Theresa Rebeck’s career is a case study in being fearless. I came across this interview with her where she discusses just that:
“Go Back and Reread Machiavelli”
Rebeck has never been one to shy away from a challenge, and it shows. In addition to being an award-winning writer, she was named one of Newsweek’s “150 Fearless Women in the World” in 2011.
“It does require more courage to be fearless as a woman,” she says. “It requires people who have your back, and it requires the ability to get up a lot more. You have to take a lot of hits and keep standing up.”
Rebeck shared some of her hard-won expertise about writing—and Hollywood—in a 2007 book of essays, called Free Fire Zone: A Playwright’s Adventures on the Creative Battlefields of Film, TV, and Theater. In the book Rebeck writes, “Someone once asked me, ‘What advice would you give to young writers who wanted to go into show business?’ And I answered, almost without thinking, ‘Tell all of them to go back and reread Machiavelli.’”
She also recommends that aspiring writers focus intensely on their craft and attempt to break free from contemporary distractions. Rebeck doesn’t read newspapers. She deleted her Facebook account. She doesn’t watch much television or movies. That free time has allowed her to read incessantly: She’s reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment for a third time, Anna Karenina a second, and has read most Dickens’ novels three or more times. Her current fascinations, she says, are historical novels and books about Wall Street.
“My advice is to write a lot and to read a lot. I think it develops technique, and it teaches you so much,” she says. “At one point, I realized I saw writing as practice, that I was always practicing, the way a piano students practices the piano. The fact with the piano is that if you practice three hours a day, you get really good, really fast.”