Screenwriters need time to fail and write bad screenplays…

Yes, you read that correctly — time to fail and write bad screenplays. The road to excellence is paved with rejection, failure, criticism, and poorly written screenplays. You can only grow by moving through this period. Screenwriters need time to get those early messy screenplays out of their system and move on to the business of writing well. Avoid becoming a defensive writer who bristles at every note or criticism. Do not be combative, but be collaborative and open to opinions. Listen to the constructive feedback and eventually you will know the changes to make and the ones to ignore. If you continue to learn and master your craft, you will always be at the top of your game and ready for any opportunity that comes your way.

Regarding failure, embrace it because you can’t escape failure on your screenwriting journey. Any failure becomes a test to see if you really have what it takes to weather the long slog of establishing a career. If you can look at the bigger picture of your career goals, you will use the failures as learning experiences and not become defensive or lay blame elsewhere. Failure and success become the Yin and Yang of any artistic journey. We can only cherish the highs of our success because we have tasted the bitter sting of our failures.

If you listen to any successful artist’s story, they will discuss the many failures and perhaps years of failure to achieve the success you find them enjoying today. Stare failure down and do not be afraid of it. When it does come, and it will, prepare for the blows and start the process all over again. You will come back stronger and be more effective with your next script.

Failure loves to scare off screenwriters by knocking them down, but it hates those who get up before a “ten count” and start screenwriting again. As we know, the overnight success can be ten years in the making. It’s rare for any screenwriters to sell their first script. Often you read the industry trades with stories of first-time screenwriters selling their first spec, but you never find out the full behind the scenes story — and there is always more to it than just a lucky break. Usually, other factors can be involved that facilitated the sale and not mentioned to make the story appear more sensational. It’s a simple publicity tactic. Many times, the writers toiled around for years and finally sold their “first” spec. Similarly, in my case, it wasn’t until six years after film school graduation that my screenwriting career finally took off with my fifth spec “I’ll Remember April” that was my “first spec sale.”

Your dreams keep you going, but make sure they’re realistic dreams in a competitive marketplace filled with tens of thousands of projects being created every year. Do not worry about the odds or the competition but focus instead on what is within your control — becoming a better screenwriter. As you find your unique voice, also learn your strengths and weaknesses. Be confident about what you know, but always remain humble about what you don’t know because it can hurt you. 

Screenwriting experience takes an incredible amount of work, time, and sacrifice. I recently calculated the volume of material that I’ve written over the years — from my forty-two feature scripts to my twenty-four assignment jobs, nine TV pilots, and script rewrite work, and it’s easily over 15,000 pages of writing for TV and feature films. When I was just starting out, if someone told me the mountain of writing that would be necessary to achieve any success, I might have been too overwhelmed to even attempt a career as a screenwriter.

As I have mentioned before, you must learn patience on your journey and look at the bigger picture of your career. I find many aspiring writers too anxious to find an agent to sell their first script for a million dollars. They appear more interested in overnight fame and fortune than becoming an excellent working screenwriter who makes a living from the craft. They do not appear to respect the incredibly long slog that lies ahead on their journey. When you relax and visualize the long road ahead of you, it puts your career dreams in perspective and humbles you. There will be busy periods and dry periods, so never take anything on this journey for granted.  

As a screenwriter, maybe structure comes easy for you, but you need to work more on your dialogue and character development. Maybe you can easily come up with ideas, but they might not be solid enough stories to write into a movie. Maybe the mastery of writing does remain elusive no matter how long we practice the craft. Do you have a newfound respect for the work now? If not, Hollywood will humble you the longer you pursue a career.

I believe a mysterious synchronicity exists that knows when a writer becomes ready for success and delivers opportunities at the right time. When you go out with a screenplay, you need to be ready by having a solid body of work to back it up. Your journey will surely involve your own Mount Everest to climb as you continue to create new projects. When you reach the top, you will fight to stay there for as long as you can, but no one stays there forever.

Aspiring screenwriters should always strive to become great screenwriters first. Without a solid foundation of the craft, you will just be wasting time and wonder why your career keeps hitting a wall. Carve out the time to nurture your craft, find your unique voice, screenwriting style, and genre that you love to write. You need to fire on all cylinders with every script that you create. If you desire to work as a professional in Hollywood, every aspect of your script must be at the highest levels of quality. If your screenplay becomes produced, other people’s money will be on the line, so treat your projects like precious treasures to be respected, savored, valued, protected, and cultivated over time.

