"Keep writing, but write for yourself and not others, so that their rejection no longer affects your self-esteem. Do not give them that power. It is yours to withhold. Keep writing."
--Richard Krevolin, Screenwriting from the Soul
You also need to meet as many people in the film industry as you can. If you live in North Platte, Nebraska, this might be difficult. But the truth is that in a practical sense, a screenwriting career is about networking and who you know. This won't save a terrible script but it will open important doors when you are ready to have them opened.
So don't miss opportunities, such as conferences and workshops, to meet people who already are working in the industry. Networking online also can accomplish this.
Report on the 2002 Screenwriting Expo
Where do you get screenplays to read? Many are available online for downloading. There are stores where you can buy them. And there is an excellent quarterly magazine that publishes four screenplays an issue. Follow the link for details.
There are also journals and magazines just for screenwriters that analyze contemporary movies in ways helpful to writers, interview screenwriters, or present useful industry news.
Let's say you have a copy of the script for E.T. I would use it to improve my screenwriting skills in this way:
You can never learn enough about the extraordinary economy of the screenplay as a literary art form. It is something to behold.
Start a notebook or computer file (if you haven't already) in which you
record the movies you've seen and studied. Fill out a
paradigm chart for each.
You want your characters to feel deeply about something, which means you have to feel, or have felt, deeply about something. Your emotional life is the best raw material you have - and next to it are the emotional lives of those close to you. A cliche just as important as "write what you know" is one far less popular: all writers are spies.
Too many beginning writers ignore their best material, probably because it is so close to them that it seems unimportant. But emotions drive stories that we never forget, and all of us have felt emotions, all of us have a past and present emotional life. Look inside your own heart and you will find a treasure chest of raw material just waiting to be "fictionalized" into high energy drama and comedy, mystery and horror. You make your stories most human by reaching deeply inside your own humanity.
A hundred good story ideas pass through your life every day. You'll find them in your family, among your friends, at work, among strangers, in the newspaper, on television, on the telephone. All writers are spies, and you must learn how to mine the raw material that is so near to you that you've probably overlooked it.
I do not mean a literal "historical" rendering of something that happened to you, although many of us have a few experiences so unusual that good stories can come from them. I am talking about your emotional life - about the things that have made you laugh and cry and feel fear, horror, loss, hopelessness, pride, joy, confusion.
This is the real stuff of life - and this is the stuff you need to give to your characters to make them come alive. You've experienced enough range of emotions in your life that you can pass out your emotional life in bits at a time, making all your characters different.
This is not always easy to do. Several decades ago I thought I was happily married until it turned out that my wife decided she was a lesbian. This experience, and the emotions that came out of it, festered around inside me for another decade before it burst out as what remains my favorite stage play, The Half-Life Conspiracy.
In a less dramatic fashion, every character I write, no matter how small, is based on something in my experience. How could I possibly put any words at all, except wooden ones, into the character's mouth if this were not true?
Your best material is found in your own life. Dig deep for it - and treasure what you find.
Tom Schulman (Dead Poets Society) says it well:
"From what I've seen, the people who just jump right into the full-blown fantasy feature as their first effort are kind of on the wrong track. To me, it's the simple stories, the stories as close to personal experiences as possible, that lead to the highest caliber of writing." [REF]
Another champion of the personal approach to screenwriting is Richard Walter, head of the outstanding UCLA film program. In his book, The Whole Picture: Strategies for Screenwriting Success in the New Hollywood, he lists over a dozen Screenwriting Principles, several of which address the importance of self-searching: [REF]
This is not to say -- repeat, not to say! -- that your script should wear your heart on its sleeve. As a writer, you want to be a magician: you want to manipulate the audience and not let them discover how you did so. Structure is disguised by flesh: the foundation of a script is only readily apparent when nothing else, not the characters or the story, interests us, and in the most structured good scripts we get carried away by the people and their stories, so much so that we only discover the foundation of structure when we come back and look for it.
Similarly, the "self" in your script gets hidden and usurped by your characters. In a sense, you become every important person in the story. Your own emotional life in all its variety and nuances runs in their veins. Your characters' lives are real because they are about the most real thing you know, or should know -- yourself.
Well, don't do it by showing your script to family and friends - except in the rare instance that someone is a film professional and will give you a frank response. You don't need flattery from people who like you but don't know anything about what makes a script good.
You need constructive criticism. In fact, you need to learn how to become your own best/worst critic, who has high standards and who doesn't let you get away with less than your best effort.
