{"id":2931,"date":"2019-06-05T15:21:18","date_gmt":"2019-06-05T15:21:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/?p=2931"},"modified":"2019-06-12T12:37:10","modified_gmt":"2019-06-12T12:37:10","slug":"how-not-to-break-into-writing-about-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/how-not-to-break-into-writing-about-film\/","title":{"rendered":"How Not to Break Into Writing About Film"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like Jeremy Smith<\/a>, I happened to be among the first handful of people who started writing movie reviews online, back in the mid-1990s. It\u2019s easy to get noticed when you have virtually no competition. <\/span>Entertainment Weekly <\/i><\/strong>praised my barely-designed personal website<\/a> in the first mainstream article ever written about Internet film critics (January 1997), and they subsequently commissioned me to write capsule reviews of home-video releases. <\/span><\/p>\n

That gig led to others, so reliably that to this day I\u2019ve never actually pitched a publication. In a sense, I won the film-critic equivalent of the national lottery and thus have no practical advice for the aspirational. Winning the lottery\u00a0<\/span>entailed spending nearly two years writing my own tickets \u2014 that is, writing about movies without being paid \u2014 not with any career goal in mind, but simply because I loved movies and needed some outlet for my thoughts about them.<\/span><\/p>\n

How to not be authoritative<\/h4>\n

Originally, my writing was intended strictly for friends, to whom I\u2019d been emailing brief responses to the movies I saw. Putting these reviews on a website saved me a little time, and the idea that others might read them barely occurred to me (partly because comparatively fewer people had Internet access in the 90s). Most of the time, my goal was to persuade myself, more than any hypothetical reader.<\/span><\/p>\n

When I went out to the movies with my then-girlfriend, she\u2019d ask me what I thought as we left the theater, and was always surprised when I hemmed and hawed and equivocated or even outright shrugged. \u201cYou always sound so authoritative when you write it down,\u201d she would say, and only much later did I recognize that it\u2019s the very act of writing something down \u2014 forcing you to articulate inchoate ideas \u2014 that instills a semblance of authority. A lot of the time I truly don\u2019t know what to think, and writing a review is my way of figuring things out. <\/span><\/p>\n

Maintaining a sense of discovery isn\u2019t always easy in the Page View Age \u2014 editors tend to prefer forceful takes with clickable headlines \u2014 but I still think of a review primarily as an exploration, and tend to write them as slightly more polished versions of the arguments I’d have with myself on my website. <\/span><\/p>\n

This approach proved useful during the years I penned <\/span>Esquire<\/i><\/strong>\u2019s film column. Because monthly magazines have such a long lead time (a June issue is often in the works by March), I was sometimes assigned to write about movies that weren\u2019t finished yet. <\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to be authoritative in that context, so I\u2019d think up an alternate angle involving its genre or director, or maybe one of its stars. That turned out to be excellent practice for ordinary criticism, limbering up analytic muscles that I might’ve otherwise let atrophy. <\/span><\/p>\n

So determined was I to maintain my independent sensibility that when I landed my first full-time staff position as chief film critic for <\/span>Time Out New York<\/i><\/strong>,<\/span> I actually spent a few months writing two separate reviews of each movie I saw: one for the magazine, and a less formal version for my personal site. <\/span><\/p>\n

Eventually, I created a blog for writing about older films, plus the occasional new release that I wasn\u2019t assigned to review but wanted to see anyway.<\/p>\n

How to not make money<\/h4>\n

That extracurricular activity subsequently shifted to <\/span>Letterboxd<\/strong>, a social-media\/review site which is basically a beautifully-designed clearinghouse for unpaid labor. I don\u2019t mean that as a knock \u2014 it\u2019s an easy way to check in with friends and colleagues about movies old and new, and in my case the entirely voluntary work is something I\u2019d be doing anyway. Without making any particular effort to do so, I accumulated over 12,000 followers<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

But then my main freelance gig had its film budget slashed after being purchased by a corporate behemoth, and I had to take another job (which ended up being poker; I have no other marketable skills) to make up the difference, leaving me little to no spare time to write for fun.<\/span><\/p>\n

My <\/span>Letterboxd<\/span> reviews dried up, and after a while I decided to find out if people missed them enough to pay a pittance \u2014 maybe only a dollar a month \u2014 for their return. I set up a Patreon<\/strong> account<\/a> and was gobsmacked by the response: more than 400 people are subscribed, many of them at $5, $10, and even $25 per month. (Higher tiers allow people to suggest films for me to watch and review.)<\/span><\/p>\n

How to not build an audience<\/h4>\n

There\u2019s no chance that I could have persuaded that many folks to financially support my non-professional writing had I not spent years building an audience, even though building an audience was never my express intention \u2014 writing about movies was always a helpful and immensely gratifying by-product of my love for movies combined with a compulsive need to write things down.<\/span><\/p>\n

I realize that the trajectory described above skews dangerously close to the old \u201cDo what you love; the money will follow\u201d saw, which I’d never inflict on anyone. The truth is that I <\/span>have <\/span><\/i>done what I love, and the money <\/span>has <\/span><\/i>followed. Not a lot of money \u2014 if that\u2019s your desire, do almost anything else\u00a0\u2014 but if not writing feels like not breathing, then write. Somewhere, anywhere. If you’re good at it, people will find you.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First, build yourself a time machine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":2936,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[32],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2931"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2931"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2951,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2931\/revisions\/2951"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}