So I got to thinking after Monday’s post. Because people wanted me to expand on the topic – How to break in. And I’ve spent the last two hours, sitting in this chair, staring at the wall, thinking about that and only that, looking for that kernel, that ONE MAGICAL MORSEL, that could somehow distill this answer down into a single actionable piece of advice. “JUST DO THIS AND YOU’LL BECOME A PROFESSIONAL SCREENWRITER” was the goal.

Needless to say, that was a failed experiment.

Sort of.

Whenever I thought I’d come up with something, I’d realize, “But they still need to put 7500 to 10,000 hours of work into learning how to write.” There was no way around that. And I think that’s the part no new screenwriter wants to hear. Or, it’s not so much they don’t want to hear it. It’s that they’re looking for a shortcut, a way to shave off a thousand hours here or a thousand hours there. I suppose that’s possible if you’re one of the lucky ones – a writer with innate talent. But, baseline, we’re talking about 5000 hours AT LEAST before you’re ready.

Assuming you’ve put in that time, there’s ONE THING I’ve found is the closest you’re going to get to a single “Holy Grail” piece of actionable advice on how to break in. And I figured it out by going in the opposite direction. I asked myself, “Okay Carson, what is the WORST thing a screenwriter could do? The one thing that would ensure failure?”

And the answer to that was easy: A bad idea.

The most common problem I see in amateur screenwriting is BAD SCRIPT IDEAS. I read so many submission e-mails where I literally close my eyes, slowly shake my head, and think, “What is this person thinking??” I know, just by looking at that logline, that the script has ZERO CHANCE of being good. Not even .00001%. Zero. And it’s sad. Because even if they’re a good screenwriter, they’re working with a faulty premise. There’s no strange attractor, no clear sense of conflict, no irony, no clear goal, no imagination, no clarity. The idea is just HORRIBLE.

Horrible idea generation tends to break down into two types. The beginner screenwriter who doesn’t yet know what constitutes a good idea. And then the more frustrating scenario – a writer who simply doesn’t realize his idea is bad. This usually happens because a) he doesn’t ask anybody whether his idea is good or b) nobody tells him his idea is bad. And “b” is, unfortunately, a common scenario. Nobody wants to be the asshole. Nobody wants to destroy the writer’s enthusiasm. What they don’t realize is that by not being truthful, they’re sending that writer on a one-year journey of misery where they’ll be turned down again and again, because people either won’t like the idea enough to read it, or the ones who do read it, will hate it because the idea was faulty in the first place.

This is why I encourage people to send me their loglines. I rate them 1-10. If it’s below a 7, I tell them not to write it. And if you don’t have $25, find a friend who knows screenwriting and ask them to do the same. Make sure you preface it with, “Please please please be honest. Tell me if it sucks.”

This indirectly leads us to our Holy Grail answer. The one thing that gives us the BEST CHANCE at breaking in is… A GOOD IDEA!!!

That’s all it takes to open all the doors, to line up all the agents, to get the studios bidding. Ehh, not exactly. But what a good idea does do is it INCREASES YOUR CHANCES AT SUCCESS EXPONENTIALLY. Everyone will at least open your script if it’s a good idea. And since Hollywood is a numbers game, the more reads you get, the better the chance you’ll finally get that “yes.”

All of this begs the question: What is a good idea, Carson?

Look, if I had a bunch of great script ideas, I wouldn’t be posting them here for you guys. I’d be writing them or hiring other writers to write them. A great script idea is no different from a great song hook. You don’t know if it’s going to catch unless you put it out there and see what people think. The advantage YOU have is that it only takes minutes to come up with an idea. And it only takes minutes to send that idea off and get someone’s opinion. So there’s power in that. You can send a lot of ideas out there with very little time wasted. That’s preferable to wasting an entire year of your life on a script only to learn afterwards that the idea sucked.

Or you know what’s worse than that? Is writers who don’t even realize that that’s the reason their script failed. They might assume they’re just bad writers and quit. But had they been working with a GOOD premise instead of a BAD one, everything about their writing would’ve been better. I’ll give you a real-world example of this. Dan Gilroy, who wrote one of my favorite scripts, Nightcrawler – great character, unique premise – also wrote a new Denzel movie, Roman J Israel, Esq. Awful premise. Confused concept. Bad script. From everyone I’ve heard who saw the movie – they say it’s bad. That bad idea turned Gilroy into a bad writer for one script. That’s how important concept is.

