Life & Work with Victoria Male

Today we’d like to introduce you to Victoria Male.

Victoria, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
For better or for worse, I came out of the womb knowing what I wanted to do: tell stories. That purpose manifested in different ways when I was growing up, whether it was participating in all the school plays, writing poetry, or making skits and home videos with family and friends. The first time I ever had my writing performed was part of a one-act play festival that my high school put on every spring for the seniors to direct. I was the only senior who also wrote their own one-act. My play was about a communist pizzeria in northern New Jersey (it was heavily inspired by Seinfeld’s soup nazi). Not only was my mind blown by the audience laughing at the jokes I wrote, but I was in awe of what the actors brought to their roles. They each had ideas and contributions to their characters that I could’ve never come up with.

From there, I studied Communications & Media as well as Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There I was able to enter the world of film and television more tangibly. I took my first-ever screenwriting class, assisted on local shoots in the area, and interned with the Travel Channel when I studied abroad in London. All of those experiences prepared me to participate in Chapel Hill’s Hollywood internship program, an initiative that takes twenty graduating seniors and places them in internships out in Los Angeles the summer after they graduate. I got to intern at a casting office and for my childhood hero, Tobey Maguire’s production company, Material Pictures.

Both were eye-opening, foundational experiences in the film industry, but I particularly cherish my time at Material. I learned what it actually looked like to produce, and I got to make a dream come true, a dream that so many people laughed at when I told them I wanted to meet Spider-Man. I spent my first years in Los Angeles bouncing around from job to job, taking whatever work I could in production, until I landed a position with director/producer Ivan Reitman’s The Montecito Picture Company in 2017. I find myself telling people that I “grew up at Montecito”. It certainly feels that way since I spent half a decade at the company and was participated in so much – traditional creative development, brand planning for the Ghostbusters franchise, going on set for a major motion picture, scouting new material at comic conventions, and establishing talent tracking for emerging, inclusive creators.

While working there, I also co-founded, produced, and launched the podcast Your Biggest Fangirl, which sought to explore and celebrate fandom from a feminine perspective. After having dream-come-true experiences in Hollywood and working for a franchise like Ghostbusters that had an ardent fanbase of its own, I couldn’t help but feel like society didn’t do its female-identifying fans justice. Over the course of three years and more than fifty episodes, I was able to interview bestselling authors, trailblazing entrepreneurs, and brilliant scholars — all women– about what it means to be a fan.

Yet in 2019, I was drawn to return to my writing more formally. Creative meetings at Montecito and writing interview questions and blog posts for Your Biggest Fangirl were all wonderful and exciting, but I wanted to return to creating on my own. I had an idea for a script, signed up for a UCLA Extension screenwriting course to help reinforce my technique and accountability, and was a represented writer a year later. I couldn’t believe the caliber of people who were reading my work. It was the first time in my life I felt like I could call myself a writer.

Over the past year, I aided in launching the western arm of the media startup Graphic India, began writing in a new medium – short stories – and gotten them published, as well as optioned my first novel this year for adaptation with a newfound writing/producing partner.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It has not been a smooth road at all! For every achievement I’ve made, there’s been hundreds of hours of blood, sweat, and tears behind it. The “no’s” I received far outnumber the “yes’s” in every aspect of my career. I’ve gone on countless job interviews, pitched countless ideas to my superiors, submitted my writing to countless production companies and publications, only to be turned down.

With my scripts, I’ve faced competition from players in the industry far about my stature, plus have had to battle my own doubts about my self-worth. After leaving Montecito after the death of Ivan, I had to confront my fear that none of the people I’d fostered relationships with during my time there would want to continue them since I no longer had a flashy franchise name to drop. Would they want to continue collaborating with “just me?” I’ve been let go for asking to be paid what I’m worth, and I have stories about A-listers that rival “The Devil Wears Parada”. Personally, I’ve dealt with the sudden, horrific loss of my father and a major injury in the past five years — both have taken a lot of time, therapy, and reflection to heal from.

Though all these struggles can feel insurmountable some days, I return to one of my all-time favorite quotes from painter Georgia O’Keefe “Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant — there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing — and always keeping the unknown beyond you…” As long as I am making my unknown known, I am succeeding.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I’m particularly fascinated and inspired by history and mythology in my writing, likely because so much of it has been centered in the male gaze, and I’d like to change that. Also, probably because I’m a huge nerd! To me, there’s something so sacred and magical in finding the relevance and relatability in someone else’s story who lived seventy years ago, a century ago, or one thousand years ago. Championing women and their points of view is also essential to what and how I write.

If I do say so myself, I feel that I’m quite adept at historical fiction; I have projects set during the Red Scare in Hollywood back in the 1950s and in the court of King Henry VIII in England. My writing also seeks to re-contextualize mythology for the modern day – I used the legend of the Welsh mountain Cader Idris to write a very personal story about grief and gender-flipped the Greek myth of Pygmalion to speak to the pressure women feel to “have it all” nowadays. I can also write a fun, splashy comedy set in the present-day too, I promise!

What I believe sets me apart from others is my ability to combine passion with execution. I believe the reason I’ve been able to churn out so much material – both written and audio – in the past several years is because I can take a look at where I am, then build a path with what I have at my disposal to what I want to create and where I want to be.

Have you learned any interesting or important lessons due to the Covid-19 Crisis?
COVID taught us so much, didn’t it? I learned about a lot about creativity during COVID. For instance, I do my best work when I have structure when I’m taking care of my body, when I’m reading a book that has nothing to do with what I’m writing about, and when I have a support system of social and creative community to either bounce ideas off of, or talk about anything but work with.

I learned that rest is imperative and that one can not be in a constant state of creation. It’s normal and healthy to have an artistic refractory period, and the best way to shorten that period is to not judge yourself for needing it in the first place! Also, a change of scenery works wonders.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @victoriamale1
• Twitter: @victoriamale
• Website: linktr.ee/victoriamale

Image Credits
The photos of me reading and holding a microphone in a yellow and orange dress should be credited to Monica Duarte