“All You Have to Do is Not Give Up, Okay?” Winnie Holzman’s Life@ Part II

“All You Have to Do is Not Give Up, Okay?” Winnie Holzman’s Life@ Part II

In the second part of our candid conversation with WICKED’s co-writer Winnie Holzman, she opens up about how she copes with fear and defines success—through authenticity, laughter, honest critique, and the power of persistence.

Do you feel successful? How would you define success?

Well, since you ask, something I learned as I matured as a person is that I have to define success for myself. Our culture is indoctrinated about what success is. It means you have a lot of money. Fame. People listen to you. You have a platform and a lot of followers. It’s very narrow. It’s kind of imprisoning. And also fraudulent because, for me, it is a very personal matter. Just yesterday, I had something I’ve been working on for a really long time get rejected by the place I wanted to produce it. How do you handle that sort of thing as a writer?

This is something that is very close to my heart, and I think it has to come down to asking yourself, “did I give everything I had to what I was writing? Did I put my authentic self into it? Did I have the courage to put myself out there, and work on it really hard, for multiple drafts?”

Because, as we know as writers, it isn’t about writing just one draft. It really isn’t. When you get serious about your writing, it’s about working on it, always giving more, always finding more than you can say, or finding a better way to reach your audience. I’m not perfect at this, believe me, not at all. But I’ve been practicing for years—many years—how to view my own success and define what success is to me. For me, it’s about never giving up on myself. It’s about being true to myself. It’s about writing even when I’m a little discouraged, or a lot discouraged. It’s finding a way to keep going, even if I’m rejected, and at some point we’re all going to be rejected. I mean, that’s part of the artist’s life. It’s a big part of it. I hope I’m not scaring anybody off by saying that, but it’s true.

Winnie Holzman with Girls Write Now Founder Maya Nussbaum

It’s been wonderful how WICKED has been embraced on the stage and as a movie. I hope the same for the next movie. Of course I’ve enjoyed seeing that, but that isn’t my North Star of success. It isn’t about how other people view me, how other people view what my work is or isn’t. To me, it’s a very personal thing of asking myself, “did I give my all? Am I completely in there?” You can never do it perfectly. But it’s about trying and not giving up. I feel like that transitions really well into Girls Write Now.

Girls Write Now is built on the pillars of writing, mentorship, and community. Can you talk about how these have played a role in your career? Did you have mentors, writing practices, or community experiences that helped you stay the course?

Well, my friends are my community—specifically my writer friends, some of whom I’ve had since my mid 20s—and I’m 71. Somebody out there can do the math and figure out how it works.

I don’t know what I would do without my fellow writers who are close friends of mine. We’re always there to encourage each other, to talk each other down off the ledge when we want to give up, or when we feel that we’ve failed.

My daughter, Savannah Dooley, is also a writer, and she’s a wonderful writer. She and I are very close. You have to have someone, and maybe more than one someone, in your life who can read your stuff, and give you really good feedback, but also always is in your corner and believes in you. I have been so lucky to have that in my life. It really helps if they’re also a writer because they understand what you’re dealing with. They understand what it’s like to feel the fear that comes over you, and the feelings of inadequacy that every writer I know faces pretty much all the time. I mean, it might come and go, but it’s pretty much always there. It used to really scare me. But I make friends with that fear now.

I used to think the fear I felt when writing meant I wasn’t good enough. But I learned over the years that fear is just a normal part of the creative process, and it’s okay. It’s more than okay. It’s just fine. The thing is that you don’t let it stop you. You don’t give it any more meaning than you need to. It’s just a feeling, and it’s a feeling that you can take to heart by knowing that all the writers that you look up to, that you admire, are all having that same feeling. I promise you, part of writing is feeling lost and confused a lot of the time, not knowing what you’re doing. That is just a big, intrinsic part of being an artist. It doesn’t mean anything bad. It’s all fine. That’s what I’ve come to understand.

When I was younger, I was really lucky to have mentors who were much older than me, and very successful writers. I looked up to them, and they encouraged me, and it made all the difference. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to do this interview with you today, and that is why I flew to New York City to be at the event with everyone, because mentoring was a pure gift given to me. My mentors took an interest in me, and said certain things to me that encouraged me when I needed it most. I feel a strong need to pass that along.

I want to jump around a bit and ask about your background in comedy. You formed a comedy group after college, where you wrote and performed your own material, and then you did improv, which is where you met your husband, right?

Yes, I did. Yeah. Lucky me. I was in the right improv group. I actually joined that group because I knew about one of the actors in the group. I wasn’t thinking of him as a boyfriend or romantic material. I just really looked up to him and thought he was really, really brilliant, which he is, and an incredible actor. And I thought, well, he’s in that group. I wish I could be in that group. I had no actual designs on him, but Oh, it worked out. It worked out 41 years this November. So, we might have a future together. We’ll see, it’s still early days.

How did you come to create a community, a training ground, just like we do at Girls Write Now?

I don’t know if your listeners will relate to this, though some of them will. I was always getting laughs, even when I was a little kid. Somehow, I said things that made people smile. That sparked me. And I leaned into it. I’m trying to express that it really came naturally to me. Comedy is something that has always been a natural part of my life, and a natural way to meet other funny people.

After college, we were writing individually, and we were writing together, and so we formed this comedy group. The four of us would come together and critique each other’s work, and then we would turn it into a show, and perform it. And though we never made a living at this, we did it for years. And it taught me so much because when you’re writing with a built-in audience, and the audience is either laughing or not, you can tweak to get a bigger laugh. We were just having fun, and entertaining ourselves. I look back at this as a really, really fun time.

But I realize now that it was also a training ground for me, and the start of me writing. We were writing comedy sketches to be performed, and that’s never changed for me. What I should have said in my little description of myself is that I write things that people perform. In other words, I don’t write novels. I don’t write short stories. I’m not saying I never will, because never say never, but that’s not what I tend to write.

I’m not the best improviser in the world. My husband is. Genius at it. I did the Larry David show where everyone improvises on Curb Your Enthusiasm. And it was hard for me not to laugh. And my whole being became all about just trying not to laugh when Larry talked. But that was the extent of my ability to improvise. I was just happy that I wasn’t ruining every joke. That said, comedy is my natural way of writing—no matter how dramatic the moment is, or how serious the stakes are, I’m always weaving humor into my scripts because, to me, I’m trying to replicate life and how I experience it.

Winnie Holzman embraced by Robin Schiff, who introduced her and presented her award.

And to me, there’s no such thing as comedy over here, and life over there. Life is comedic, right? We’ve all had that experience of having something scary or sad happen that struck us as funny. Or something makes somebody laugh in the midst of the pain, right? Or in the midst of sorrow, or loss. This is part of living. And if we’re honest about what it’s like to live, we’ll admit that those things are intertwined. So that’s what I try to do in my scripts. Comedy is part of what I do. A very important part of what I do, and I feel like that really does shine through in both WICKED the stage play musical, and also the film. I know a lot of people think of how big the music is, along with the visual elements, but, there are funny moments in Wicked that I appreciate.

Being a writer has made me a stronger, more resilient person. It feels wonderful to write something, and discover that what you’ve put into words is also being felt by someone you don’t know, and will never meet. But in the end, it’s not about who reads your words, or how other people react to what you’ve written. It’s not about the result.

The true gift is the act of writing, the courage to face yourself and explore your feelings, all gazillion of them, to express something that matters to you as authentically as you can in a way that captures something about life as you experience it. There’s just one rule when it comes to writing: Keep writing even when it’s tough. Especially when it’s tough. When you feel like it’s not working, like you have no idea what you’re doing, all you have to do is not give up, okay?