Patricia Fox

I attribute my success to just persistence, really. Every writer gets many rejections, and I think a lot of writers get a couple of those and they're like, it's just hard to deal with, especially when you start out, and so I think a lot of them give up. I just never gave up, because I just couldn't imagine doing anything else. I mean, ever since I was in the fourth grade, I knew that I wanted to be a writer. I saw a friend of mine keeping a journal, and she was writing about summer camp. I never went to summer camp, so I just started a whole different trajectory for me of fiction. That's where it all began, and I've just kept at it through all the rejection because this is what I was meant to do.

The best career advice I ever received came from my undergraduate screenwriting professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Thomas Hope. He pulled me aside and told me I really need to do this for a living, if I can. At the time, I wasn't even thinking about screenwriting that way, as something I could actually pursue professionally. It was so meaningful to have someone else see that potential in me and push me toward realizing it was the right path. Later, another mentor, Kevin Clark, who ran the MFA program at Augsburg University, said something similar after reading one of my screenplays. He told me it was very interesting and I should try to get it made, which validated that I was on the right track.

I would tell young women that filmmaking is really a male-dominated industry, and women really struggle in the film industry to get taken seriously. Through my persistence doing this over a number of years, and getting some credits and awards and stuff like that, people start to take notice. Just don't give up. Don't listen to those naysayers that are telling you you're never gonna make it, that women are gonna struggle. I experienced this firsthand when I was living in Los Angeles. I met with a producer who wasn't interested in the screenplay I was writing at the time, but when I got home from that meeting, I shot him an email saying thank you for meeting with me, and he responded immediately asking me out. I didn't even respond because I was not interested. So there's that aspect too that women have to deal with. But my advice is to keep persisting, build your credits, and don't let any of that knock you down.

The biggest challenges in my field right now are gender and age. Filmmaking is highly male-dominated, and screenwriters tend to be older and male. Most Oscar winners that win for a screenplay are in their 60s or 70s. It still hasn't reached equal ground with men and women, not even close, in the film industry. Women really struggle to get taken seriously, and that's been my observation throughout my career.

To always keep going. This industry there is a lot of rejection and you cannot let that stop you