One way to find feedback is to form a writers group with your peers. Ideally, a writers group would be formed among people who are equally serious about their craft, and it would be helpful if several in the group had more experience than you do. In this way, a group of peers can help one another by reading scripts and offering constructive criticism.
There's a danger in this arrangement, of course, which is that the group deteriorates into ego-games playing. There are "professional" group joiners who get their jollies by letting other writers know how bad they are. There are others who get their jollies by telling people how great they are - and being loved in return.
So putting together a solid, workable writers group is a tricky business. I suggest you start small, with a few writers you can trust. If you are online, you have the world at your fingertips - and many successful small writers groups have formed online now, exchanging scripts and comments electronically, some even meeting live in chat rooms. Jeff Miholer has put together a website called the Screenwriters Internetwork and offers suggestions for forming an online group, many of which can be applied to any writers group.
In my experience, worthwhile writers groups are rare. More often than not, they become a kind of mutual admiration society - but in the lonely world of writing, particularly early in a career, this is not necessarily a bad thing. If you form or join a group, periodically review your reasons for being there and make sure you are getting from it, and giving to it, what you expect.
By all means, don't use a writers group as a crutch. Hollywood is very mean and stressful territory, and "too nice" a writers group isn't good training for this reality.
You also can network by joining the Screenwright chat room.
This is especially true in the beginning. You feel such a fine sense of accomplishment after finishing your script, all justly deserved, it's only natural to spend as much time and energy marketing it - and you should.
But this is not all you should do!
Which is why I suggest that you start a new screenplay as soon as your first one is either ready to send to contests, to market, to workshop in a writers group - or to abandon. If you know enough to abandon your screenplay, then you indeed are learning something and also are able to evaluate your own material fairly enough to know when it isn't good.
Most writers take anywhere from two to five scripts before they write something ready to market. You do not want to enter the marketplace too early - and I'll have more to say about this later.
Begin a new screenplay. This will have another advantage: it will give your attention new interests and provide a more objective viewpoint when you return to look at the recently finished script.
In fact, I like to be working on several scripts at once, all in different stages of development. I may jot down notes or even fill out a paradigm chart for new ideas that come to me and stick them away for possible development later. When I have a good draft, I usually begin a new script - so that means I am creating a new script and rewriting a draft at the same time.
Starting a new screenplay also puts you in the habit of writing. If you are going to be serious about this craft, you need to complete two or three screenplays a year, in my opinion. Of course, if you are a part-time writer, this may be asking too much. But write at least one script a year. You should be able to do this even in the most trying circumstances.
So once your first is out of the way, make sure you always have two projects that you are working on - the new one in creation and the prior one in rewriting - and down the line, the rest in marketing.
Screenwriting is hard work. Get used to it. And do what it takes.
Please don't reply - to make money! If you do, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.
Sure, money - a lot of it! - gets made by screenwriters. And I'll give you all the advice I can about how to make some of it (some of which I ignore myself because my values are different. For example, I am from L.A. and will not return for all the money in LaLaLand, despite strong professional advantages to living there, about which more later). But there are other reasons, even more noble reasons, for being a screenwriter, for becoming a screenwright.
In Zen, poetry is not considered to be the words written down on paper but the mode of thought in the mind of the poet. I think we screenwriters can learn something from this insight.
A script says something about the character of the person who wrote it - what "mode of thought" resulted in the story on the page. If it's a story filled with racist and sexist stereotypes, if it's mean-spirited and degrades the best human qualities - well, I think that says something about the writer. I know this writer is not someone I'd like to have dinner with.
Don't misunderstand me. I am not saying that film stories have to be "high brow" in any way, and I enjoy entertainment as much as the next guy. There are some very entertaining scripts that I wish I had written, such as Rain Man, Cocoon, and Citizen Ruth. Entertainment and a kind of spiritual truth about the human condition are not incompatible entities.
What I am asking you to do is to write from your best self, not from your worst self. This goes back to realizing that your own life is your best material - your emotional life, the things you've experienced and felt and now know from the gut, things that are your version of the truth in this world. Even the most car-chasing, high exploding, natural disaster-packed visual highjinks can be improved by a little true human insight in the characterizations and story line.
Don't sell yourself cheap. Don't see dollar signs in front of your eyeballs and nothing else.
You have stories, important stories, that no one else on the planet can tell because they uniquely come out of your own human experience.
Tell them. Tell them well, and tell them true.
Be proud to be a screenwright.
8/97