Daily Inspiration: Meet Mayanka Goel

Today we’d like to introduce you to Mayanka Goel.

Hi Mayanka, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I was born in Mumbai, India. I came from a family of people working in Bollywood. My father wrote screenplays for Hindi feature films, and my uncles were Directors and Stunt Coordinators. Consequently, writing for film and TV was the first ever career that presented itself to me. However, this became a conscious choice much later. When I was 18, I lost my older brother and my mother. Till this point, I had written for fun and amusement. Now, I started writing to process my grief. I went on to major in English and study Journalism and Advertising. I wrote feature articles for a daily Indian newspaper and commercials for Baskin Robbins and Clinique. I also wrote short films for Humans of Bombay.

In 2020, I got a full scholarship to NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Dramatic Writing MFA Program. Here, I studied under renowned writers like Charlie Rubin (Seinfeld, Law & Order) and Sabrina Dhawan (Monsoon Wedding, Kaminey). I also won the Tisch Future Screenwriters Fellowship Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Writing Award. Soon after graduation, I began working at Nickelodeon as Showrunner’s Assistant. Most recently, I got selected to participate in the South Asian Writers Committee (WGA) Mentorship Program where I will be working with WGA writers to develop my work.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has been far from a smooth road. I grew up in a loving home, but it all changed when I was 18. I lost my older brother to an accident, and my mother followed soon after from grief. That was the last I knew of a stable home. With support from my father and other family, I continued my studies and work in writing. I moved to the US during the pandemic, all by myself, to study at NYU. New York can be very daunting, and COVID didn’t make it any easier. But my classmates and professors supported me and made the transition as smooth as possible.

Apart from the emotional struggles, the business of writing is also full of rejections. Often, you rarely even hear back. And this is after putting in a lot of effort and time into a project. However, the key is to be patient and have faith.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I’m a screenwriter. I studied Dramatic Writing (Writing for Film, TV, and Theater) at NYU. I focus on writing for film and TV, and one of the projects I’m most proud of is a feature screenplay called ‘At the Heart of Everything.’ It is a comedy-drama about two estranged sisters who deal with their mother’s death and the grief that follows through science. It won me the $10,000 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award in 2022. I experienced grief at a fairly young age and have learned to see the absurdity that goes hand in hand with tragedy. I like to write about struggles that everyone goes through, with a lens of comedy.

Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
I’m a fairly introverted person. I like to learn different skills in my free time. I recently taught myself to draw and am now working on a very amateur version of a Webtoon based on a romcom script I developed at NYU.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mayankagoel.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/MayankaGo