Letter from ScreenCraft Fellowship Winner T.A. Snyder

As part of our ongoing Letters from Past ScreenCraft Winners series, our 2014 winner TA Snyder shares some thoughts on his experience.  

There are very few months in my life as pivotal as January 2014. I was down and disconnected in a dark Midwestern winter, binge-watching television during a furlough from a construction job where I built stone patios with some of the hardest-working, non-Hollywood people on the planet.

Though psychologically restless and ready for adventure, I was physically bound to the couch as I recovered from a surgery and post-operation infection that nearly killed me. As friends and family celebrated the New Year and all its possibilities, I felt outside myself, wondering if I would ever find the way back in. Two years prior to this bleak time, I had recommitted my creative life to screenwriting. I entered many screenwriting contests with the little spare cash I had, placing in the finals of a couple, and winning a few. Nothing changed except my resume.

Then, on January 27, 2014, I received a call from John Rhodes. He congratulated me on winning the inaugural ScreenCraft Screenwriting Fellowship, explaining that Don Handfield (longtime producing partner of actor Jeremy Renner) had personally chosen my script from the finalists. Validation feels good, and I hung up the phone feeling a ping of possibility. But the uncertainty soon followed as I cynically wondered if this would pan out to be another digital award that led nowhere.

A week later, I was sitting in the Edison Ballroom in New York City, watching David Simon, one of my writer/producer heroes, give an inspiring acceptance speech at the ScreenCraft-sponsored 2014 Writers Guild East Awards Ceremony. John, Cameron, and the rest of the ScreenCraft team personally showed me around, and told me that the fun had just begun. And they kept their promise.

Help ignite your writing career with the ScreenCraft Fellowship!

Following several rounds of helpful development notes on my screenplay, the ScreenCraft team flew me to Los Angeles the final week of April for a full week of meetings. Managers, agents, producers, working screenwriters -- it was a whirlwind experience that opened my eyes to the business side of screenwriting and the industry. The experience revealed a critical truth: the business side is only the beginning, and if you’re not in the trenches making connections and building relationships, your words are only characters keeping you warm at night.

Through the people I met during the ScreenCraft Fellowship, I signed with a literary manager, moved to Los Angeles, and began to connect my creative instincts to people who actually make movies as their day job. It accelerated everything. The ScreenCraft Fellowship week also introduced me to a development assistant at a major production company who, after he was promoted, and based upon his love for my ScreenCraft-winning script, brought me in three years later to pitch for a feature film writing assignment that I just landed this past week.

The old poet was right: anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity. If you can harness it and keep writing, writing, writing your way back to yourself, then put that creative voice out there, life is waiting to surprise you. The world needs fresh voices fighting to tell stories that bring us together, and challenge us to examine what continues to divide us. I tell you with all sincerity, ScreenCraft is seeking to not only discover those voices, but help nurture and connect them to the world. I will be forever grateful to the ScreenCraft Fellowship and the pivotal role it has played in my creative life.

Best,

T.A. Snyder

Documenting indigenous cultures in the wilds of Alaska, writing scripts from a hospital recovery room with a hole in his stomach, surviving sinking boats while operating camera in the middle of the Illinois River, T.A. is a storytelling vagabond searching past and present for character-driven narratives that connect us.

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