This past week, author of Just the Funny Parts: …And a Few Hard Truths About Sneaking into Hollywood’s Boy’s Club, and creator of one of my favorite shows, Sabrina the Teenage Witch Nell Scovell, visited William & Mary, spending an hour chatting with a group of students, faculty and community members, answering questions, giving advice, and leaving me with much to think about. In that hour, I learned that Scovell’s favorite thing she has ever written was a script that was never produced; which answered the question: What if people were judged by who they were and not what they looked like? I learned that people like Sheryl Sandberg, Anita Hill and other people who display courage in the face of pushback inspire her. And I learned that common threads in her work are her curiosity and the thrill of the challenge of writing something new.
While all of that was great, and I enjoyed her candor and humor in answering those questions, I was most moved by the conversations we had around her writing: her process, her motivations, and her advice. “If you’re a writer,” she said, “you can move into different worlds.” Scovell got her start writing sports articles for the Harvard Crimson. She spent time writing first person columns for Cosmopolitan, and even articles about leasing cars. I was so entranced by the allure of her writing for shows like Sabrina and The Simpsons, that it never occurred to me that she had a writing career before she “made it” in television.
Her adventures in writing were so diverse. They were expansive. Though she never said it explicitly, all she wanted to do was write, and she’d write about anything; just as long as she had an opportunity to put pen to paper or fingers on a keyboard. She was hungry for challenges. Nothing was impossible, there were only obstacles to conquer. Her stories were like a new age Odyssey but with a female lead. Writing, it became clear, can take you places. It can take you anywhere.
Scovell gave some great advice on writing. She told us that when you’re just starting out, just say yes, you never know where it will lead. She told us that you can’t just write, you have got to write a lot. And she told us that you must put yourself into the world to be judged. As someone who is still feeling the sting of her latest rejections, I had to ask her, “If you’re putting yourself out into the world to get judged and getting rejected, how do you deal?” She smiled and told me to keep those who support me close, and ultimately, take the feedback you want and screw the rest.
During the talk, she said one thing that really stood out to me, “I don’t understand people who are scared to try something new. If you do it well, it’s great, but if you fail, you have the best excuse in the world: ‘I’d never done this before!’” Instantly, I thought about the time Micah encouraged me to write a script. I gave her all the excuses: I’d never written one so I didn’t know how, I didn’t have an idea, I didn’t have software, and so on and so forth. Then I thought about the time I sat in a dimly lit room on the second floor of Clemons Library with a group of other Black UVA students and wrote monologues. I’d never written a monologue before. I’d also never written something that would be used for performance before, but I had a story that I needed someone, anyone, to hear and so I wrote.
I still have that hunger. I still have stories I need to tell. I still need to write.
I don’t know if there will ever come a day when I won’t need to put words on paper.
So I met Nell Scovell, and after Professor Losh generously plugged my blog during the talk, Scovell asked me to write down my site for her. I’m always still amazed when anyone wants to read my words. I wrote the link on the back of one of my new business cards and chatted with her for a while after the formal talk was over. She asked me if I wanted to write for TV and “yes” flew out of my mouth before my brain had a chance to catch up. Looking back, even if I’d had a second to think before I spoke, I still would have said yes. Anyone that knows me knows that I would love a crack at writing for a superhero TV show, particularly a spin off about a certain superhero girlfriend with the initials LL.
Nell Scovell cracked my world wide open with one simple question. One day, if I keep writing, writing a lot, and getting feedback, my writing is going to exist in a lot more places than this site and amongst the piles of other essays on my professors’ desks. My words do not have to know bounds. They can exist in academic journals, literary reviews, blogs, magazines, newspapers, TV, film, novels, screenplays. So long as I continue to believe in my words and put them out into the world, they can take me anywhere. I just have to believe it.
And I do. I really, really do.
(Oh, and Nell? If you’re reading this, thanks.)
Black Girl Does Grad School 