A Major Difference Between Professionals and Amateurs

After recently reading a very good book on pitching, and having written and re-written 30-50 loglines in order to craft the perfect one or two that distill the essence of a story I spent a year writing, it occurred to me that I'm gaining a huge leg up on most of the writers I know, not to mention those I don't. Why? Simply because I'm taking the time to do these things.

I've spent hours - days, maybe, if I add it all up - scouring the internet, researching contests, production companies, producers, managers and agents to whom it may be appropriate to submit my material (when I'm ready, which is not yet). And from what I hear, not many writers do this. It's much easier to haphazardly blast your queries to everyone in town you can find an address for.

Searching for all this stuff can seem like a waste of time, when that time could be spent actually writing. That may seem like a good, responsible excuse, but it's not. If we want to get anywhere, people must read our material. And they won't if we haven't done our homework. Rather, they'll consider us and our query a waste of time and move on to someone who took the time to check out if they should submit their genre spec based on easily obtainable evidence of the buyer's history and tastes.

When you're starting out you don't have a manager or agent, so you have to be both, in addition to your duties as a writer/editor. At their core, every manager or agent is just a salesman, so you must be too. It's nice to look at successful screenwriters and imagine they woke up one morning with inspiration shining through the window, lasering directly into their cerebrum, wrote a brilliant script in a matter of weeks, sent it out to a bunch of random reps/buyers and was immediately welcomed with open arms because of their brilliance.

But the truth is - and this should give us all some consolation - that from William Goldman, J.J. Abrams and the Rossio/Elliot team to John Grisham, J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown, every COMMERCIALLY SUCCESSFUL writer has had to endure the process of "taking off the writer's cap and putting on the business attire". Writing the queries, withstanding the rejections, re-write after re-write, building connections and relationships, etc. They all did it and still do it today, and we must too. Unless you have an aversion to commercial success, in which case maybe we'll catch you at next year's Renaissance Fair (but I bet even Shakespeare had to do his homework on who to approach to get, say, Titus playing at the Old Vic).

Especially if you're a writer today, there's just no excuse - it is easier now than it has ever before been to find the necessary info to target our submissions to someone who has the power to move our careers forward. There are many ways to research buyers and representation, literally thousands of websites, hundreds of books and gagillions of interviews with these people spanning all forms of media. Part of the job of an aspiring writer - 50% of it in my opinion - is to seek out such information, take notes, and use said info when time comes to get an agent/manager/query prodcos, etc. If you don't target your submissions carefully, you're wasting their time, and they're going to remember that.

I think that's a big reason why MOST aspiring writers fail, drop out, or keep banging their head against what seems like an impenetrable wall for years without making a dent. Because they don't do their marketing and business research. They don't practice their pitches out loud until it becomes ingrained in their subconscious. They don't write logline after logline trying to find the most compelling sentence that showcases their stories' strengths. They don't seek out background and information that can help them build rapport with prospective buyers/reps. The movies or personal passions we may have in common with them, the places we grew up, the kinds of stories we want to tell, all this info can be found in countless interviews with professional writers, script consultants, buyers & reps, an used to engage them with US the writer, on an emotional and personal level. It seems most writers don't even take the time to analyze what their stories' strengths and weaknesses are, much less do any of the above. They think that's the job of someone else, and again, it's not.

If I can't be bothered to spend the time carefully crafting my own marketing plan to give my "baby" the best shot possible, then why should anyone else? It's our job first, and those of us lucky/smart enough to recognize that will always be miles ahead of most of the pack, and I don't mind bragging - that feels good.