If you have only written one draft of a screenplay, please know that you have a tremendous amount of work ahead of you — years of work and possibly a decade of slogging it out in the trenches until you become capable of working at the level necessary to score assignment jobs and work professionally. Early on during your climb to success, do not be afraid of failure, rejection, or your first poorly written screenplays. You will need to work through this period so you can move on to the place of writing well. The most important part of your early journey will be surviving this process and learning from your failures and successes. The great F. Scott Fitzgerald said it best, “Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.” Only when you learn and grow from your experiences can you become the screenwriter you were meant to be.

Keep the faith and keep filling your blank pages.

Scriptcat out!

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It’s a long haul journey to reach any level of screenwriting success. If your passion drives you to embark on this crazy adventure of a  screenwriting career, you’ll need to prepare for survival in Hollywood’s  trenches. Talent is important, but so is your professionalism and  ability to endure criticism, rejection, and failure over the long haul.  The odds may be stacked against you, but the way to standout in this  very competitive business is to create a solid body of work and build a  reputation as a team player and collaborator. The rest is just luck — a  prepared screenwriter who meets with an opportunity and delivers the  goods. “A Screenwriter’s Journey to Success” (2024 updated edition) will help you prepare for  your own journey with the necessary, tips, tricks and tactics that I’ve  developed over the past twenty years of working in the film industry.  It’s time to start living your dream as a screenwriter in Hollywood.

Enjoy some quotes for today… taken from my blog page QUOTE OF THE DAY…

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“This is, if not a lifetime process, it’s awfully close to it. The writer broadens, becomes deeper, becomes more observant, becomes more tempered, becomes much wiser over a period time passing. It is not something that is injected into him by a needle. It is not something that comes on a wave of flashing, explosive light one night and say, ‘Huzzah! Eureka! I’ve got it!’ and then proceeds to write the great American novel in eleven days. It doesn’t work that way. It’s a long, tedious, tough, frustrating process, but never, ever be put aside by the fact that it’s hard.”—Rod Serling

Starting tonight, every night in your life before you go to sleep, read at least one poem by anyone you choose. Poetry and motion pictures are twins.”—Ray Bradbury

“You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love. If it is all the same to you I would rather not expound on that.”—Ernest Hemingway

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.  The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.” — Joseph Campbell

“There are two kinds of scenes: Pet the Dog Scene & Kick the Dog scene. The studio always wants a “Pet the Dog” scene so everybody can tell who the hero is.”—Paddy Chaydfsky

Scriptcat’s end of the year checklist…

Who can believe the year is almost over? It will be 2022 in a blink of an eye. It’s always a powerful tool to look back over the previous year and critically analyze the good, the bad, and the ugly choices you’ve made.

Hopefully, you’ve learned from your failures, from any criticism, and enjoyed your successes. Excuses abound, but what really matters is how productive have you been? Room for improvement? Have you become a better screenwriter and have you been able to move yourself and your projects down the field? Have you opened doors and gained new “fans” of your writing? Have you continued to build those vital relationships that matter over the long haul? Did you gain and hold new ground? Create a solid body of material in a genre to show your unique voice? All of these are important to any screenwriting journey to success.

The responsibility for a screenwriter’s career begins and ends with the screenwriter. The hard fact:  Your screenwriting career is probably the most important struggle to you and not to anyone else. Only you know the hard work and sacrifices you’ve endured to go after your dream, so you need to protect your career path by taking responsibility for chartering the course of your career. Your time is precious and you need to constantly be moving forward and avoid the pitfalls of poor choices and negative experiences.

Too many times, I’ve heard screenwriters blame others for their own missteps or lack of success in Hollywood. Some writers look for the quick and easy way to success, but end up frustrated when their one script doesn’t sell, they have no other plans and they are not working on new material. Sure, it’s easier to soften the blow to blame the agent, manager, producer, or Hollywood itself for not getting your film made, but screenwriters need to step up and take more control over their choices.

