Andrea Mann

Andrea Mann is a writer and musician based in the UK

Who The Hell Put This Glass Ceiling Here?

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Grandpa Joe: You mean we’re going…
Willy Wonka: Up and out!
Grandpa Joe: But this roof is made of glass! It’ll shatter into a thousand pieces. We’ll be cut to ribbons!
Willy Wonka: Probably.

I was invited to give my first guest lecture last week: to final year students at the University of Leeds, talking about skills to help them navigate a career in the creative industries. I absolutely loved it, and not just because the exterior of the School of Fine Arts had a New York High School of Performing Arts vibe. I loved talking to the students, I loved being in their orbit, I loved being on campus… in a ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to spend more time here and do more lecturing!’ kind of way, not a Never Been Kissed/17 Again bodyswap/time travel kind of way, I hasten to add.

One of the ideas I spoke to the students about was that of moving through our comfort zones and smashing our personal glass ceilings. And although I didn’t go into the following with them, being back in a university environment reminded me once more of my own glass ceilings, my deep-rooted childhood (and who am I kidding, adulthood) dream of following in the tap-dancing footsteps of The Kids From Fame, and the two incidents which quashed that dream.

Or rather: the two incidents I would for a long time blame for quashing that dream. Because it wasn’t until many years later that I realised I had, in my response to these events, well and truly quashed them myself.

The first Dream Quashing Incident™ started when I was about to leave middle school, very excited about the prospect of going to our local high school – because each year they put on a school musical. The year before I started there (aged 13) they had put on a production of Joseph And His Technicolour Dreamcoat (as is contractually obliged for all British schools to perform) and, well, this budding triple threat couldn’t WAIT to get up on that school hall stage herself.

Until I started there. Because that was the year the first big wave of teachers’ strikes hit – and one of the consequences of that was no after-school drama, so no school shows. In fact, there were no musicals staged for the rest of my time at high school.

And what did I do about that? Well, I was just a kid with a very big but very secret dream, so naturally I kept my mouth shut and did nothing. I took it on the chin/as a sign, and I retreated, cursing Margaret Thatcher/Keith Joseph/Kenneth Baker (thanks to a few brilliant lefty teachers who reminded us who was to blame for the strikes). I only finally, barely, got it together to go for my dream in any small way in my final year, when aged 18 I sang I Know Him So Well at the end of year school concert with Elizabeth Webster (who was magnificent, though memory fails me as to which of us was Elaine Paige and which was Barbara Dickson).

The second time events conspired to quash my dream – and I again went “Oh OK, then!” – was in my first year as a student at Sheffield University. Bruised by the above experience at school (I was embarking on a modern languages, not performing arts, degree for starters), I nonetheless told myself: “It’s OK! University is where I can do all the fun theatre stuff. It’s where all my heroes met and did it! Look at the Beyond The Fringe lot! The Monty Python chaps! Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie!” Yes, Sheffield University was where I was going to turn this ship around and point it due north-west (to the New York High School of Performing Arts), so in my first term I auditioned for a university production of Cabaret.

I remember a few things. I remember making the shortlist for Sally Bowles. I remember standing around a piano with half a dozen Impressive Girls singing Tomorrow Belongs To Me. And I remember the American postgrad director telling us all that it turned out they couldn’t get the rights to Cabaret after all, so they were going to do a straight play instead.

Once again I took this on the chin/as a sign, went ‘OK, I’ll move on!’ – and walked away from it. Only to then go and watch the staging of the aforementioned straight play some months later, and feel utterly robbed because it turns out they had decided to intersperse the scenes on stage with performances of jazz standards sung by a series of – you guessed it – Impressive Girls standing by a piano.

It took me a long time to both realise and accept how I had, in fact, sabotaged myself both times. How I had used these turns of events as an excuse to keep myself small because, well, small was safe and familiar, and who was I to have these silly dreams in the first place? Seeing them as evidence that it was Not To Be, I had focused on things that had been totally out of my control without looking too deeply at my response to them – which was in my control. It finally dawned on me that in doing so, I had constructed my own personal glass ceiling both times. And I wasn’t even a professional glazier.

