If you’re a regular reader of this blog, first of all—THANK YOU! I truly hope you’re busy creating and forging ahead on your screenwriting journey and you’ve been able to take away a few nuggets of advice that helped. As you may know, I’ve been adding short posts (nothing is EVER short on this blog!) and sharing various survival tips. I do speak about these in the various articles on this blog, but this new feature will be a quick reference to glance over and consider as you navigate your screenwriting journey.
So, in addition to my tips on Twitter (@scriptcat), I’ll be posting new tips here from time to time. Thanks for reading and as always: Carry on, keep the faith and keep screenwriting!
Okay, three more survival tips that will help you on your screenwriting adventure…
TIP #1
Do yourself a favor early on your screenwriting journey: Always work from a solid step outline or story treatment before you start pages. Trust me, you will be training yourself for the future. Treatments, beat sheets and step outlines are an important process that prepare you to write the script. If you’re getting paid as a professional writer for a script assignment, it’s standard practice the producer or executive will require you in the contract to create one of these structured documents before they’ll allow you to start the script. Only a fool leaves on a journey without the proper road map, supplies and a clear vision of the destination. The same goes for your screenplay. I’ve read so many scripts that run of steam in that barren wasteland of ACT TWO and the writer has no clue how to get the characters across those fifty or so pages. Writing an extensive treatment is similar to doing a pre-draft of your script. It gives you the chance to explore your story and get to know your characters before you set out on a journey of a hundred pages with them. If you embrace the treatment process and craft a solid framework for your story, it will help serve as your road map to a successful first draft.
TIP #2
Be willing to make the time necessary to create a viable body of work. Practice patience, Grasshopper. We all want overnight success with the least amount of effort, right? You read or hear about a first time writer selling a script for a million dollars? You think a screenwriting career is as easy as falling out of bed in the morning into a three-picture deal? Wrong. It usually takes years of rejection and learning while you toil away writing at a half-dozen screenplays to achieve any level of success as a working screenwriter—or maybe never. You’ll need time to fail, be rejected and write bad screenplays so you can get on to doing your best work. You need to think of your career as your life’s journey and continually learn, study, and work at becoming a better screenwriter. You want to become a master of your craft at the top of your game. When you consider that only 4,510 Writers Guild Members reported any income last year and half of the guild did not work, you’ll need to be screenwriting at the highest levels necessary to compete in a very competitive and crowded marketplace.
TIP #3
Image is everything! As you travel on your screenwriting journey, the image that you project is extremely important and you should keep up an image of success. You do this by being busy and creating a solid body of material to show prospective agents, managers, producers and executives that you are a work horse with something to offer. Never give them a chance to think of you as a diva who believes he or she is God’s gift to cinema. It’s the team player and collaborator who always works again. The pain in the ass gets branded as “difficult” and wonders why the work has dried up.
Keep screenwriting and filling your blank pages.
Scriptcat out!
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“Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?”― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald
“You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”—Ray Bradbury
“One of the things that young writers falsely hope exists is inspiration. A lot of young writers fail because they aren’t putting in the hours. Whether you can write all day every day, or whether you can write four hours on Sundays, whatever it is, you have to protect that time.”—William Goldman
“Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure. But the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. [F]ailure means a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself to be anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena where I believe I truly belonged. [R]ock bottom became the solid foundation on which I built my life.” ~ J.K. Rowling
“Everyone holds his fortune in his own hands, like a sculptor the raw material he will fashion into a figure. But it’s the same with that type of artistic activity as with all others: We are merely born with the capacity to do it. The skill to mold the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated.”—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
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