We were lucky to catch up with Tilly Bridges recently and have shared our conversation below.
Tilly, appreciate you joining us today. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Oh hi! My wife Susan and I are a writing and producing team. We wrote for season two of the MONSTER HIGH animated series, and were head writers of the 2023 NEBULA AWARDS and 2021 HUGO AWARDS. Our sci-fi comic KILLSWITCH is now available in trade paperback. We also write for the STAR TREK ADVENTURES and FALLOUT role-playing games.
For over a decade we’ve been writing and producing award-winning scripted podcasts through our production company at pendantaudio.com. Six of our shows have ranked in Apple Podcasts’ top 60 all-time most popular scripted sci-fi podcasts. I also write Trans Tuesdays, a series of weekly essays on trans life, covering the basics of being transgender, existing as trans in this world, trans representation in media, and the crucial importance of cis allyship. You can find all the essays archived for free at tillystranstuesdays.com.
Some of those essays led to a book deal, and BEGIN TRANSMISSION: THE TRANS ALLEGORIES OF THE MATRIX was released in June of 2023, and is available in hardcover, paperback, digital, and audiobook. The book takes you through every film in the series, scene by scene and sometimes minute by minute, covering the inherent transness of The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Animatrix, The Matrix Revolutions, and The Matrix Resurrections. And it all tracks one person’s transition journey—from Thomas Anderson to Neo… to Trinity.
Tilly, love having you share your insights with us. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?
The most difficult thing about becoming a good writer, about becoming a better writer, is learning how to be okay with terrible work.
Nothing will ever be perfect and ready to go on the first draft, though as you gain experience your first drafts do get stronger.
But you have to push through and let it suck. If you stop to fix what you know needs fixing, you can get caught revising act I over and over again and never getting anywhere. And, I find, if you have a pristine and heavily revised and edited portion, it can be that much harder to move on to the first draft of the next section, when you’re bound to notice the stark difference in quality.
You can’t fix what doesn’t exist. When people say “writing is rewriting” this is what they mean, because you often find the story during the revision process. You hone in on the themes and character arcs, strengthen them, and make them sing.
But that song can’t be sung if it’s not done. Get that first draft done, and let it suck. Be okay with it sucking and not being what you want. You can fix it in revisions; that’s what they’re for.
Trust the process.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
There is nothing, and I mean NOTHING, like the feeling of someone who read, saw, or heard your work telling you how much it’s meant to them, how important it is to them, how it’s helped them or impacted their lives.
Writers always, always hope we’ll be able to do that. Like any other art form, we want it to impact our audience. To make them feel what we’re feeling, or to care about something (be it real world issues or entirely fictional characters).
And that we can take the thoughts jumbling around our brains, get them in to strings of words and sentences that best approximate these nebulous ideas, and have that touch other people’s hearts and souls? There’s nothing better.
So much art changed my life for the better, especially stories. Written by writers. I am who I am because they let me see reflections of myself and my truth. If I can give that back to others, so they can hopefully get from it what I did? That’s all I can hope for.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?
Ideas are cheaper than a dime a dozen. Ten writers can have the same idea and come up with wildly different executions, so much so that you might not even realize the final stories were based off the same kernel of an idea.
There’s a thing that happens to writers a lot, where someone approaches us with a “great idea” and if we just write it out they’ll graciously split it with us 50/50.
But, like… I have SO MANY of my own ideas, I don’t need anyone else’s. If I lived a thousand years (and I’d like to, science please get on that) I could never tell all the stories I have to tell. Writers become writers because we have ideas already, and we want to tell those stories.
The execution of the idea, that’s the magic. And the work. And the joy. And the frustration. That’s *writing*. So rather than bringing your ideas to people who are already chock full of our own, give writing it yourself a shot.
Just don’t expect it to be perfect right off the bat. Let it suck! Then make it sing.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://birdguest.com/
- Instagram: @heckyeahtillybridges
- Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/profile.php/?id=535350732
- Twitter: @tillybridges
- Other: Bluesky: @tillybridges Mastodon: @[email protected] Threads: @heckyeahtillybridges Trans Tuesdays: http://tillystranstuesdays.com/