Brian Ruberry, a screenwriter of beloved Christmas movies for networks like Lifetime, Hallmark and Great American Country, shares insights from his experience in Reynolds Hall on Saturday afternoon. Tabitha Johnston

SHEPHERDSTOWN — “I am the least likely writer you will ever meet. In fact, when I was in high school, I had zero interest in writing and, to be honest, I had zero interest in school,” said Brian Ruberry in Reynolds Hall on Saturday afternoon.

Ruberry spoke about “How to Write a Christmas Movie,” based on his experience as a screenwriter of Christmas movies for networks like Lifetime, Hallmark and Great American Country. But his road from high school indifference to screenwriting success proved to be a long and challenging one.

“A long time ago, I played at Ram Stadium, when I played at James Madison University. I wanted to be a football player,” Ruberry said. “If you told me then that one day I would be writing Christmas movies with the banter and the snowball fights and the hot cocoa and the kiss at the end, I would have said, ‘No! Go away.’

“As the saying goes, ‘When one door closes, another door opens,’ and that’s what happened to me! In college, I had a very bad shoulder injury from football, and kind of on a whim I took a short story course and discovered I had a talent for storytelling,” Ruberry said, mentioning soon after taking that class, one of his short stories was published.

“What I realized I wanted to do was write movies, so I moved to Los Angeles and I went to film school! That started a 40-year journey of trying to get one of my scripts produced.”

According to Ruberry, his success as a movie writer came down to his ability to persevere.

“Can you imagine 40 years of just writing scripts and rejection? Forty years of being told, ‘You’re a good writer, but . . .’ or, ‘We’ve decided to go in a different direction,'” Ruberry said. “I read an article in a screenwriting magazine about writing TV movies. I had never thought about writing a TV movie and didn’t know a lot about it, but there’s this huge demand for TV movies, including Christmas movies!”

Soon after reading that article, Ruberry started writing screenplays for this niche market. And although he still faced rejection initially in the Christmas TV movie market, over the last three years, five of his screenplays have been made into movies and an additional two have been optioned for potential future production. This success, Ruberry said, proves that writers should look for areas where there is a need.

“This year alone with just Christmas movies, Hallmark is doing 40 Christmas movies, Lifetime is doing 12, Great American Family is doing 20, Black Entertainment Television is doing two dozen and that’s not even counting how many Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and HBO are doing,” Ruberry said. “Everybody’s doing Christmas movies, now!”

After a lifetime hard-won success, Ruberry has finally been able to retire from his career in public relations and focus on writing more screenplays. And, as he shared his story with Shepherd University students and community members, Ruberry gave some sound advice for those wanting to build a career in his line of work.

“Perseverance is key,” Ruberry said. “Once I started writing the movies for TV, I would finish a script and immediately start a new one. Just keep writing! I would contact producers cold and say, ‘Hey, I have a log line, do you want to read it?’ and it’s amazing how you might keep on getting, ‘No, no, no,’ yet all it takes to get on the road to success is to find that one person who will say, ‘Yes!'”