"I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay"
About this Quote
Accidental authority is the quiet flex in Kate DiCamillo's line: she positions herself as both amateur and fixer in the same breath. "I didn't know anything" is a disarming self-portrait, the kind creatives offer to lower the room's defenses. Then the pivot lands: "but somehow I ended up rewriting". That "somehow" is doing a lot of work. It's comic, yes, but it's also a critique of how cultural production actually runs: competence is often assumed after the fact, and people get drafted into roles not because they're credentialed, but because they're available, trusted, or simply the last one standing.
The sentence is built like a shrug that hides a résumé. DiCamillo isn't confessing ignorance so much as exposing the industry's improvisational plumbing. Screenwriting, typically treated as a specialized craft with rigid rules, is revealed as porous; the gate isn't always guarded by experts, it's guarded by momentum. Rewriting is also the less glamorous, more politically fraught job. You inherit someone else's vision, your changes are both essential and deniable, and the work happens in the shadow zone where authorship gets muddied.
Coming from a celebrated children's novelist, the line carries extra subtext: storytelling skills travel, even when the format doesn't. DiCamillo's real point isn't "I winged it". It's that narrative instinct is portable, and the creative world routinely discovers that only after it has already thrown you into the deep end. The humor softens the jab, but the jab is there: meritocracy is often a retroactive story we tell about messy, human systems.
The sentence is built like a shrug that hides a résumé. DiCamillo isn't confessing ignorance so much as exposing the industry's improvisational plumbing. Screenwriting, typically treated as a specialized craft with rigid rules, is revealed as porous; the gate isn't always guarded by experts, it's guarded by momentum. Rewriting is also the less glamorous, more politically fraught job. You inherit someone else's vision, your changes are both essential and deniable, and the work happens in the shadow zone where authorship gets muddied.
Coming from a celebrated children's novelist, the line carries extra subtext: storytelling skills travel, even when the format doesn't. DiCamillo's real point isn't "I winged it". It's that narrative instinct is portable, and the creative world routinely discovers that only after it has already thrown you into the deep end. The humor softens the jab, but the jab is there: meritocracy is often a retroactive story we tell about messy, human systems.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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