Meet Ben Carter Olcott

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Ben Carter Olcott. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Ben Carter, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

In a purely creative sense, my resilience comes from a vital relationship between two factors: a kind of faith in the creative drive, and a highly conscious forging and re-forging of artistic practice. As a writer, that second point really begins and ends with something straightforward: sitting down and doing it. It’s a matter of making the time, putting your butt in a seat, opening a blank page, picking up a pen, placing fingers on a keyboard, and starting. Relentlessly and always starting. The energy for this daily practice ends up getting fed by that first more ineffable aspect, and I don’t shy away from giving the creative drive a spiritual quality: I do think it derives from a place both deep within and almost beyond myself. Certainly, it’s a belief that creativity matters. That it can form a gift of understanding or empathy or feeling that enriches that other art of living. It’s an abiding hope in possibilities. That’s where I think the connection between praxis and belief really occurs: starting, always starting, means another day has come to pass on which anything can happen.

But all of that is held up by a whole host of people I love, and they are the most important answers to this question. Family, friends, my girlfriend: together, they’re a network of deep support. I find that even when I am feeling my most defeated, at the tail end of a slew of rejections or dimmed by career stagnation, their words of encouragement and care remind me I have their belief. It’s not always possible to fully steel yourself against failure and endlessly bounce back (accepting this is another form of resilience, too). I know that when my personal resilience fails, I have loved ones who will help me find it again. Honoring them is, for me, a central motivation for continuing onward.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I’m a screenplay and fiction writer, which means I’m constantly shifting between forms and cross-pollinating concepts from both. My short stories often have filmic elements, and my scripts tend toward the literary. Regardless of the format or project, my goal is always, always to be interesting on the page. I want my reader gripped from page one no matter what. My work is character-driven, intimate, urgent in tone–centered around damaged families, people, or institutions. Often all three. Nothing fascinates me more than people who find themselves driven forward by an inexplicable ambition or emotion, and who in a very human moment find themselves mired in the consequences of an irreversible mistake. How do we resolve the damage we cause or that has been done to us? My stories and screenplays alike are almost always about people struggling to do what they believe is right for themselves and others.

I’m currently the Creative Associate to Robin Veith, the showrunner of Hulu’s true crime series CANDY, on which I was a writer’s assistant. She has an overall deal at 20th TV, and we’ve worked together for four years now. Recently I’ve had fiction publications in TulipTree, Marrow, and Pangyrus magazines (the latter two are forthcoming in 2025), and I have an essay featured in Cusper Magazine, an excellent journal run by some awesome fellow young Hollywood folks here in LA. Both TulipTree and Cusper are available for purchase online, and I’d highly recommend both, there’s some fantastic writing in each.

My next goals are to find staffing on a show, continue to publish fiction, and collaborate with others to make great new work. I have a background in publishing in New York, and I genuinely love to read–I’m always exchanging work with my peers, getting into writers and readers groups, and building a sense of what matters to writers right now.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

1) Communicating what you care about.

I was lucky to grow up in a household of artists in which discussions about what we were reading, watching, playing, acting were the norm. My parents–both professional musicians and avid readers/watchers–always asked my sisters and I about what we’d seen or what we were reading. Elaborating this into a full-fledged communication talent is, to my mind, the purpose of an English degree at the college level–and that’s what I pursued at Boston College. The skill of taking in a piece of art, understanding its impression on oneself, and conveying those impressions to others is crucial in a collaborative creative field–the very heart of work in Hollywood. So that’s my justification for getting a “useless” degree. But this is of course great practice for life too, and it has been a tried and true way of finding other people out there in the world who care about what I care about, people who are almost certain to be friends and allies in a challenging environment. I recommend writing down your impressions of everything you read or watch, attending events where you might find likeminded people, joining reading clubs, whatever possible means you can find of putting words to thoughts. Like any skill, this one is about practice.

2) Insatiable curiosity.

I find that some of the best stories are lurking in off-handed sentences of articles, a series of deep-dive clicks into a Wikipedia article, or just beneath the surface of something you think you know well. If something intuitively interests me, I always research what I can just to see if any wayward fact grabs me. And learning as much as you can about your industry is sound advice no matter what job you’re after. My advice is to cultivate a state of mind in which you’re ready to admit what you don’t know. In a creative sense, voraciously reading whatever fascinates you consistently refuels the imaginative tank and teaches you the techniques of previous masters. Steal those liberally.

3) Dealing with risk.

This is one of the most challenging aspects of a creative career–because unless you are very lucky, chances are you’ll be taking many risks that, for a while, don’t pay off. You might be risking the income your peers are making. You’re always risking disappointment when you put your work out there. In a competitive industry, you’re risking that you may never reach the acclaim you dreamed of. Speaking with people who’ve gone down the path ahead of you is the best way to learn strategies for managing that risk–and in my experience, patience and optimism are they key bulwarks, and too, taking advantage of all the resources around you. All this amounts to a strategy that works for people at all levels of creativity: have many pots boiling at once. In a sense, it’s a numbers game, a matter of at-bats and the sheer odds that one day, it will be your turn. So long as you keep swinging.

Before we go, maybe you can tell us a bit about your parents and what you feel was the most impactful thing they did for you?

My parents taught me that a creative career is hard, hard work–but that it can be done. It is possible. I speak to many young people who wonder whether they really can make the leap and pursue their passion for the arts. I tell them what my parents taught me: yes, but you’ll have to make sacrifices. The money may not always be consistent. Networking will be essential–being someone people want to work with, a great peer, is so so important. A passion is a fire you must tend to with practice and consistency. Validation will have to come ultimately from within. All this means a highly individual career path that depends on self-starting–and my parents practiced every day. They would work nights, driving into New York City to provide entertainment for those who’d worked all day. Some big moments were missed, but their lives featured a meaningful relationship to their passion, and it brought a richness it was clear for me to see even at a young age. They taught me that many risky pursuits are the most worthwhile.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://bencarterolcott.com/
• Instagram: @bencarterolcott