ask.
Steve Harper on Twitter: "Please don’t ask random strangers to read your #writing (like on #Twitter). Find a like-minded artist with a gentle feedback manner. Harshness and reckless comments can be harmful. Find your peeps! If you ask a random person, expect random results." / Twitter “Please don’t ask random strangers to read your #writing (like on #Twitter). Find a like-minded artist with a gentle feedback manner. Harshness and reckless comments can be harmful. Find your peeps! If you ask a random person, expect random results.”
What you can do is ask an upper level writer with whom you’ve had positive interactions if they’re willing to talk, Zoom, email. Which, I know, seems a bigger ask. But what you’re really doing is asking to meet them as people. You have questions about the business or craft. They have proven to be successful at it. That’s a conversation starter. But remember, as above: it’s a conversation. Be a person.
And if you offer to take them out for coffee (which, yes, I know, they are “rich” because they’re a showrunner, but you’re the one who called the meeting, so you’re paying), and they say that they’re busy right now, take that as a soft “no.” Try again in a couple of months. If they’re still busy, let it go. You don’t want to be the person constantly bothering a showrunner who has a multi-million dollar organization to run. Anyway, it’s a small town. You’ll probably run into them at a bar or party or something, and then you’ll have an opportunity to re-connect briefly and remind them who you are.
It’s always a light touch. It’s always a tap on the shoulder. Where I see people fail in networking is they go for the tackle every time. They forget the humanity of everyone involved.
So, When?
I don’t know the answer to this except to say: You’ll just know when it’s appropriate to ask someone to read your work, hire you or buy your script or connect you to someone who can.
You have to be able to read a room. It took me a few years to ask Mickey to read anything I’d written. Not because I was afraid of ruining the friendship but, when I did ask, I wanted it to be something that didn’t waste his time or mine. His notes on my script mattered, and I didn’t want to throw his thoughts away on something that was just another script for me. (His notes were great, by the way).
Likewise, earlier this year, my partner and I were up for a job on a show for which we’d be perfect, at least based on the premise. We didn’t know the showrunner personally, but we saw that they’d worked on a show with a writing team who, over the years, had brought us in for staffing and development a number of times. We knew that this writing team liked us and our writing, and we felt the same. I’ll admit that I was a bit uneasy asking them to recommend us to the showrunner who’s show we wanted to work on. Even knowing this team fairly well, it’s a big favor; you’re asking someone to stake their reputation on recommending you.
Ultimately, the writing team wrote a lovely email to the showrunner recommending us for the job, and they were happy to do it (you can usually tell if someone does something right away that they’re happy to do it or really busy; I choose to think this was a case of the former). We didn’t get the job (sad face emoji), but having that soft-touch interaction with both the team who recommended us and the showrunner who didn’t hire us was valuable, I think.
As Jeff Greenstein (Friends; Will & Grace) says, “I think my version of networking is that when I work with someone I try and have a really good experience so that when I leave I’m aware that they will move on and I will move on and maybe they will remember me fondly.”
Peer-to-Peer
This networking advice comes up a lot and for a good reason: network with your peers. And, as I’ve mentioned above, do it without “networking!” The so-called “note-behind-the-note” is this: make friends. Be a person. Interact with others at your own level.
Javi Grillo-Marxuach, mentioned earlier, describes how he got hired on Lost: “I wouldn't have had the job on Lost if I hadn’t met Jesse Alexander [who was already working on the show] through mutual friends, and for a while a couple of us would go out to dinner and bitch about our jobs to each other and stuff like that. He’s the person who brought me in to Lost.”
Javi didn’t try to network with the showrunners himself. He and Jesse were peers and friends. Jesse knew Javi would be a good fit for the show and so recommended him. It’s that rising tides thing, right? Form relationships, real ones, which are not transactional, where you’re supporting one another and each other’s work. Celebrate each other’s wins and commiserate in each other’s losses (there are a lot of losses in this industry, so pace yourselves). Look out for one another.
Be a person.
What If I Can’t?
Learn or adapt.
C. Robert Cargill is the screenwriter behind Sinister, Doctor Strange, The Black Phone, and more. (He’s also my guest this weekend at the Re:Writing paid-sub exclusive Zoom Q&A! Find out how to attend here). Cargill recently answered a few questions for me for the newsletter, and among his many insightful responses was this one:
Half your job as a starting writer is writing something great, and the other half is coming up with some very real, tangible, creative way of getting that work in front of the people who want to buy it. …There are a myriad of ways to go about that, and you need to find the one that is best suited to you and your skillset.
That last part is key. If you are not good at reading a room (and many writers are not), if you have social anxiety or don’t like groups or don’t know how to start a conversation, network—FriendWork (this will never catch on)—in a way that makes sense to you. Start or join a writers’ group. Host a barbecue or game night. Take a class where you’re obligated to give and receive notes. Suggest a real-life meet-up with Friends from Twitter or friends who share a fandom. Go to WGA events. The opportunities are out there, either to grab or create yourself.
Like many writers, when I first started out, I was not very good at socializing. I’m still not great. I love talking with people but, as my wife says, I enjoy “a structured good time.” It’s why I love throwing a dinner party or playing Werewolf or, you know, hosting a podcast.
The Writers Panel became my way to network with other writers whom I admired. When I first started in 2011 no one was really talking with TV writers about the business or process of writing TV. Of course, I had it in the back of my head that meeting all of these showrunners would lead getting hired on one of their shows. After spending a fun 90 minutes talking about themselves, these showrunners were sure to associate me with a good time, see that I’m a thoughtful person, and think of me as someone they wanted to spend ten hours a day with in a writers’ room.
Did it work?
Not at all!
What did happen is that I ended up meeting thousands of writers, many of whom became good friends. That writing team who recommended us for that job? I met them on the podcast before they ever invited us in for a meeting. We sold two pilots to USA some years ago because a showrunner I befriended on the podcast sent our material to his execs there. And, of course, you wouldn’t be reading this now if I hadn’t hosted a Writers Panelepisode on which Mickey guested back in 2015.
The writing community in Hollywood really is a community. When people talk about networking in the industry, I rarely hear about is how much fun it can be to make genuine connections with people who are in the trenches with you.
I used to record the Writers Panel podcast live at the old Meltdown Space, and a lovely community of folks showed up there to watch, laugh, and ask questions. They’d wander the comic book store beforehand, talking about TV and movies and storytelling. I’d see the same faces week after week, and it was heartwarming to hear their progress in the business.
I started this newsletter, Re:Writing, in part to recapture some of that. So let this place become a writing community. The people who listen to The Writers Panel and who read this newsletter tend to be nice people who want to make cool stuff. So, please, use the comments section to get to know one another. It’s an opening and welcoming space. Who knows, it may lead to work down the line. Or it may lead to something even better: a community.
Tell you what. I’ll make it easy. I’ll end this newsletter as I end every podcast episode: by asking what you are watching on TV these days. What’s getting you excited or inspired?
Re:Writing | Ben Blacker | Substack — benblacker.substack.com What I've learned from talking with over 2000 professional writers and writing professionally for twenty years. Click to read Re:Writing, by Ben Blacker, a Substack publication with thousands of readers.
The Writers Panel with Ben Blacker | Forever Dog Podcast Network — foreverdogpodcasts.com The definitive insider's guide to our current golden age of television, Ben Blacker's The Writers Panel is an ever expanding anthology of live convention panels and intimate in-studio interviews with the writers, producers, and show runners responsible for the shows you can't stop watching.