LB: For all my dreamer friends…(Take 2)

by Larry Brody

…And I know I have a lot of you because my life has always been about dreaming-fantasizing-leaving-this-world-for-another-one-just-around-the bend.

Which leads me to this daily segment of Stephan Pastis’ comic strip, Pearls Before Swine from about a week ago:

As a young writer starting out in the idealistic late ’60s, when my contemporaries and I were full of dreams for ourselves and the world, regardless of what TV show I was writing – Hawaii Five-0, Medical Center, Star Trek, Ironside (you name it, I wrote it because any of those gigs and more came more naturally than home and hearth).

I was still hard at the celebration of dreams and goals and lofty ambitions in the late ’80s, when Gene Roddenberry asked me to write an episode of ST:NG as a kind of test for becoming its producer (turns out Gene asked everyone whose work he liked to do that, so it really wasn’t such a big deal after all).

After he’d read my first draft, Gene called me and said, “Ah, still a dreamer, I see,” and even though we weren’t in the room together I could see his wide smile.

Where was I going with this?

Oh, right. Even now, so many years after I abandoned working in TV, my commitment to helping others achieve their dreams remains as a sort of GPS, guiding me through the morass of reality.

Which is why the comic strip above – to be precise, this panel from it – keeps digging into my mind:

I know Pastis – the character of Pig anyway – is wrong. Well, to be linguistically precise, I believe he is. Yet I find myself thinking and re-thinking and boring deep into my heart for a certain spark creative need that I haven’t consciously felt in a long time.

Condemned to a life of futility?!

But, but, but…wouldn’t it have been even more futile in the long run if all I’d ever cared about and struggled for were attainable goals?

No, I’m not ending this post with a “Sigh.” Instead, I’m seeing this quest as another worthwhile and, yes, potentially unmeetable challenge. How wonderful to know that even now, as my seventy-seventh birthday approaches, the universe continues to tell me/urge me/ push me to reach for the moon.


LB’S NOTE: For reasons that surpasseth all understanding, this post, originally published yesterday, was – when published yesterday – invisible to most cell phones and a large number of desktop browsers as well. So I’ve removed the version so many people couldn’t see and replaced it here and now with one that you can. I hope. Apologies for the weirdness!

#tvwriting #screenwriting #writingtips #writerslife

Author: LB

A legendary figure in the television writing and production world with a career going back to the late ’60s, Larry Brody has written and produced hundreds of hours of American and worldwide television and is a consultant to production companies and networks in the U.S. and abroad . Shows written or produced by Brody have won several awards including - yes, it's true - Emmys, Writers Guild Awards, and the Humanitas Award.

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