Cause I don’t want to leave you guys out in the dark. Here are the last three articles I wrote about how to come up with a good script idea. Read them. Embrace them. Make the most of them.

The Secret To Better Movie Ideas

The Power of Reinventing Ideas

Ten Tips to Come Up With Better Movie Ideas

But the main thing is GET FEEDBACK on your idea. Hell, you have one of the best screenwriting networks on the web right here at Scriptshadow. Take advantage of it! Tell people to be “brutally honest” when assessing your idea. Because if you’re SUPER DUPER EXCITED and tell them, “This is my best idea ever,” before asking their opinion, they’re going to lie to you. They don’t want to rain on your parade.

Good luck!

Carson does feature screenplay consultations, TV Pilot Consultations, and logline consultations. Logline consultations go for $25 a piece or 5 for $75. You get a 1-10 rating, a 200-word evaluation, and a rewrite of the logline. All logline consultations come with an 8 hour turnaround. If you’re interested in any sort of consultation package, e-mail Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: CONSULTATION. Don’t start writing a script or sending a script out blind. Let Scriptshadow help you get it in shape first!

Genre: TV pilot (comedy)
Premise: A low-level hitman heads to LA for his latest job, only to inadvertently befriend his target, an aspiring actor.
About: Today’s script was written by SNL vet, Bill Hader, and Silicon Valley producer, Alec Berg. Whereas Netflix has embraced the “throw a bunch of shit at the wall and see what sticks” strategy, HBO still has to slot shows into a proper schedule, and is therefore more discerning about what they air. It’s for this reason that they still have the edge over Netflix. It’s also why, when something gets an official commitment from the network, you know it’s beaten out a ton of other quality material (last I heard, HBO had something like 100 projects in active development).
Writers: Alec Berg & Bill Hader
Details: 36 pages (Third Draft)

Since yesterday’s script was the antithesis of funny, I spent the last 24 hours on a comedy script hunt, a laugh-quest, if you will. After traversing many of Los Angeles’ landmarks – Randy’s Donuts, Rodeo Drive, the Capital Records building, I met a sinewy little fellow who called himself “Maurice Bubblestilskin the III.” “Psst,” he said to me, while I tried to hail a Lyft. “Psssssst!” he said again. And from under his cape, he passed me this, “Barry.” ‘Best project HBO’s got going for it,” he assured me, before slipping back into his tent and screaming at himself for 5 minutes. And that’s how I came across Barry.

Hitman-Comedy is a sub-genre with a lot of history behind it, and that’s because, like all good comedy, it’s built on top of some heavy irony – A comedy… about killing people. I’m surprised we don’t yet have the definitive hitman comedy. Could there be some flaw in the concept that keeps these scripts from being great? I’m sure we’ll find out. Grab my hand and hop in my Scriptshadow canoe while I paddle you through Barry’s plot.

Barry is lonely. But WAY worse than that, he lives in Cleveland. If there is a more hideous fate than being lonely in Cleveland, I don’t know what it is. The only time Barry has anything to do is when he’s on the job. Barry is a hitman, you see. He’s paid to kill people.

Barry has a Charlie’s Angel’s disembodied boss named Fuches who calls Barry whenever he’s got a job for him. And Fuches has a new target in Los Angeles. If Cleveland is our idea of hell, Los Angeles is Barry’s. Barry begrudgingly flies to LA, where he’s introduced to a medium-grade Chechen crime boss named Goran Pazer. Pazer is pissed because some trainer named Ryan Madison is fucking his wife.

Pazer has hired Barry because he can’t have his fingerprints on the murder. And it’s a fairly simple job. Ryan is a nobody trainer. So, theoretically, all Barry has to do is wait until he gets home and put a bullet in his head. But Barry makes the mistake of following Ryan to an acting class (yup, it’s LA, so Ryan is also an actor!). And after being lured into the class by a beautiful young actress, Barry bumps into Ryan, who assumes he’s a fellow actor, and asks Barry to do a scene with him.

