Kelly Oxford has taken issue with how some have decided to portray her. Particularly The Chicago Tribune, who recently headlined an article about her, “Writer takes short route to Hollywood success.†She writes on her blog:
The message I am getting from this is that living my whole live as a writer, writing for years and years meant nothing. Growing up as the annoying kid on the street who wrote plays and tried to force peers to perform them, going to screenwriting seminars, blogging daily (exercise) for 12 years, staying up for days and days to finish scripts was a waste of my goddamn time. The message I’m getting here is that you can write a few funny tweets and become a screenwriter. It’s the American Dream, and this Canadian is calling bullshit.
She continues to explain that there are no shortcuts, you just have to write words over and over again. Here are the three things she says every writer must do:
1. Be a good writer. You don’t have to be amazing, but be a very good writer and above all have a point of view. Be honest when you write, because when you try to be something you are not, it shows (and when it shows it stinks)2. Write. Write a lot, all the time. Every day. Re-write. Never show people your first drafts, trust me, it’s crap. The beauty of writing is that you can take 4 days to write that one page and make that page so beautiful that people cry/laugh/shit themselves when they read it.3. Get your writing out there. Make videos, start a website. Self-publish and self-promote.
The alternative, of course, is you write a couple tweets about how Kim Kardashian is dumb and how Britney Spears is dumb and then you sell your soul to the devil. (Not the metaphoric, big show business devil. The actual devil.)