Don’t get me wrong – real actual glass ceilings exist in society (and by ‘real actual’ I do of course mean ‘real figurative’). They’re everywhere, in all sectors, trying to keep historically underrepresented people in their lane, trying to keep certain people away from success and power, stopping them from achieving their potential.

But I bet you have a personal glass ceiling inside yourself – or indeed: on top of yourself – too. Whether it’s how happy we believe we’re allowed to be, what career we’re entitled to pursue, how much money we’re allowed to earn, how much success we deserve… we often put an unconscious limit on these things, and we conspire to keep ourselves within those limits.

It took me years of interrogating those sorts of beliefs and fears inside myself – including looking at where they came from – to even begin to smash my own personal glass ceiling. And when I started to do it, I would often retreat once again to ‘safety’ after achieving any kind of success.

But here’s the thing: smashing ceilings and achieving success isn’t linear. It isn’t neat and tidy. Most of us will be chipping away at our glass ceilings gradually, not smashing through them in one go like a Great Glass Wonkavator. And every so often we’ll retreat from the progress we’re making, because, well, who isn’t afraid of falling glass?

But once you start to smash your personal glass ceiling, your muscles start to build (which is to be expected, you’re doing a lot of smashing) and there’s increasingly less glass to break through. Although don’t be surprised to find that it was, in fact, just an atrium you were chipping away at, and above that there’s a whole other glass ceiling…

Is it a life’s work? Definitely. Will you be cut to ribbons? Probably.

But as Willy Wonka says: Don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted.

He lived happily ever after.

The Goals Post

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James Taylor’s great song ‘October Road’, or as I am currently hearing it in my head: ‘October Goals’

I have just written down my October goals. I do this every month (write down that month’s goals, not my October goals – that would be weird, except for in October), and they cover all kinds of things, though they tend to focus on work and health/fitness.

I by no means always attain them – especially the health/fitness ones – but, as I touched on in my last post, I try to keep them to goals I can control.  There’s no point in me writing, for example, that my goal is to win a BAFTA – especially as the BAFTA Film Awards take place in February, not October. No. Instead, for example, one goal I’ve written down this month is: ‘Deliver an outline I’m proud of, to deadline’. Those are pretty much aspects I can control when it comes to my current work project – which is, you guessed it, writing an outline (a prose document written ahead of a script) for some lovely producers, to an upcoming deadline in October.

As for the ‘proud of’ aspect: author and coach Chris Smith wrote a piece about this on his and Bec Evans’ Substack Breakthroughs & Blocks this week – prompted by recent remarks by Richard Osman on his podcast – saying that remembering you’re proud of your work really helps when promoting it (and/or yourself). It’s true; and I’d go one step further and say that it helps when setting or clarifying goals, too, because it helps to keep that goal self-contained, within your control. ‘Deliver an outline the producers love, to deadline’ is not a helpful goal to set myself, because the producers might not love the outline – and whether they do or don’t is partly to do with what I produce but also partly to do with them and how they receive it. Channelling my inner Girl Guide and doing my best, however: producing something I am happy with, nay proud of? That’s solely within my purview. As was the use of the word ‘purview’ in that last sentence.

For all those who set goals too – or are thinking of doing so – here’s one final thing I do which I also find helpful. At the start of each month, before setting the new month’s goals, I look at my document with the previous month’s goals on it, work my way through it deleting anything I didn’t achieve (and trying not to beat myself up about that), confirming the things I have, and adding in anything unexpected that came up that was a win… and then I rename the file, changing it from SEPTEMBER – GOALS to SEPTEMBER – ACHIEVEMENTS! (And yes, I do always put an exclamation mark. I like to think that’s because I’m being positive and upbeat, but to be honest there could also be an element of being genuinely shocked: Look, Andrea, you actually achieved something! You!).

Then at the end of the year, I look back at all these monthly little ACHIEVEMENTS! lists, combine the highlights to make a year-end list, and… well, to be honest I feel a bit like Heather Small when she’s asking us what we did that day to make ourselves proud. ‘This, Heather! I did this!’ I can say. And then perhaps Heather and I would have a nice chat, which would inspire me to start writing a new list of goals, such as: 1. Search for the hero inside myself; 2. Search for the secrets I hide, and so on.

But I digress.