Every time you write a new project on spec, you must consider how it fits into the bigger picture of your screenwriting goals. It’s a risk when you write a spec and you are rolling the dice with your precious time. Did you just have a “fun idea” for a movie and thought it would sell, so you decided to spend months writing it? This is not an effective use of your time. If it’s your passion project and you must write it—do it and hopefully you’ve executed it properly and your passion will be there on the page.

Always have a purpose in choosing your material. REMEMBER: What you write about is as important as how you execute it — and just because you write it doesn’t mean they have to buy it or will “love it.” You’ll only figure this out after you meander through four or five scripts that don’t achieve the plateaus you had expected or do not sell. You’ll be forced to take a step back and examine your reasoning for embarking on the journey with each project. If you’ve been successfully making noise with a particular genre, continue to establish yourself as an expert in that genre. When you secure a writing gig, you’ll have steady work because you’ll be known for a genre. There is nothing wrong with being pigeonholed as a screenwriter. It means you’ll work and build up your résumé in a genre that you hopefully enjoy writing.

Trust me, bouncing around for years with different scripts in different genres hoping that something sticks is a fool’s endeavor. I’ve been there.  When something eventually hits and is a success, the producers will want more of the same from you in the way of screenwriting assignments—the bread and butter or working screenwriters. There is no shame in steady work in a particular genre. I find sometimes aspirants believe they’ll hold out and will only go with a script that is “their vision” and somehow it’s “selling out” to take a job offered writing something that maybe isn’t their favorite choice of material—but it’s a foot in the door. A writer with zero credits is still a writer without any produced films.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, the odds are already stacked against you and time marches on so quickly. Only 6,108 WGA members reported any income last year and of those, 5,013 were in Television (annual report ending in June 2021) out of nearly 13,000 members. Check out the 2021 ANNUAL REPORT FROM THE WGA. Think about those odds for a moment and then get back to work. And if you add the non-union screenwriters working… it can boggle the mind with more stats and there are no stats for non-union screenwriters working or not working. The main issue is that you must stay busy creating projects, networking, building your unique voice, and casting your best scripts wide to the right players. Your first job may be non-union and for little money, but it’s important to build upon any success and get that important produced credit. No career starts out on top. And it’s difficult to weather the storms of the long haul journey.

If you haven’t yet, check out my book, “A Screenwriter’s Journey to Success” with 43 FIVE STAR REVIEWS on Amazon or if you need in-depth screenplay consultation check out my services at my website.

So, it’s never too late, even though the year is nearly over, to grab a piece of paper and if you haven’t yet, set up a game plan for 2022. Hollywood continues to deal with Covid and all the protocols to produce films and production continues. Hit the ground running and achieve your goals every day of the week. Treat your screenwriting like a business—because it’s YOU, INC. and every decision you make affects your pathway to success. Ask yourself the hard questions: “Why are you writing this particular spec and will it serve you in the best way possible to create opportunities and open doors?”

Here are eight tips on my checklist to prepare for the new year:

1)  SCREENPLAYS! Make a list of all viable projects. Completed scripts and what condition they are in: ready to be read, needs a rewrite, needs a polish, only a first draft, etc. Add to the list any fleshed out pitches, log lines, one sheets, beat sheets or treatments. This is important if you cross paths with an agent or manager. They want to see you busy and prolific on your own. What do you have to offer? Do you have script only and nothing as a follow-up? You’ll need a solid body of work to standout and it will take time to craft these projects. It’s dangerous to be impatient and go out with a screenplay without having another solid project to back it up.

2)  ACHIEVEMENTS!  Make a list of your achievements in the past year. Scrutinize the successes and failures so you can see where you need to pick up the slack in areas where you need to focus in the new year. List any accolades—did you win or place in a significant screenwriting competition? Did you option or sell a screenplay? Did you graduate from film school?  Did you make any films, short movies, or a webseries on your own?  Did you work on a production or take an internship? List anything that shows you are working toward to your goals.

3)  SOLID CONTACTS! Make a list of any new contacts that you met by networking during the year. In January, make sure to send them a “First of the year—hope this finds you well—this is what I’m doing” e-mail. It will put you back on their radar and if you list a few interesting projects, they might bite and ask for a read. Also, instead of always asking for help, BE a good contact too. It’s not all one-sided. You are building “relationships” and not just contacts. These are vital to your continued success on your journey.

