“Mad Men” Creator Matthew Weiner’s Reassuring Life Advice For Struggling Artists

If this excerpt featured in Fast Company is any indication, the book “Getting There: A Book of Mentors” looks to fall into my must-buy-then-must-read category (as opposed to must-buy-then-lie-in-a-stack-by-the-bed-and-collect-dust-for-years). This is a first person account by Matthew Weiner who created the renowned AMC series “Mad Men”. Here are some excerpts:

Writers were revered in my home and I wanted to be one since I was a kid, but when I went to college, I could not get into a writing class. I went to Wesleyan, a very small liberal arts school. The classes had only 12 to 15 people, and you had to submit writing samples to get in. Mine, apparently, were just not good enough. I was rejected from every writing class. I ended up convincing an English teacher to do a one-on-one independent poetry study with me. When I finished my thesis, I was extremely proud and wanted others to see it. I gave it to a humanities professor and he invited me to his house to read the work out loud. After the first poem, he told me to get out a pen and take notes. He began, “The infantile use of . . . The puerile . . . The childish use of . . . The cliché awkwardness . . . “ It was one humiliating cruelty after the next. And I had to write these insults down myself. I literally went through hours of this, poem after poem. He finally leaned over to me and said, “I think you know that you are not a poet.” I said, “I was not aware of that.”

After college Weiner attended film school at the University of Southern California and made a documentary, but couldn’t generate anything from that.

So for the next three years I stayed home and wrote spec scripts. My friends had day jobs, but I didn’t. My wife, Linda, worked hard as an architect and supported us. I attempted to shop my material around, but nothing sold. I got very bitter, seeing people I didn’t think deserved it succeed. It was a dark time. Show business looked so impenetrable that I eventually stopped writing. I began watching TV all day and lying about it. My mother would call me to drive my brother-in-law to the airport. That’s the kind of crap I was doing instead of being a writer. I felt like the most useless, worthless person in the world.

He landed a temporary gig doing punch-up work on a Warner Bros. TV pilot, Weiner’s first paying gig in the business, which led to being hired as a writer on a seris. He was 30 years old.

Comedy hours are long — literally 14-hour days, sometimes seven days a week. But I always wanted to create my own show, so I started researching my “advertising project” (Mad Men) in my spare time. It was like having a mistress. I worked on it at night or during my off-hours when I was not with my family. I paid people to do research, inundated myself with material, and even hired a writer’s assistant to dictate to because I was too tired to type (it also freed my imagination). When I finished the script, I felt like it was something special.

I sent it off to my agent and pitched it to everyone I could. I literally carried it in my bag wherever I went in case I ran into someone who might be useful. I wasn’t able to get meetings at the big networks, but I pitched it to small production companies. From them, I heard things like, “You don’t know what you’re doing.” “Are you aware of how uncommercial this is?” “Are you pulling our leg?” But, honestly, the most stinging responses I heard were along the lines of, “This is one of the most beautiful, well-executed, exciting things I’ve ever read, but I’m afraid that we just don’t do this kind of show.” Those comments made me feel as if I were alone in the universe.

Eventually the script reached David Chase who was producing “The Sopranos” on HBO. He hired Weiner as a staff writer, but Weiner kept pushing his script “Mad Men” and as we all know, AMC picked it up and the series basically made that network.

The observations Weiner makes at the end of the article are noteworthy in the extreme:

Hollywood is tough, but I do believe that if you are truly talented, get your material out there, put up with the rejection, and don’t set a time limit for yourself, someone will notice you.

The most defeatist thing I hear is, “I’m going to give it a couple of years.” You can’t set a clock for yourself. If you do, you are not a writer. You should want it so badly that you don’t have a choice. You have to commit for the long haul. There’s no shame in being a starving artist. Get a day job, but don’t get too good at it. It will take you away from your writing.

The greatest regret I have is that, early in my career, I showed myself such cruelty for not having accomplished anything significant. I spent so much time trying to write, but was paralyzed by how behind I felt. Many years later I realized that if I had written only a couple of pages a day, I would’ve written 500 pages at the end of a year (and that’s not even working weekends). Any contribution you make on a daily basis is fantastic.

Ah, a happy ending!

For the rest of the article, go here.