Today we’d like to introduce you to Marta Hernani.
Hi Marta, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
My LA story actually started many thousand miles away, in Spain, my home country. Today I’m a TV development executive and a writer, but I had quite different jobs before that: I was a corporate lawyer at one of the biggest law firms in Spain, a debate professor to South Korean kids, I worked on set at a British independent production, etc.
Growing up, I always loved stories: not just reading books and watching films, but also inventing them, writing them in my blue notebooks, directing my friends in our homemade productions. I’m naturally very curious and I’ve always loved learning, so I acquired multiple other skills along the way – including competitive public speaking, learning other languages like English and Italian, and making my way through college with a Law degree and a Criminal Science degree. But I always had a story at heart. I think of all these other accomplishments not as detours but as building bricks to the person I am today and fuel to the stories that I’m excited to tell.
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?
I think the biggest obstacle to any artistic career is the very misconception we often have about what being an artist means. As a society, we still equate artists to the figures of Mozart or Beethoven – child prodigies that showcased an enormous amount of natural talent from a very young age. If someone doesn’t stand out in their first artistic attempts – be that music, acting, or writing – they are automatically discarded as an artist and labeled a failure. We are so obsessed with the idea of early success – the debut novel, the directorial debut, the multiple “30 under 30” lists – that we forget that this is ultimately a long-distance race.
The truth is, the most successful artists I know have multiple talents, not just one natural gift, that they’ve honed throughout their entire careers. Talent, inspiration, intelligence are important, but so is hard work and perseverance. The first draft of any given story is fated to be legitimately awful, but it only really is so when the first draft becomes the last. I learned all this working on the manuscript of my first novel, Carlota Paris, going through constant rounds of re-writes, pitching it to multiple agents and publishers until I finally reached a publishing deal and realized that the ultimate success of the book was just that – having written it. The purpose of a first novel is no other than to pave the way to the next – and hopefully, all the lessons learned translate in an improvement of your writing!
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m a creative executive at Starz. I work on development for the international shows that we distribute through our streaming platform, Lionsgate +. I love my job because it connects me with creators from all around the world and gives me the opportunity to work alongside them to elevate their stories to their true potential. Being Spanish and having lived in Italy and the UK before moving to LA, I rely on my global background to help create three-dimensional characters and impactful storylines that can resonate with audiences around the world.
In addition to that, I’m a screenwriter and a book author. I’m passionate about telling stories that put women at the center, that have strong heroines who are also flawed and stand back up every time they fall; stories that are funny and poignant and will eventually break your heart. My first novel, Carlota Paris, came out in the summer of 2022 and narrated the journey of an eleven-year-old girl searching for her secret-agent mom in a fantasy-esque Madrid. It was published to great success in Spain by Bunker Books and I’m currently looking to license English rights to an American publisher to have distribution in the US. On the TV side, I’m currently working on an animation script about the adventures of a group of orphans in a desert town haunted by an old curse, that I hope to be able to start showing around very soon, so stay tuned!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://martahernani.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/martahernani/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/
