The Douglas Coleman Show VE with Jud Widing

Jud Widing:

I took a bit of the long way around to arrive at writing books: Growing up in Pennsylvania, when I was so young I wasn’t thinking about careers or jobs at all, I would write little stories on notecards for fun. Approaching and into my early teens I attempted slightly longer-form stuff, but as I started thinking about trying to write professionally, I lost confidence in what I was writing, or even in my ability to write at all.

I knew I needed to have some sort of storytelling be a part of my life, though, and as I have always loved film just as much as literature, I decided around age 14 that I would set my sights on becoming a director. That would allow me to be a professional storyteller, I hoped, without necessarily having to rely on myself for the writing.

I went to Emerson College in Boston for Film Production, with a specialization in directing. For my entire time there, I was trying and failing to write screenplays, each time losing confidence in them and abandoning them before they were done. In the course of studying directing, though, I was unknowingly immersing myself in the absolute fundamentals of story, breaking down each story, and each scene within it, beat by beat. This turned out to be a bit like running scales on an instrument – it doesn’t teach you how to play actual music, but it makes you quite a bit more comfortable with the mechanics of the craft.

Towards the end of my time at Emerson, my friend and I co-wrote a screenplay together. It took us over a year, but we did it. This broke a mental block I didn’t know I had; the following year, after I’d moved to LA, I tried to write a screenplay on my own, and managed to finish it. It wasn’t very good, but I’d done it! Having proven to myself I could do one, I started another. Then another. I did quite a few, each one teaching me something new about the process. After a while, though, I got disheartened by writing script after script that had no real hope of being produced. They would be far too expensive, and I had focused so much on writing that I hadn’t developed the directorial body of work I probably should have.

So I adapted one script, Westmore and More!, into a novel. I absolutely loved rediscovering this kind of writing, and immediately switched my focus onto novels and short stories. Inspired by another friend of mine who had some success self-publishing zines (and deeply unnerved by some horror stories I’d read about people losing control of their work through traditional publishing), I decided to try self-publishing my work. It took several years of trial and error, but after moving to Portland, ME a few years ago, I’ve found some success by focusing on building a local readership, largely by selling at non-literary events like Farmer’s Markets and Craft Fairs. The journey now is not only to continue to build momentum, but to find ways to scale the whole endeavor!

http://judwiding.com

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