Barry does the scene with Ryan, likes it, and is then pulled out for drinks with the acting class. Being such a lonely guy, this is an exhilarating experience for Barry. But now he has a dilemma. He has to decide if he’s going to kill his new buddy, Ryan, or wiggle out of his contract and pursue his new dream – ACTING! Unfortunately, Barry’s hand is forced when the Chechens step in and take care of Ryan on their own. The plan is to kill Barry next, but Barry kills them first. And that’s how Barry finds himself an aspiring actor in LA… with the Chechen mob after him.

I want to take this opportunity to reiterate a great screenwriting device that works every time you do it. It’s mostly a comedy thing but you can use it in any genre. It’s called the “Mid-Scene Twist,” and the structure behind it is quite simple. You make the audience believe the scene is one way. Then, at the midpoint, you reveal that it’s something completely different.

We open on Barry, washing up in his bathroom, getting ready for the day. He looks at himself in one of those, “What the hell am I doing with my life?” ways. He plucks a gray hair, frowns, straightens up, then walks out. As he walks through his apartment, we notice… GUN HOLES IN THE WINDOW? Oh, and then there’s a murdered dude on the floor. This isn’t Barry’s apartment. No, Barry is a hitman, and he’s just finished a job.

In this case, the mid-scene twist was subtle. But it’s a lot more interesting than say, showing the hit. We’ve seen hits before. Hell, I think every single movie in history has a hit. So to start with a mid-scene twist was a much stronger choice.

A more aggressive form of the Mid-Scene Twist came at the beginning of an, unfortunately, terrible movie – Snatched (that Amy Schumer Goldie Hawn jungle flick). But it was a good scene!

In it, Amy’s character is at a clothing store, picking up dresses to try on, excitedly telling the employee helping her about the amazing vacation she’s about to go on with her fiancee. The employee seems a bit overwhelmed as Amy continues to grab new articles of clothing and gab away.

Finally, when the employee can get a word in edgewise, she says, “So are you going to set me up with a fitting room?” And we realize that it’s actually AMY who is the employee, and the other girl the customer. Amy then becomes defensive, frustrated that this woman isn’t appreciating her upcoming vacation, and the two eventually go their separate ways. It’s a simple premise, the mid-scene twist, but very effective when done well.

Start us off one way. Twist it into something else. Usually the opposite of what we assumed.

As for the rest of Barry, it was good. It was a little different. More importantly, it was unexpected. And this is where all the amateur writers screw it up. Because I know the amateur version of this script. I’ve read it a million times. Barry has to kill a guy. He goes over to the house. But, oh no, ZOINKS, the guy shows up with the wife he’s fucking! And the only place for Barry to hide is… ZOINKS!… UNDER THE BED! So he has to hide under the bed while the two have sex! Oh the shenanigans! Oh how the hilarity is ensuing!

No.

NO NO NONO ONONONOONNOONONOON

If you write that version of the script, you are a failure as a writer. I’m not kidding. Your job as a screenwriter IS TO GIVE US THE UNEXPECTED. If you give us what we expect, why would anyone pay you? If they want the version everyone expects, they write it themselves. They pay you to come up with unexpected complications and obstacles that keep the story fresh.

And that’s exactly what happens here. I never thought in a million years that Barry would get drawn into an acting class, and start to like acting, and start to like a girl in class, and wonder if he wants to move to LA, and kill the guys who hired him instead of the guy he was supposed to kill. I didn’t expect any of that. And so, even if I don’t like what the writer did with the story, I acknowledge that he gave me something unique.

Now, as it so happens, I did like what the writers did here. My only issue is with “Barry” is Barry himself. He’s such a quiet character. Quiet characters are hard to make interesting. And to build an entire show around a quiet character is more challenging than they may be anticipating. But I was still intrigued by what Barry would do next. That’s a sign that I’m connecting with the character.

