I don’t care if Fincher actually said this or not. It sounds true and right now, it is true. (Language, you’ve been warned)
I have not met David Fincher (yet), but I have had lunch with his good friend, Eric Roth, and I learned a lot from him. Mostly about attitude and moving forward.
No one hands you your work, whether it’s a film, a play, a novel, a painting, whatever. No one hands it to you. A writer friend just posted on FB: hundreds of pages written over several years and now the revising starts. It’s a hard long slog most of the time with no control over how it will be received. You put the paint on canvas, words on the page, create digital sound and images and take the leap.
Right now, we are in the home stretch in pre-production for the short film. There are days when I figure we might as well have made it a feature! And perhaps that is still to come. For a short story, every word counts, For a short film, every word and every person, as well. It’s a lot of coordinating and clashing and scheduling and opinions and herding of cats. But we’re getting there. There comes a point when the story will be written or shot or published or acted, when momentum takes over and you keep going no matter what others say or what you’ve (up until now) thought your limits were. Fear and doubt take a back seat. And no one, but no one, can tell you to sit down or shut up.
dianesherlock.com 
2 responses to “Will you sit down?”
I work with new writers who quite often feel the hard part is over because they’ve finished the manuscript. They really show me who they are and how well they’ll succeed when they at some point realize they aren’t really done yet and they don’t give up. Brave cuts, persistent rewriting, cheerfully changing, correcting, pitching, querying …Here’s to the tough ones who don’t whine or pout or give up the ship! They’ve taught me so much as I navigate my own novel journeys.
well said!