We talk about celebrating the wins – big or small – in life, and I think this is such good and important advice. Our negativity bias means that we’ll often remember the bad stuff over the good, criticism over praise, our failures over our wins. Whether it’s because I believe in trying to counter that or because I’m just incredibly forgetful, I make a point of not just trying to celebrate these wins/achievements, but also to record them somehow. By doing the above and also, for example, doing something like this:

When the producer of one of my films called me up to tell me about the lovely feedback my spec script had got from sales agents, I immediately opened up a text file on my computer, and as he spoke to me down the phone I literally typed every word he said – so that I wouldn’t forget what these people had said to him about my work.

I’m sure he had no idea that I was doing this, and might have thought I was a bit bonkers if he had known. But the result is a text file I can and do return to when imposter syndrome strikes, when my inner critic is being particularly vocal, when I’m doubting myself or my ability as a writer. It helps to give me a bit of balance and perspective, and to remember one of my ‘wins’.

So here’s to recording your wins, here’s to our October Goals, here’s to an auspicious autumn… and here’s one of my all-time favourite cartoons, by artist Rachel Greenberg. Hope you have a great one too, folks.

A cartoon of Humpty Dumpty doing lots of lovely autumnal activities, with the caption: 'Humpty Dumpty had a great fall'

Wishin’ and Hopin’ and Musin’

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Not saying I had a mild panic attack halfway up those steps, but… I don’t wanna talk about things I’ve gone through

I have just returned from the most wonderful holiday on the most beautiful Greek island: Skopelos, aka where they filmed Mamma Mia!. Just as it took me approximately 20 years to start watching The Sopranos – no spoilers please, I’m still on season 5! – I waited for Skopelos’s ABBA-related tourism craziness to die down a little before heading there, ie I lay low for a mere 16 years. I can attest that the craziness has indeed died down, though I can also attest that a) the hour-long boat ride which took us from Skiathos to Skopelos played the soundtrack for the final half of that hour, as did our bus to the boat taking us back; and b) my husband and I ended up in a bar in Skopelos Town on Saturday night dancing to Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! with big goofy smiles on our faces.

So… I’m writing this because I realised on holiday that I wanted to start writing about some of the thoughts that ping around my head – and the ‘Musings’ section of my website seems like a good place to post these, well, musings. They will most likely my thoughts about writing, and screenwriting in particular, and creativity in general. But no doubt other things, too – like life after breast cancer.  

I hope these posts can be in some way interesting and/or helpful; I suspect that they will at least be the latter for me personally. Because I’m also doing this as a result of being inspired by a tweet I read some time ago (apologies but I don’t remember who posted it), which advised people who do creative work – especially those of us whose work and careers are very dependent upon other people’s decisions and actions – to do something creative which is purely for you, and controlled by you from start to finish.

Not only do we screenwriters rely on others – producers, directors, actors, an entire crew – to turn our words into films or TV shows, but much of our careers are spent waiting, hoping, crossing fingers… relying on these other people to help realise our dreams. We send a script (or pitch, or outline) out into the world hoping that it will be read, or liked, or lead to being hired or to a meeting or to a greenlight… And not only can all this wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’ (thanks Bacharach & David) drive you slightly mad if you’re not careful (I mean, you start thinking in Bacharach & David lyrics, for one), it can also sometimes feel like it’s what your work life mostly entails, as opposed to the actual ‘doing’, ie the creative work of writing. And because this is true to a certain extent – all the things above absolutely come with the territory of being a screenwriter – I’ve realised that anything I can do which helps me accept and manage this can only be A Good Thing. Hence, for example, trying to only set goals for myself that can be controlled by me rather than other people (eg ‘Finish this draft’ as opposed to ‘Win a BAFTA’), and taking the advice from that kind Tweeter on board, and starting to write posts like this.

If you’re a creative whose work and/or career success also relies so much on others, I hope it inspires you to do something for yourself, too. Something which is solely created by you from start to finish. It could be writing a poem, it could be taking a photo and sharing it on Instagram, it could be singing or playing a song (I highly recommend the back catalogue of Bacharach & David. Also ABBA). Whatever it is, I don’t doubt it will bring you some joy, satisfaction and/or sense of accomplishment – and will help give you some balance alongside all that wishin’ and hopin’. Here’s hopin’, anyway.