tick...tick...time to quit?

This week’s livestream is about failure, success, how long it takes to get from one to the other, and how we can best use that time wisely and well. That’s all you need to know to dive in—but if you want to get the context for this talk, read on. And yes, musical theatre is involved!

All writers will find much to ponder about the creative life from the new film, Tick...Tick...BOOM! (now streaming on Netflix). 

This 2021 musical film was adapted by Lin-Manuel Miranda (creator of Hamilton), based on a small-cast musical that itself was adapted by playwright David Auburn in 2001 from an earlier, one-man version of the same material.

Under the title Boho Days, this solo show was written and first performed by Jonathan Larson in 1990.

Today, Larson is best known as the creator of RENT, which opened on Broadway in 1996. RENT was a massive hit that helped reshape what a Broadway musical could look and sound like. It won numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and has never left the world’s stages in the decades since.

You can see that the material that later became Tick...Tick...BOOM! predates RENT. This is the work that Larson created before writing his gargantuan, world-changing hit.

What is that work about?

It's about being an artist who feels like a failure, wondering if he’ll ever succeed, struggling to keep going when the years are ticking by and he seriously didn’t know if it was all going to be worth it in the end. 

That's what Larson felt, and lived, and wrote about, before RENT. He had no idea what was coming. None of us do. 

Let me not bury the lead, for those of you who don’t know the story: Larson died (of an undiagnosed aortic dissection) at the age of 35, in the early morning hours of the day that RENT was to have its first public preview Off-Broadway.

He never got to see RENT. He never knew that it would be a global juggernaut of a hit show, performed everywhere in countless languages, and that it would continue to move and influence theater artists for generations to come. 

So few writers experience the kind of success that Larson posthumously did (or that Miranda now has with Hamilton). It‘s easy to imagine that for those blessed few, there must have been some inkling, some subtle but unmistakable foreshadowing that, someday, it is all going to be okay. More than okay. Way more than okay!

But it's not so. They didn't know what was coming any more than you do now. They felt like quitting and suffered bouts of dismay. They may have spent years feeling like failures, frustrated, being rejected, starting over on something new that doesn't quite work and then doing it again and again—until the moment comes when, without warning or fanfare, it happens.

The work is ready. The timing is right. The stars align. The lightning strikes and gets caught in the bottle at last.

There are as many paths to success as there are artists. Some paths take longer than others. The ones who make it? Here’s what they all have in common:

They didn’t quit.

If you quit, you just decided how the story ends.

Larson didn’t get to know how his story ended. Before RENT, he was near despair after more than a decade of getting nowhere in his career, and that despair is powerfully depicted in Tick...Tick...Boom!

But he didn’t give up, and we have RENT and the rest of his creative work because of it. His art is chugging right along, and that's always been how artists get the last laugh.

Wherever your writing journey took you this year—whether you're feeling hopeful or disappointed, full of pep and new ideas or afraid to admit how little progress you made toward your goals—know that you stand where giants have stood.

The only surefire way to lose is to quit.

Go slow, take breaks, be cranky sometimes, that’s all fine. No one knows what's coming. Do your part. Do the work, and focus on being better every day. Write, read, study, and support your fellow artists. They’re going through it too.

Do the work. Don’t quit.

Yours in storytelling,
Maryrose

My weekly livestream about story structure, writing craft, and the mindset of the working writer happens on Wednesdays at 1 PM Pacific on YouTube. Come live and participate! Or catch the replays on YouTube, or here on the blog.

To watch live and ask questions, subscribe to the YouTube channel here.  

And you can join the Path of the Storyteller Facebook group right here.