We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Marion McNabb. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Marion below.
Marion, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
I’ve been writing stories since I could hold a pen honestly, but I guess it wasn’t really until I was an adult in my twenties playing around and writing some pretty bad scripts and plays that I began to think of myself as a writer. I admired writers. Writing, books and scripts seemed so difficult, challenging and incredibly cool that I don’t think I had the self-esteem to use that word to describe myself. But once I became a mother and my time was no longer just my own that I really felt compelled to focus and write to completion, a fully realized story, and I did. I was always a creative person and being home with my kids was wonderful at times but confining as well. I used to get up at five in the morning to write before they got up because I felt like I would go crazy if I had no outlet. If that isn’t a writer I don’t know what is. And then things slowly started falling into place. I was hired as a screenwriter on a preschool animation show. I got that job because my neighbor and friend was the head writer on the show and she read and liked an (as yet unpublished) novel and loved it and asked if I’d be interested in writing animation. And that just sort of got the ball rolling, again, a little slowly but there was movement. I wrote about my life as it was unfolding and that helped me to deal with the changes I experienced and never run out of material!
Marion, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
When I was young I remember wanting to live some sort of bohemian life. I grew up in a small New England town and I dreamed of living an artist’s life in Southern California with a funky home, with expensive art on the walls, incense burning, scarves draped over lamps, dinner parties with eccentric artists. I got a version of that but I always held on to my New England roots and that’s where I find myself these days. Still a bit bohemian and very much my speed. I read every day, mostly at night. I’ve written many scripts, pilots and screenplays. And I realized I was always writing stories I wanted to see onscreen. That filtered over into my fiction as well. I write what I’d like to read and looking back at my body of work I came to realize I write my life – a fictional version of course. I think there are just innate things in people that make us all the same – and so every character I write has those attributes that I have felt or experienced and so has the reader. For example, I am not a wildly successful life coach who is a guru to the stars whose life and life’s work starts to fall apart one day but I have experienced pain and felt embarrassed and shocked by life so I use those feelings to imagine how my protagonist (and ancillary characters) feels and go from there.
Have you ever had to pivot?
I worked for many years trying to find that perfect script that was going to knock down the door in Hollywood. I got close many times. I was having meetings on studio lots, developing ideas, writing out detailed pilots and full-length feature scripts. I really loved finding my way through the stories. But for the most part I wasn’t getting paid for all this work. Initially I was thinking that work begets work and that with each story I wrote I became a better writer. I believe what you put out into the universe comes back to you. And I loved to write. But I did reach a point where it was both not plausible or even possible to spend the time and energy writing and pay the bills. And Hollywood can be tough – it seems like everyone has a script or a story and it can be hard to even be taken seriously or have your work valued. It’s had to even be read. In publishing that’s a different story. People read in publishing. It might take a while but the slush pile exists and success stories from the slush pile do happen. I knew that my work was good and that if I could only get someone to read my first few chapters the sea would part and there would be someone who would take it to the promised land. Writing is about never, ever, ever giving up. And for me pivoting from writing for screen to fiction has been what I needed, at this point, to get a footing in a career as a writer.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
I read daily, as I said before, and mostly in the evening but I also listen to audiobooks and it’s changed my life. I’m very much about routine and while experiencing some personal and financial hardships I decided to do things that made me feel good. Hiking and walking was at the front of the list. Instead of listening to music I decided to listen to Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth” one day and it impacted me deeply. It began a course of reading and self-exploration that completely knocked me out of my sad but ‘safe’ life and into the big, scary, exciting world of my dreams. I read “Think And Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill and “You Are a Badass” by Jen Sincero about twenty times. The words sunk into my subconscious like repeated mantras and slowly I began to take big movements in my life and career that continue to this day. In fact, the idea for my novel, a life coach whose life starts to crumble, comes from my experience listening to these books and allowing my mind to wander as I put one foot in front of the other from Ventura Blvd up to Mulholland.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.MarionMcNabb.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mcnabbmarion/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marion.mcnabb
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marion-mcnabb-68067359/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/marionmc
- Other: Buy book here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Marion-McNabb/author/B0CGMLQQD3?ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true
Image Credits
Terri Calla Photography Elizabeth Carney – photo white sweater