Happy New Year!
Happy New Year everyone! Or, I should say, Happy New Year in 15 hours or whatever it is. If you’re anything like me, you’ll pour yourself a drink, turn on Ryan Seacrest or Anderson Cooper, look at the big ball ready to drop in New York City, get all warm and cozy, do a double-take, and say, “What the hell am I watching this for?? This is the dumbest excuse for entertainment I’ve ever encountered.” Then turn it off and go to sleep early.
2014 has been a strange year for the screenwriting community. We’re at a crossroads, with previous paradigms dying and new ones struggling to form. The closest we have to a working model is: Shift over from writing features to writing television. The problem is, if you’re anything like me, you love movies. You want nothing more than to write them for the world. So that paradigm doesn’t work for you.
Well, I don’t think it has to be all or nothing. Chances are, you have a few feature ideas that would work well within a longer format. And since a lot of TV shows these days are basically long movies anyway, are you really missing much by writing them? Either way, you should add at least one TV pilot to your portfolio. Trust me, when you break through with your feature script and every producer you meet wants to know what pilot you have in the pipeline, you’d be wise to be prepared.
But this speaks to a larger problem. Why is the feature screenwriting world sucking so badly? I’m not as down on this year’s Black List as some. But I admit that it’s probably the worst collection of scripts yet. And there were no super-sales to speak of either. I don’t know if it’s because all the good writers are moving over to television, if the market’s new focus on super-franchises (with their big expensive veteran writers) has placed less importance on the emerging screenwriter, if specs-turned-failures like Draft Day and Transcendence have scared studios off, or if writers simply aren’t doing the work.
It very well could be that last one. Writers are putting in less work at a time when they need to put in more – when the competition is as fierce as ever. Screenwriting takes a long time to master. There are too many key elements to learn all at once. You have to write a script, fail, write another one where you learn from your mistakes, fail again, write another one where you learn from those mistakes, fail again, and keep writing until you finally figure out what works for you. It’s like any other skill. You need to practice. And I don’t know if writers are out there practicing enough.
One of the problems is the amateur screenwriter isn’t kept accountable. You don’t write as much as you should because you don’t have anyone telling you to. This is why you can get to the end of a year, like we are now, look back, and say, “Where did the time go? Why don’t I have a screenplay written?” Screenwriters work in the Las Vegas of jobs. There are no clocks. Just the sudden shocking realization that, holy shit, it’s 2015!
So the first thing I’m going to ask you to do is set some goals for yourself. You’re going to write two, or if you have a lot of free time, three, screenplays in 2015. An easy way to hold yourself accountable is to pick three screenwriting contests spaced throughout the year and enter each of them with a new screenplay. Don’t worry about winning. Don’t worry if you think contests are bullshit. Use them as motivators for finishing your screenplays. I can give you one date right now. June 1st. That’s the deadline for The Scriptshadow 250 Contest. Boom. You have your first script deadline.
Another thing I want you to do is drop the excuses. One thing I’ve come to learn about writers – and I’m just now coming to terms with my own problems in this space – is that the majority of them are afraid of action. They’re afraid to finish a work (whether it be a book, a screenplay, a project) because that then means their script will be out there for the world to judge. Which means people may not like it. Which means they’ll be miserable.
So they tell themselves that they have to study screenwriting more or do more backstory work or read more screenplays or whatever – all so that they can “truly” be ready to write that screenplay. What they don’t realize is that they’re creating barriers to finishing, to putting themselves out there, and if they keep that up, they’re never going to finish anything.
The lies we tell to protect ourselves aren’t limited to procrastination. We might blame the rest of the world for not “getting” us. Or we might blame Hollywood for their “shitty” movies as a reason why they could never understand our “good” script. And if that’s the case, why write anything at all?
We have to start being honest with ourselves. The mind is a very complicated device but the one constant it craves is the status quo. The mind doesn’t want change. Change requires new challenges and unfamiliar situations and life adjustments. And the mind’s terrified of that. Why go through all of that when it’s so much easier to sit around and rewrite your opening scene for the 80th time? If you never finish, your life never changes.
This can be applied to EVERY aspect of your life. From work to personal relationships to losing weight. Change is a hurdle we’re biologically wired to avoid. So to leap that hurdle takes a lot of effort. The good news is, if you can take that first step towards change, the rest of the change becomes easier. And lucky for you, a new year brings with it the perfect excuse to make that change. As you step into Thursday, you have the opportunity to reboot your life. Take it.
So where does that leave us on the artistic front? The town would like you to believe that the only outlet for creativity is through television. But I don’t think that’s the case. Whenever an industry becomes too reliant on one thing – as the studios have with comic book movies (and huge franchises in general) – a door opens up for a revolution in the opposite direction. Audiences WILL get bored and they WILL crave something new. Why can’t you be the person who brings it to them?
I still remember when The Matrix came out. At the time, cinema was dominated by cheesy Bruckheimer films and all those “earth gets blown up” movies. But they were clearly running out of ideas and audiences were hungry for something different. Then this Matrix movie came out and everyone was like, “Whoa. What’s this??” They’d never seen anything like it before. Ditto when the original Star Wars came out. Whenever an industry gets stagnant, that’s the time to strike.
And hey, if you want to play it safer, I can respect that. A lot of people break into this business by giving Hollywood what it wants. If that’s the case, my suggestion would be to write a feature inside your dream genre (i.e. Action-Espionage). Make it the same-but-different (a confusing way of saying give the genre a slight twist, like Matthew Vaughn is doing by turning the James Bond franchise younger and funnier with “Secret Service”) and don’t expect to sell it. Treat it as a writing sample with the hopes of getting assignment work in that genre. So if you do a great job with an Action-Espionage script, who knows? Maybe you’ll get to write Bourne 6. That’s just as awesome as selling a spec, in my opinion.
But whatever path you choose, whether it be trying to change the system or embracing it, set up some goals for yourself this year – create a system where you’re held accountable (if not screenwriting contests, then something else) and then write your butt off. DO NOT create excuses for yourself for why you can’t finish the script. You may not have heard yet, but 2015 is an official NEAY (No Excuses Allowed Year). So you’re stuck with no other option than to write your scripts and send them out.
I think you’ll do a great job. And who knows. Maybe I’ll get to read one of your screenplays myself.
GOOD LUCK AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!
