Today we’d like to introduce you to Nancy Beverly
Hi Nancy, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
Mad Magazine! Yes, that was my first inspiration for creative writing when I was a kid, and to this day, I have dry humor in my work. I also had to give speeches in the 5th and 6th grade. I did one on ESP and other paranormal stuff – the class was riveted – and my teacher gave me an A++. My fascination with “out there” stuff continues to this day and has been a part of many of my scripts. I also acted in school and that opened me up to my love of theatre.
I wrote a few plays in college and grad school and one of them went to the regionals of the American College Theatre Festival which gave me enough confidence to apply for an internship at Actors Theatre of Louisville in their literary department. I got in! Granted, it was nine months without pay, but I worked with many talented folks and learned a ton. Then I became the Assistant Lit Manager and read hundreds of scripts each year and equally cool, I had a half dozen short plays produced at ATL in our showcases. Most of my plays were funny, as you’ve probably guessed, so I decided to move to Los Angeles and try my hand at sitcoms.
I worked on Roseanne and Blossom and then switched over to hour-long dramas like Desperate Housewives and Ghost Whisperer because I wanted to be a part of shows that had more depth and less jokes.
The Writers Guild strike hit in 2007-08 and like everyone else in Hollywood, I got laid off. I took a short-term office gig at UCLA… and when the strike was over, my boss at Ghost Whisperer told me my job had been eliminated. (I was the digital media coordinator.) Gulp. I made a difficult decision: I decided to stay at UCLA (instead of constantly searching for Hollywood jobs) and produce my own content. I used UCLA as my steady base of employment for many years as I wrote and produced my lesbian romance film Shelby’s Vacation, the web series The Calamities of Jane (about a women dealing with ageism and sexism in Hollywood, imagine that!), and of course my plays.
My plays have been produced by my playwrights’ / actors’ group Fierce Backbone as well as all around the U.S. and Canada. One of my fav scripts is a 10-minute play called Attack of the Moral Fuzzies which features a fake game show called Morality Made Easy (yeah, right?) which had the honor of being published by Samuel French.
Most recently I wrote and performed my one-person show Sister from Another Planet at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2023. We had packed houses and great reviews.
My latest adventure is the novel version of Shelby’s Vacation, a journey of two women figuring out how to let go of past and future romantic fantasies. Most folks write a novel and then do the movie, but I reversed the process – we created the 40-minute version of the film when we couldn’t raise the money to do a full-length feature. The cool thing about writing a novel is I didn’t have to worry about trimming budgets, juggling a large number of actors, securing a bunch of locations – and the story could take place over a whole year not just a weekend.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
When I first moved out to L.A., I had some AMAZING synchronicities that led to my first few jobs in television, it felt as if the hand of the Divine was guiding me. Quick example: when I was working my first job for a TV producer, I was sitting at my desk (in the big tall building in Universal City) and I heard a voice say, “Can you tell me where the men’s room is?” I looked up and it was Matt Williams. I’d done summer theatre with him back in Indiana. Well, he was in our Universal City building to cast a new show he was creating: Roseanne. I ended up being his assistant and the writers’ assistant. Then I got a job on Blossom because I knew someone there, and I sold scripts to both of those shows. I thought things would always be that smooth. Alas, no.
I went up for writing jobs on other sitcoms and didn’t land them. It took a half a dozen years of me doing temp jobs and mulling things over to steer myself towards hour-long shows. I landed a gig working for the head of Drama Development at FOX which led to me getting onto an hour-long show. Yay! Oh, wait. It got cancelled after just a few episodes. Dang it.
Then came my gig on Desperate Housewives, which was pretty cool… until it wasn’t – my boss and the show’s creator locked horns. My boss got let go and so did I. Grrrr.
I landed my job on Ghost Whisperer next… but, yup, the WGA strike hit as I mentioned previously. When the strike ended, I persistently reached out to Ghost Whisperer to see if I could get a full-time writing job there, even if my other job had been eliminated. They eventually passed on me. Sigh.
Once I had on my producer’s hat, I was more in the driver’s seat of my career. Mind you raising the money for and shooting our film and web series took a LOT of work (and on Shelby’s Vacation, we had one of the lead actresses drop out in the middle of our fundraising campaign, yikes!). BUT those efforts were totally worth it. We had great casts and crew members and I’m proud of the work we did.
A niggly naggy voice that used to pester me in my early years as a writer would say that I wasn’t good enough, my scripts weren’t good enough. I’ve learned over the years to quiet that voice and see if there are script improvements I can make but to not throw me and my scripts out the window.
One of the things I’ve learned over the years is to see if there’s a lesson to be learned when I’m turned down for a job (maybe it wasn’t a good fit, maybe I wasn’t the right person for that job, maybe there are things waaaaaay beyond my control). I’ve also learned to be persistent. A good batting average in baseball is .300. That means the batter has to take ten swings at the ball to get three hits. Don’t let the other misses drag you down, fine-tune your swing (or in the case of TV, “pitch,” as in pitching my TV shows).
Pitching my TV shows recently was an interesting challenge because COVID hit when I was getting the concepts and the pilot scripts out and about in Hollywood. It was tough to network and make connections during the first couple years of the pandemic. But I’ve kept at it!
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I love writing character-driven scripts – both for the stage and in other media – with a metaphysical / “woo-woo” touch. With my one-person show Sister from Another Planet, I opened up my soul to the audience – I took them on a journey of how I figured out that I was a non-binary lesbian while simultaneously going on a spiritual exploration thanks to a channeling class I took the first year I moved to Los Angeles. Yes, channeling, as in allowing spirit guides to communicate with me and speak through me.
I’m very proud of my two TV pilots. The Cleaning Crew is about a small hazmat cleanup team in L.A. that’s headed up by a former investigative reporter who gets laid off from her newspaper job and decides to use her do-gooder energy to help folks clean up messes – using a psychic gift given to her by her grandmother. (I discovered books on ESP and such in my grandma’s wicker basket, so that’s my personal connection to the concept.) My other TV pilot, The View from Above, is about mysterious, magical crop circles appearing in the Midwest where a New Age healer realizes she has a personal connection to the formations – which contain pressing messages she and others need to decipher. (I’ve actually been to England to walk around in crop circles, been a fan of them since the 1990s.)
Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
I think folks constantly need to take risks if they’d like to grow, both on the personal / spiritual level and on the career level. Moving out to L.A. was a huge risk. I knew just two or three people when I landed in L.A. (University of Evansville college friends), but through an amazing synchronicity, I got my first job because one of those pals had a friend leaving her job as a producer’s assistant – and my pal recommended me for the job.
Every time I send a script out or have a reading, I risk people not liking it, not getting it, not knowing how to give feedback. But the script won’t grow if I don’t do that. I won’t grow if I don’t take risks. So let’s do it!
Pricing:
- novel Shelby’s vacation is $5.95 on Kindle
- $19.95 on Amazon books for paperback
- $30 on Amazon books for hard cover
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.nancybeverlywriter.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hikernb/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nancy.beverly.52
- Other: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=shelby%27s+vacation+nancy+beverly&i=stripbooks&crid=1CY9CWGIPK6CU&sprefix=Shelby%27s+%2Cstripbooks%2C134&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_1_9
