Patrick Henry Ford On The 5 Things You Need To Be A Successful Author or Writer

Some writers and authors have a knack for using language that can really move people. Some writers and authors have been able to influence millions with their words alone. What does it take to become an effective and successful author or writer? In this interview series, called “5 Things You Need To Be A Successful Author or Writer” we are talking to successful authors and writers who can share lessons from their experiences. As part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Patrick Henry Ford.

Patrick Henry Ford melds classic film aesthetics with modern storytelling, creating genre-bending scripts like the romantic-horror Baby Boy. A software engineer by day, Patrick’s meticulous approach to story structure imbues his screenplays with the spirit of cinema’s golden age and grounds his work’s emotional complexity. Patrick is a graduate of UCLA’s screenwriting M.F.A. program.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. Can you tell us a bit of the ‘backstory’ of how you grew up?

After college, I finally had the time to rediscover my love for cinema. At the same time, the quotidian anguish of my QA job was mounting. I channeled my energies into my first screenplay, Greetings from Covington, Georgia, an Altmanesque grand ensemble about my home town. The strength of that first screenplay allowed me to join UCLA’s screenwriting MFA program. There, I had the opportunity to learn under some great filmmakers and build up my craft.

Can you share the most interesting story that occurred to you in the course of your career?

As a shout out to the interviewer, Susan Johnston, It was very exciting to be a nominee in the festival she founded — New Media Film Festival® for my script — Baby Boy.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in your journey to becoming a writer? How did you overcome it? Can you share a story about that that other aspiring writers can learn from?

My biggest challenge was crossing over from being someone who “wants to write something someday” to being an active writer, who is writing something right now. I had this creative energy but didn’t know where to start. One day I started a writer’s notebook. Any time I saw something in the world or thought of something that piqued my interest, something cool or funny or an interesting turn for a story, I added it to the notebook. Of course, many of those ideas didn’t go anywhere (especially so when I was just starting). But as I kept at it, I was building that muscle that looks out for interesting ideas, that judges them, and organizes them into a coherent story. When a couple ideas start to stick together, they can build like a snowball into a full grown story as they pick up more pieces that make sense together.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

My silliest mistake was hiding my work from others early on. I wanted my first screenplay to be perfect before I could show anyone. But naturally, we writers rely on feedback from others to build our work into all it can be, so my fear of imperfection was really stunting my own growth.

In your opinion, were you a “natural born writer” or did you develop that aptitude later on? Can you explain what you mean?

From the first time I was invited to write a story, in elementary school, I enjoyed it, but I didn’t think of it as a career or even a hobby. Some people say that writers are those with something so urgent to say that they must express it at any cost. If that’s true, then I started writing all backwards. I was (and am) driven by a desire to make people laugh, to make their hearts catch, to make them enjoy my stories. And while I have an intuition for how to do that, my challenge is in finding the stories that I feel I must tell. On the other side of the coin, those “natural born writers” still must learn the craft of delivering their burning message in a way that captivates their audience.

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?

I just wrapped up the research phase for a pool hustler movie and I’m writing the screenplay now. Our pool hustler protagonist competes with his brother for everything, most of all their father’s respect. When his brother asks to stake him for a run at a big-time hustler to raise the money to save their father’s pool hall, he reluctantly accepts. But the ruthless competition in the pool hustler foils his brother’s plan and destroys everyone in his life.

Based on your experience, what are the “5 Things You Need To Be A Successful Author or Writer”?

Perseverance. You will face a lot of negativity and rejection, first from yourself as your ability to create a good story slowly catches up to your ability to distinguish a good story from a bad one, and you judge your work as inadequate until it does catch up. That’s a necessary part of one’s growth into a writer, but a painful one. After that self-rejection period is a period of rejection from others, as many readers won’t connect with your work, and the difficulty is in staying true to the unique aesthetic that you have created, while selectively integrating feedback from your readers. Pushing through all that negativity takes a lot of energy, and there are many failures to dust yourself off from along the way. An iterative, growth mindset. You will never be able to persevere through the obstacles ahead of you if you see your work as final and unchangeable. Likewise, your writing ability can’t improve if you see it as a fixed attribute about you, rather than a practice that you continually work to improve. Having an iterative view to your writing can be deceptively difficult. There is something about the screenplay format that feels final, an unchanging set of instructions for making a film. As much as you can, get comfortable writing scenes you know won’t end up in the final film. These help you understand your characters and remind you that your work isn’t sacred, and any part can be changed or removed. An aesthetic. You must have a particular, personal idea of what an amazing movie is like. What qualities do all of your favorite movies have that make you excited about making movies? And when only a single scene or even a single moment in a movie excites you, what qualities does it have? This will be different from any other writer, and it’s exactly what will make your voice fresh to your audience. Your aesthetic doesn’t necessarily need to be as distinct from all other writers’ aesthetics as say, Jacques Tati’s or Quentin Tarantino’s aesthetic is. Even if your aesthetic has more subtle differences from the mainstream than theirs, it is still your guiding light, which you can look to whenever you don’t know which direction to take a scene. Take it in the direction that makes you excited about making movies. A group of fellow writers. This is your support group that helps you through the challenges of navigating your career. They are your accountability group who hold you to your weekly and quarterly goals. And they provide you with valuable feedback to keep your story on track. Time. You have to make time to write. This means sacrificing something. Time you could be spending at a job bringing in a reliable paycheck, or time you could be spending with your family, or on your hobbies, or just resting and recovering from all the other demands in your life. My personal strategy for this is to keep my living costs to a minimum and stash away as much money as I can while working a day job. I plan to transition to living off of those savings and investment returns while writing full time.

What is the one habit you believe contributed the most to you becoming a great writer? (i.e. perseverance, discipline, play, craft study). Can you share a story or example?

I made movies my life. My habit was spending every moment outside of work and sleep (and often during work and sleep too) focused on expanding my understanding of what makes a great movie. After work, I would spend two hours working on my current writing project, and I reserved two hours for watching a classic film to broaden my knowledge base. On the weekends, I wrote all day. After years of working through screenplay problems and watching a classic film every day after work, I started an MFA in screenwriting at UCLA and focused on movies full time. You need to be obsessed to make the leap to become a writer.

Which literature do you draw inspiration from? Why?

Being a screenwriter, most of my greatest inspirations are movies. Short Cuts, Boogie Nights, Late Spring, and Visconti’s White Nights are some of my favorites. I like the Spoon River Anthology as well. But works that inspire me are usually specific to the piece I’m writing at the time.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

My movement would be to broaden our sense of our moral obligation beyond the harm we may cause others in our personal life to include the much larger impacts we have on others indirectly. Almost every action we take, or purchase we make, has an impact on other individuals. These are often in our control. We dishonor ourselves when we pretend that we are powerless to prevent the suffering that companies exact on our behalf, when those companies are only able to exact that suffering because we pay them to do it for us. In many cases, we have harmless alternatives available to us. In those cases, we are responsible for the harm we choose voluntarily.

How can our readers further follow you online?

pat dot henry dot ford at gmail dot com

About The Interviewer: Susan Johnston is a Media Futurist, Columnist as well as Founder and Director at New Media Film Festival®. The New Media Film Festival® — honoring stories worth telling since 2009, is an Award-winning, inclusive, and boundary-pushing catalyst for storytelling and technology. Susan was knighted in Rome in 2017 for her work in Arts & Humanity.