4)  DEADLINES!  Make a list of potential deadlines for any rewrites or new ideas. Keep true to these self-imposed deadline as if they were real screenwriting jobs. Do not deviate from the commitment for anyone or any external forces. Trust me, either on purpose or by mistake, people will try to derail your schedule and will think it’s not that important because you’re writing on spec. It is that important. It’s vital training for the time when you finally do get a job on assignment and you’ll know how to keep a deadline under any conditions. Find respected screenwriting contests that you may want to enter and use their entry dates as a goal and deadlines to finish your new material.

5)  NETWORKING! If you haven’t yet, start attending networking events in the new year. Become a member of the International Screenwriter’s Association ( ISA ) for workshops, webinars and in person events in your area. Join Scriptwriter’s Network and they have seminars and meetups every month in Los Angeles. It’s hard with Covid affecting in person events, but you can use Zoom and other apps to continue to stay connected. And don’t be afraid, get out of your writing cave and meet other screenwriters and network.  Help others and you will find they will help you.

6)  READ, READ, READ! If you don’t already, read scripts on a regular basis. Good scripts, bad scripts, classics—read! You’ll be surprised how much you learn from reading screenplays. Be careful of the screenplays that are posted during award season. Do not try to emulate their style as most were written in a protected bubble of development and were not specs, so they can get away with many things regarding format that you cannot with a spec from an unknown writer.  “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” —Stephen King.

7)  HOMEWORK! If you don’t already, read screenwriting blogs, books, articles and film websites with news about the film industry. You must do your homework on a daily basis and not expect your representation (if you’re lucky to have an agent or manager) to do it for you. A lot of vital information slips through the cracks and information is priceless currency in Hollywood. It can mean the difference between getting in a door with a meeting that could land you the next job that launches your career.

8) PLAN TO MAKE SOMETHING! I don’t care if it’s on your cell phone. You learn so much if you film a scene that you’ve written. If you have larger ambitions to produce your own feature — by all means go for it! Don’t wait around for Hollywood to call because they will not unless you give them a solid reason to care about what you are doing. Produce a project. There has never been a time before in our history when it’s been easier as a filmmaker to produce a project. It’s also empowering to make something of your own. Regardless if it’s seen by the masses or twenty people who appreciate it. You will have gained the precious experience of making a project on your own. This will also show potential agents, managers, executives and producers that you are not waiting around to be discovered. You have made a solid body of work that reflects your unique voice. Go for it!

A game plan helps you allocate your precious time wisely. It shows that you’re your serious about your career and treating your screenwriting as a professional—not just willy-nilly writing a script and hoping it will sell on its own merits. It’s rare that one script makes a career. It’s always one script that opens the door, but you’ll probably have to write five or six to get to that “ONE.” The overnight success is usually a series of little successes along the way that lead up to continued success.  You have to consider how everything you do regarding your career fits into your bigger overall goals.

Your career aspirations can’t live or die by one project and you can’t focus on “the one” and hope it unlocks the gates of Hollywood. It’s always going to be a numbers game with horrible odds of success. Even if you sell a screenplay, there are no guarantees and still so many hurdles to jump. The good news is—the more quality material you create, the better chance you have of garnering interest and that may lead to a sale or assignment work. It’s always about the right project to the right producer at the right time. That’s why you stay in the game by continuing to write and get better. Keep your eye on the big picture.  It’s like what Bruce Lee said in Enter the Dragon, “It’s like a finger pointing a way to the moon. Do not concentrate on the finger or you will miss all of the heavenly glory!”

All my best wishes for a glorious and successful new year that is a blank slate for you to fill as you wish.

Scriptcat out!

Copyright © 2021 by Mark Sanderson. All Rights Reserved. My Blank Page blog.

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“It is no small feat to get a movie made, on any subject, on any screen.” — JJ Abrams

“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then.”—William Falukner

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”—William Falukner

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” —Lao Tzu

“Your screenwriting career is not a Dali-esque delusion, but the result of work, talent, focus, sacrifice, patience and luck. And we know that luck is a prepared screenwriter who meets an opportunity.”—Scriptcat