I spent months ghostwriting a memoir about Truman Capote's final days. The story was extraordinary. The book never sold.
I hadn't been long in Los Angeles when this happened.
I was hired to ghostwrite a memoir about Truman Capote's final days for Johnny Carson's widow.
She lived in a house straight out of Sunset Boulevard. Baby grand piano covered in signed celebrity photographs - the kind you normally see hanging in dry cleaners and old Italian restaurants, except she had them expensively framed. There was even an East Indian holy man living in the garden shed.
Her assistant Bill used to drive me up to the house. Before that he'd been Mickey Rourke's assistant. Before that he'd worked at The Mayflower in New York.
On the drive over he'd warn me: "Don't trust Joanne. Especially the Truman stuff. She's a compulsive liar."
Then the second he left the room, Joanne would lean toward me and whisper: "Don't trust Billy. He's a compulsive liar."
The whole thing felt like living inside some decaying Hollywood funhouse.
At one point Joanne invited me to stay over for Chinese food. Bill later explained that "Chinese food" apparently meant something else entirely.
I never stayed.
The story she told me was extraordinary. Funny, tragic, completely unrepeatable. And she still couldn't tell it honestly. Every time we got close to the real thing - the sadness, the humiliation, the loneliness, the desperation - she'd pull back. Soften it. Turn it into mythology.
The book never sold. Not because the story wasn't there. Because she couldn't face what the story actually was.
I've thought about that ever since. Most projects don't fail because they lack craft. They fail because the creator is protecting themselves from the one thing that gives the work actual life.
The grit is usually the story. The thing you're tempted to clean up. The thing that embarrasses you. The thing that makes you look less heroic than the version in your head.
That's usually the doorway.
What's the thing in your project you keep protecting yourself from?