Ten years since the Emmys

​The weekend just gone marked ten years since what I see as the real start of my career – winning the Sir Peter Ustinov Television Scriptwriting Award and being flown to the International Emmys in New York to accept. Somewhat symbolically, I didn’t notice the milestone because my head has been buried in a TV writer’s room for the past week.
 
Given how much the Ustinov meant to me, on a few different levels, I wanted to say a bit about it.
 
In 2015 I was at a low ebb. I’d finished my Masters of Screenwriting and had no clue how to leverage it into any kind of functional career. I was broke and driving forklifts in a warehouse in Lilydale. I was writing no-budget plays that were largely received with shrugs, if anybody saw them at all. For the first (and not the last) time I was grappling with the gnawing suspicion that maybe I wasn’t as good at this writing thing as I’d hoped. Because what proof did I have, other than my own waning self-belief, that anything I’d written was worth anyone’s time?
 
Then I got the phone call that I’d won the Ustinov. I went through every stage of disbelief you’d care to imagine. I genuinely thought it was a mistake until I got the trophy with my name on it. In those days it was so easy to get carried away with what it all might mean. Everybody seemed to want to meet with me. Producers who’d previously showed zero interest asked for writing samples. I was on top of the world and convinced everything was about to blow up.
 
My time at the Emmys only affirmed that certainty. I met revered writers, directors and producers from all around the world. I made lifelong friends and stammered through introductions to celebrities. Between New York and L.A, I took so many meetings that seemed to promise the most exciting next steps were just days away. When a friend told me ‘you’re set now’, I believed it.
 
But that wasn’t quite true. I came back to Australia convinced of my own Cinderella story and waiting for the phone to ring. A year later I was still waiting.
 
This isn’t to say that nothing happened in the next few years. By anyone’s estimation, a lot did. I produced more plays, some of which were genuine hits. I had my Boone Shepard trilogy of novels published. I was paid to write reviews and appear on podcasts and teach writing. But compared to the image of impending red carpet glory I’d painted for myself, this next chapter felt disappointing. When producers and directors I’d met with didn’t reply to my follow up emails, I started to suspect that everyone was laughing at me. Like I’d been given the keys to the kingdom and somewhere along the line been proven unworthy of them. And eventually, as various exciting possibilities fell away, I slipped back into that same depressive self-doubt I’d felt right before winning the Ustinov. Which I was staring to believe had been just a fluke.  
 
In truth the award was proof of what should have been obvious but can’t be until you’ve seen it enough to believe it; that if something so affirming can happen once, it can happen again. Because it was during that renewed low ebb that I finished writing a scrappy horror novel about a siege in the Australian outback and sent it to an agent despite being convinced nobody would want to read, let alone publish, something so blood soaked. If you’re reading this, you likely know the rest.
 
Since then, I’ve had books that have done well and books that haven’t. I’ve had meetings I thought trivial that led to big things, and meetings I thought would change my life that came to nothing. What it’s all convinced me of is something I wish I’d understood in those low ebb moments – that you can’t control what’s coming, but you can put yourself in the best stead to make it something good.
 
The Ustinov Award did not overnight make me the toast of Hollywood, but it did something far more important. It restored my confidence enough to power me through the next few lean years, to do the work that would make me a better writer and in turn lead to The Hunted and everything that has come since.
 
So now I look at these photos and I see a skinny, scrappy, stupid 24 year old whose life has changed forever but he’s too dumb to understand exactly how for another few years. And at the risk of sounding corny it’s a good thing for a slightly less skinny, slightly less scrappy, but probably just as stupid 34 year old to remember whenever those low ebbs or career lulls threaten again – that you really never know what’s around the corner or what the full meaning of something is until it's happened. 

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