Good Will Hunting

When I saw Good Will Hunting in 1997, I walked away feeling that I could write what I wanted. The problem was finding when. I'm still looking.

Good Will Hunting came along when I was in my senior year of college with the world spread out in front of me. I won a scholarship for a screenplay I wrote — and stayed in college an extra semester so I could keep writing.

While my friends were graduating, getting jobs and wives, buying houses and cars, and having children, I stayed in school. I don't regret grad school one bit, but I do get annoyed when people bring up the fact that I was in school a while. I know. I was there.

Although other people's lives passed me by, I don't think that way about my own. Yes, I grew apart from most of my friends, but growing apart is a two-person process.

Grad school forced me to think in ways I'd never even attempted, and to do work I never knew how to attempt. I ran on four hours of sleep or less, read and re-read books that made no sense until they made sense, and wrote papers using words I didn't even know how to pronounce yet. I found myself surrounded by people who were just as masochistic, but also just as inquisitive, competitive, and fascinated.

Finally, I got a job as a technical writer, which is the most bastardized form of "writing" ever invented. I didn't last. Within three months, I'd been offered a job teaching writing at a university. That led me to a full-time gig where I am now.

This was never the plan. This is just how things worked out. For most people, you don't get your dream job. You don't get your dream anything. You get what you get. You take it, count yourself lucky, and (try to) shut up. This is a blue-collar upbringing talking, I think.

Sean asks Will a simple question: "What do you want to do?"

First, that question is bullshit. Wanting to do something and actually getting to do something are different concepts, and only someone who has failed repeatedly can understand that sometimes you don't get what you want.

Sometimes, you take what you can get.

The only thing I've ever really wanted to do is write. Everything else I've done was a means to get to do that, because writing doesn't pay any better than any other kind of art, and all artists have to eat.

Knowing that kept me from moving to Los Angeles to try to be a screenwriter there. I could've gone out there and waited tables like all the other creatives. Instead, I chose to stay here. Like Sean in the film, I chose a path for myself.

Did I end up where I expected? No. Am I doing what I foresaw 20 years ago? Hardly. But you take what you can get and struggle to do a little better each day.

I type this from my couch on a snowy, icy Tuesday in the middle of Indiana. I do not have to be in Los Angeles to write. Some say you can't get into the industry unless you're out there. I wonder if these people have heard of the Internet.

Sure, there are days when I wish I lived in Southern California, but not necessarily for the industry. I mostly just don't like being cold.

Many people are tormented by the struggle to balance work and life. A few fortunate folks find a hobby to which they devote some free time: model airplanes or comics or something. Writing isn't a hobby. Hobbies wait for the weekend. Writing doesn't wait well.

When I don't want to write, I don't write. A lot of writers will say you should just write through that. To me, that sounds like a good way to crank out a bunch of shitty writing.

I got into teaching with the assumption that I would have the free time to write. Turns out, teaching is just as time-consuming as any other full-time gig, if not more. I'm not the first writing teacher to come to this realization, and I won't be the last.

Most of us are just living our lives of quiet desperation, like Thoreau said.

Good Will Hunting spends a lot of time on the symbolism of tickets — lottery tickets and the odds of winning, a World Series ticket that Sean gave away so he could "see about a girl," and the metaphorical "ticket outta here" that Will possesses.

Not everyone gets the perfect ticket. Some people don't get a ticket at all, and others play the lottery every day. As for me, most days I'm content to sit back and watch others try to use the ticket(s) they've been given, and I am thankful.

Most days.