MY MFA AESTHETIC: The Cavalry IS Not Coming

There are two things I want to do with my life as a writer.

I want to make films.

And I want to help other people find the courage to make their own work.

Those goals are connected.

For a long time, I wanted one of my scripts to be made into a film. That still matters to me. Of course it does. Every screenwriter wants the pages to become sound, light, faces, weather. A script is a blueprint with a pulse, but it is still waiting for a body.

But over time, the goal sharpened.

I do not just want something made.

I want to make it.

I know what that means.

Nobody is lining up to hand money to a first-time director rapidly approaching, or now passing through, the age when people start saying “emerging” with a slightly apologetic tone. Nobody is coming to my door with a check, a crew, and a note that says, “We heard you were ready.”

Good.

It is better to know that.

One of the most useful creative ideas I ever encountered came through Mark Duplass, who has talked often about making what you can make with what you have. Write for the people around you. Use the locations you can access. Build the smallest possible version of the thing. Make the three-dollar movie. Then the five-hundred-dollar movie. Then the thousand-dollar movie. Keep going.

The core lesson is simple:

The cavalry is not coming.

That can sound bleak if you hear it wrong.

I find it freeing.

If the cavalry is not coming, then I do not have to wait for it.

I do not have to spend my life scanning the horizon for rescue. I can look around the room instead. Who do I know? What do they do well? What can we shoot? What location can we borrow? Who has a face the camera loves? Who has a house, a garage, a van, a field, a strange office, a song, a weekend?

What can be made now?

Not someday.

Now.

That does not mean ambition shrinks. It means ambition gets practical. It stops being a fantasy of arrival and becomes a discipline of construction.

Build the community.

Write the short.

Shoot the ugly thing.

Learn why it is ugly.

Make the next one less ugly.

Repeat until the work starts looking like the thing you had in your head, or until the thing in your head becomes wiser because reality has finally had a chance to argue back.

The second thing I want to do is mentor other storytellers.

That may happen formally someday, in a classroom or workshop. It may happen informally, over coffee, in notes, in long conversations with someone who has a story burning a hole through them and no idea how to shape it.

I care about that because I know what it is like to have too much inside and no clean way to say it.

I know what it is like to hide behind characters because saying the thing plainly would cost too much.

I know what it is like to confuse criticism of the work with criticism of the wound that produced it.

If I can help someone separate those things sooner than I did, I want to.

If I can help a person find their voice before they start imitating whoever got praised last, I want to.

If I can help a wayward writer understand that their strange little obsession might actually be the doorway, I want to.

But mentorship also requires credibility.

Not fame, necessarily.

Experience.

You cannot tell people how to survive the making of things if you do not make things. You cannot teach the set if you have only imagined one. You cannot help someone through the terror of finishing if you keep stopping at the edge yourself.

So the two goals feed each other.

Make the work.

Help others make theirs.

Make more work.

Help better.

I do not expect the industry to discover me out of kindness. I do not expect permission. I do not expect a perfect moment when the money, time, confidence, collaborators, and weather all align.

I expect to build.

A little badly at first.

Then better.

The cavalry is not coming.

That is fine.

We can make a movie before they get here.