How to Escape the Box You’ve Become Trapped in as an Artist
Screenwriter and novelist Cole Haddon asked more than 20 filmmakers, novelists, and comic book writers to weigh in about how to avoid being…
Screenwriter and novelist Cole Haddon asked more than 20 filmmakers, novelists, and comic book writers to weigh in about how to avoid being put in a box and, if it’s already happened to you, how to break free.
For the last year or so, Cole Haddon (Dracula — TV series, Psalms for the End of the World — Novel) has hosted the Substack site 5AM StoryTalk. The subject of his most recent article: How to Escape the Box You’ve Become Trapped in as an Artist. Cole posed that question to a bunch of screenwriters, filmmakers, novelists, and comic book writers including Amy Berg, Meg LeFauve, Mike Royce, Liz W. Garcia, Marc Guggenheim, and Mickey Fisher.
Here is my contribution to the article.
My first two screenwriting deals were comedies: The spec script K-9, which sold to Universal and a pitch Warner Bros. bought called Mr. President, a Rodney Dangerfield project set up on the strength of his hit film Back to School. As a result, my writing partner and I were “branded” as comedy writers. A studio exec even showed us a buck card titled Comedy Writers and yep…there we were on that list. As a result, the first twenty or so screenwriting gigs I was involved with were comedies/action-comedies.
At some point, my writing partner and I became interested in the state of Alaska and, in particular, polar bears. So, we came up with a family action-adventure pitch about two adolescents who head off into the wilderness in an attempt to locate their father, a bush pilot who had crashed and was lost. Along the way, the kids intersect with an orphaned polar bear cub who “adopts” the teens and joins them on their quest. We pitched it to Castle Rock. They liked it, but had reservations because we were comedy writers. We settled on a plan: we’d write the first act of the script to demonstrate we could write that type of material. That’s what we did and Castle Rock bought it, a hybrid pitch/spec script deal. That script was produced as Alaska, starring Vincent Kartheiser and Thora Birch.
My takeaway from that experience was pretty simple: if a screenwriter wants to redefine the town’s perception of them and expand into another genre, they should write a spec script in that narrative space. Obviously, the concept, characters, and story has to be great, but if it “plays on the page,” their brand now includes another genre. It’s great screenwriters have that option as it allows us to follow our creative interests regardless of what types of stories we want to explore.
The whole article is well worth reading as there is some great advice in it. In terms of my suggestion, one of the great things about being a writer is you can completely reinvent yourself by what you write. If you come up with a great idea outside the box in which you’ve been pigeonholed, and you have a passion to write it, develop the hell out of it — especially the characters — then write the hell out of it.
As I said, if it plays on the page, you are officially out of that box.
Here are links to the article across multiple platforms:
DIRECT LINK: https://colehaddon.substack.com/p/how-to-escape-the-box-youve-become
NOT-TWITTER: https://x.com/colehaddon/status/1803167951924896120
BLUESKY: https://bsky.app/profile/colehaddon.bsky.social/post/3kva2kjcegk2t
THREADS: https://www.threads.net/@colehaddonwashere/post/C8XvCpry622
Good luck breaking out of your box.