Josh Olson On Assholes Who Don't Respect Your Profession

Josh Olson, writer of A History Of Violence and the forthcoming Halo, wrote a really great piece about annoying "aspiring" writers who ask him to read their scripts. Assholes who think it's OK to ask a professional to do free work for them. A lot like assholes that hit up their web designer friends for free web design, because since they can't physically see the designer toiling away, assume that it's not "too much work" or "too much to ask" to just request a "little basic website, nothing fancy." Sure, let me get on coding that for you on my lunch break at 12am. You've sure figured it out, we work from home for a couple of hours and charge for 25 hours of labor; it's all a scam.

I agree with 95% of what Josh says except for this one part: "It only takes a sentence to know you're dealing with someone who can't [write]."



That's bullshit. The journey of ALL ARTISTS is a long one. It takes ALL OF US a lot of work to discover our voices and to clear out the grime and gunk in our talents and abilities. Dismissing someone's talents with one sentence is pompous and screams of insecurity on the dismissers part. I have known many creative professionals who cut their potentially more talented aspiring apprentices down (very obviously) because they are threatened by them. I had a graphic design teacher who could barely veil his petty selfishness, refusing to give credit where credit is due and "encouraging" students to make changes which actually HURT their work and drove there projects into the ground. He didn't want more competition in his day job: Professional graphic designer.


So read this great column and skip over that part. Or rather, don't skip it, but know that it's just one man's opinion. The rest of the article is pure gold and Josh Olson is a talented man.

The Village Voice - Josh Olson

My favorite snippet...

There's a great story about Pablo Picasso. Some guy told Picasso he'd pay him to draw a picture on a napkin. Picasso whipped out a pen and banged out a sketch, handed it to the guy, and said, "One million dollars, please."

"A million dollars?" the guy exclaimed. "That only took you thirty seconds!"

"Yes," said Picasso. "But it took me fifty years to learn how to draw that in thirty seconds."