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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!
The Douglas Coleman Show now offers audio and video promotional packages for music artists as well as video promotional packages for authors. Please see our website for complete details.
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