I think there are many serendipitous ways that we can manage to get work.
My wife got one of her first jobs because she had worked for a Congressman.
I was offered a job once because someone saw what I had written online.
See, the key is connections.
But these connections can come in the oddest of ways.
You get to write a few screenplays, people know you are from Texas, and suddenly you are their go-to Western writer for movie scripts.
The point is to keep working and let fate take you where it will.
You can’t control the fate.
But you can control your work.
Just do your best.
The fact that Hud was made from my book had one extremely important effect: somehow through the illogic of show business it enabled me to get work on scripts for no better reason than that I was from the West—cowboy country. From 1963 to the present moment I’ve been offered screen work, even though, at the beginning, as this narrative will demonstrate, I knew nothing about what I was doing in a craftsmanlike manner.
