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.

Never Give Your Script to Anyone Hot Off the Press!

As writers work endless hours in solitude, the deeper we delve, the more we tend lose objectivity on the quality and coherence of our projects. Once we feel we're "done", by any stretch of the word, we're always anxious to get immediate feedback on whether we've achieved our goals or fallen short. So we take our creation hot off the press, and put it in a reader's hands.

Then, moments later, we make an adjustment. Or realize something isn't quite right. We fix here, tinker there, rewrite a little, then, making the same mistake a second time, immediately send our revised copy to our trusted reader who has already begun - if not finished - the original draft. Usually this is accompanied with an apologetic email sounding something like "really sorry if you've started my first draft already, I made some revisions, and now the structure is better, I've eliminated/combined some characters, and put a whole new twist on the ending! The new draft is absolute genius, so trash that first one and check this baby out!".

In varying degrees I have committed this sin, as have friends of mine, as I'm sure have you.

It may seem a small sin, but I don't think there's any such thing as a small sin in the Business - they're all large, egregious sins, because they can affect your career not in just one, but in many different ways.

For example, we all know the importance of connections and the value of a true, "trusted reader", a friend or acquaintance who will give you honest and specific feedback, no smoke, no bull. But any trusted reader is going to get tired of re-starting your towering work of staggering genius every time you feel another adjustment needs to be made. People have better things to do. It also gives the impression you are unorganized, amateurish and flaky. There is so much competition in this business, and so many flakes and wannabe's that most professionals will zero in on the tiniest, most insignificant piece of information about a potential writer and characterize said writer based entirely on their mistake. If that seems unfair or illogical, consider the sheer volume of material out there producers, agents, readers, execs and directors have to slog through each day just to find the two or three unproven writers or new projects they may say "yes" to this year. Fifty thousand original scripts registered with the WGA each year, of which less than 50 will even get optioned (remember, I said "original" works. Most projects bought now days are almost exclusively based on pre-existing works). Think of a prospector who has to sift through an entire mountain to find a half-ounce of gold flecks. You think he's going to closely examine every stone comprising the mountain for their individual merits? To say these people are busy is a gross understatement, that's why the Business is a lifestyle, not just another occupation out can clock out from on Friday.

So by jumping the gun before your material is ready, not only have you distanced a valuable resource, you've also painted in their minds a picture of someone who's "not ready yet". That's not where you want to be. Also, I doubt your trusted reader will be waiting on pins and needles to read your next project when they know they'll have to read at least 3 drafts of basically the same story. No one is going to have the same passion or tolerance for your project as you do, don't test what little they do have. If, however, you turn in your projects with i's dotted, t's crossed and such, your reader will look upon you as someone they don't mind spending their time on, because you appear serious about your work. There are other side effects too, which are self evident if you consider the topic a moment, but since I passed brevity about three paragraphs ago, I'll stop detailing the problem and consequences here.

Now it's time to talk about solutions, which should also be pretty obvious: once you're "done" with your project, SHOW IT TO NO ONE. Throw it in a drawer. Close the drawer. Nail it shut Wyle E. Coyote style and don't go near that drawer for at least two or three weeks -- at least (I recommend a month). What you need right now is to get your mind off your project -- literally to forget about it. Start another screenplay, read some books, ply your hobby, whatever, just forget about what's sitting in that drawer for a while.

Then, one day when you don't feel like it, pull the nails out, open the drawer, go to a quiet place for at least 2 hours with a pen, a highlighter, a pencil and your script. Then read. Take notes. Make changes. Do what you need to do. You'll be surprised -- shocked, actually -- at the many errors that litter your script. Don't worry, that's expected, you've been staring at this document for hours on end for months, of course you're not going to see things that will scream out to other, more objective readers. Then go to your computer and plug in those changes and guess what? Entomb it in another drawer for another week or two. Rinse, repeat.

Then, after two touch up/rewrites, maybe, just maybe, your work of staggering genius will be ready to be seen by foreign eyes.