How to deal with rejection

Hello from Milwaukee where the Dodger road trip and Manny Ramirez traveling circus continues. Here are some Friday questions direct from the great Midwest.

From Scott Siegel:

What did you do about rejection or about disappointment or disgust from this business before you got a blog and could vent?

Yet another advantage of having a partner is you have someone to bitch with. But seriously, rejection always hurts – no matter how much success you’ve had. And there’s little comfort in knowing it’s all subjective, a lot of the people making the decisions are idiots, timing is sometimes wrong, etc.

But you have to somehow shake it off and move forward. Don’t dwell on it. If your pilot wasn’t greenlit don’t read the ones that were.

Sometimes rejection can turn out to be a good thing. Perhaps you know why a project was passed on and can use it as a learning experience. Sometimes you look back and thank God you didn’t get a certain job because a better one came along shortly afterwards.

But two coping methods have helped me.

1) Always have several projects you’re working on. Don’t put all your eggs into one cliché. You never know which project is going to hit. Plus, it gives you something to do while you wait for answers. I’ve always been a firm believer that you make your own momentum. Good things happen (often unexpectedly) when you stay busy.

2) Uber executive Barry Diller maintains that when a project of his fails, or a business deal doesn’t happen he always just says “Next?” Move on. The word “next?” is one of the most important in any writers’ vocabulary. Watch. I’m going to use it right now.

Next?

Craig M wonders:

When writing a script, do you plan for the time when the show will be rerun in syndication? Do do write a scene thinking, this is the one they can cut without harming the story?

Honestly, no. We never thought about what scene they could cut. Probably because we knew they’d cut the wrong one anyway.

But here was our take on syndication – if we knew we were writing an episode for a series that was likely to go into syndication we wrote as many of them as we could. On MASH, CHEERS, and FRASIER we always volunteered to write the episode through Christmas break or write the script that had an insane deadline even if it meant working around the clock. We put in extra nights, extra weekends, we cut vacations short. But we knew that every episode we wrote was going to keep paying off for years so it was well worth the extra effort.

And it’s very satisfying that work we did years ago is still being seen and enjoyed today. But it’s mostly the money.

It appears to be “Scott” day. Here’s one from Scott B.:

Are there any writers around town who have a reputation for accidentally "borrowing" or outright stealing from other shows or writers? How does a room deal with them? And have you ever discovered after the fact that you accidentally lifted something from another source?

Back in the 80s I knew a freelance drama writer who would go to the UCLA library and leaf through old TV GUIDES from the 60s and just lift stories from earlier shows. He had a successful career for quite a while. He's now out of the business.

One of the funniest writers I ever knew, Jerry Belson (I profile him here) , was working with us on CHEERS, pitched a joke that didn’t go over and defended it by saying, “this got a huge laugh on THE ODD COUPLE (a show he also wrote for).” When we said, “Jerry, you can’t pitch an ODD COUPLE joke he said, ‘hey, what went before is good too.” He was kidding of course but generally the practice is frowned upon. And if a writer is known to steal from other shows he’s quickly drummed out.

As for my partner and I accidentally lifting something from another source, that happened once on MASH. We found an interesting story in the research, wrote up an outline, and took it to our consultant Gene Reynolds. He suggested a way to tell the story. It was written, produced, and aired. MASH had just started re-running (Friday nights at midnight on CBS). Two nights after our episode aired my partner was watching the rerun from an early season and it was THE EXACT SAME SHOW. Only difference was Larry Gelbart did it better (duh). Amazingly, Gene never picked up on it, neither did any of the actors or the crew. It happens. But it’s still the most embarrassing moment of my career.

If you have a question or wish to reopen old wounds just leave it in the comments section. Thanks. I must get out now to eat some heavy German food.