We were lucky to catch up with Desirée Proctor and Erica Harrell recently and have shared our conversation below.
Desirée and Erica, so great to be with you and I think a lot of folks are going to benefit from hearing your story and lessons and wisdom. Imposter Syndrome is something that we know how words to describe, but it’s something that has held people back forever and so we’re really interested to hear about your story and how you overcame imposter syndrome.
We are a writing team that works in film, tv, video games, and comics. What’s hard about the entertainment industry is everyone wants to put you in a box. When we first started working in Hollywood, we both worked in production. It wasn’t easy to make the jump to the creative side because everyone saw us as non-creative production workers. So we decided to just give up, move back home, and wallow in self-pity. Just kidding! Luckily for us, being from Florida and having survived the heat, the alligators and every Florida man, we already had a thick, SPF slathered skin. When we saw that most TV writers came from Ivy League backgrounds, instead of public state schools like us, we could have given up, but instead we decided to just go for what we wanted.
We write both comedy and drama across several mediums. Again, people want to put you in a box. No one believed we could seamlessly transition from TV to games to comics and back again. And at first, we weren’t sure we could either. We knew we wanted to, so we brushed those insecurities aside and made it happen. Our advice is if you feel any fear about pursuing something, that just means you’re growing as a person and artist, so embrace it.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
Most recently we were co-producers on the hit NBC series, Lopez vs Lopez starring George Lopez and his daughter Mayan Lopez. We also recently published our award-winning graphic novel, Nuclear Power, which is a conspiracy thriller set in a world where the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in nuclear war. It’s basically what if Handmaid’s Tale met X-Men. You can check it out at www.nuclearpowercomic.com.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Discipline, networking, and taking inspiration from our own personal stories for our writing. We’ve written about Desirée’s experience working at Disney World and growing up as an Army brat; Erica’s crazy father and rigid Catholic school upbringing. Every experience that we’ve had has helped us grow more as an artist. Our piece of advice is never stop learning. We took one Upright Citizens Brigade sketch writing class and the sketches we wrote there got us work on an all female comedy sketch series, BETCH: A Sketch Show. You never know when or how a new learned skill can pay off in the future.
If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?
We’re currently on strike with the Writers Guild of America. Hopefully the AMPTP will come back to the negotiating table soon and make a fair deal so we can get back to work.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.nuclearpowercomic.com