We’ll see what happens once this hits the air. Im predicting, at the very least, a multiple-season pick-up.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: When writing TV shows, think about character advancement. Where are they in their career now and is there opportunity for them to move up over time? Because that’s where you’re going to find your Season 2, Season 3, Season 4, is in the character advancing in their career. Breaking Bad is the most obvious example of this. He’s a small time drug dealer at the beginning. Then, by the end, he becomes a major force in the meth business. Here, Barry is a low-level hitman. So there’s lots of room for him to move up the ladder.

The winner of last week’s heated Amateur Offerings showdown finally gets its moment in the sun. But as every great tennis playing chimp knows, the sun gets awful hot without sunscreen.

Genre: Monkey Tennis
Premise: After a tragic tennis accident, a failed tennis pro seeks redemption by coaching a talented chimp and entering him in to Wimbledon disguised in a man-suit.
Why You Should Read: This is the greatest monkey tennis story ever told. It’s an ironic homage, a pastiche if you will – a spoof if you must – of the great animal-based comedies of the 90s like Beethoven, Flipper, and Dunston Checks In, each one of them an iconic work which has stood the test of time.
Writers: Chris Grezo & Rupert Knowles
Details: 110 pages

Ben Stiller to play the chimp in a human suit?

Das.

Chimp.

Chimp.

Das.

By themselves, the above words mean nothing. Invisible food-coloring, if you will.

But together? They represent one of the most powerful phrases in the English language.

Das Chimp.

Don’t believe me? Have you ever had a single passionate thought about the word “Das” before last Friday?

Me neither.

But look at how much controversy that same word created once combined with “chimp.” We had a fellow competitor questioning the sanity of each and every member of the Scriptshadow community when his script was defeated by Das Chimp.

Let us call a spade a spade. “Das Chimp” is the single greatest title to ever grace the pixelbytes of Scriptshadow. It is both simple, yet oh so complex.

And therein lies Das Chimp’s biggest hurdle. Could a title promise something so great, that it was impossible for the story to live up to it?

My friends, I’m ready to find out if you are.

So please, grab a beer, grab a racket, grab your favorite stuffed animal, and join me… for Das Chimp.

It’s never a good day when you kill your doubles partner. That’s what happened to John Protagonist, who lost his nerve when his tennis match got tight, accidentally hitting the chair umpire with a serve, causing a chain reaction of Center Court implosion, leading to a giant light landing on poor Hamish.

Adds a whole new meaning to the term, drop shot.

Fast forward 10 years and John faces each day with the regret of what he did to a man who didn’t deserve his demise. John heads to the zoo to share a beer with his custodian best friend, Duncan, when he sees a chimp effortlessly hitting a tennis ball against the wall.

John approaches the chimp’s handler, the excessively weird but beautiful zookeeper, Lily, and asks if he can teach the chimp (Pierre) tennis. Lily is game, but to do this, they’ll need to make sure no one realizes Pierre is gone. John comes up with an idea and puts Duncan in a monkey suit where he’ll stand in for Pierre.

Once John gets Pierre out on the court, he’s even better than he thought, so he starts entering Pierre in tournaments. The scrappy Pierre keeps winning, and actually earns a birth into Wimbledon! There’s only one problem. Monkeys aren’t allowed to play Wimbledon! Who would’ve thought?

So John gets another one of his genius ideas. He’ll dress Pierre up in a human suit. No one will know the difference. Meanwhile, John is dealing with some unexpected issues. Pierre is in love with Lily. And the reason Lily is so weird is because she was raised my meerkats. She has no clue how human interaction works.

But John’s biggest challenge comes when Britain’s #1 Doubles team is mauled by a wild boar. Britain comes to John and asks if he’ll team up with upstart Pierre to represent the country again. John is reluctant, but dons the headband once more, this time to play with a chimp… a chimp wearing a human suit.

Elephant shit.

Oh, I’m sorry. That’s not my assessment of the script.

I’m just noting that when you can include an elephant shit joke in your movie? And it’s FUNNY? By gosh you’ve already succeeded my friend.

But Das Chimp is no flash in the pan one-elephant-shit-joke wonder. Believe it or not, the majority of this script is funny. And not just funny, but well structured!

There’s an easy way to distinguish between “I don’t know how to write a screenplay” broad comedy and “I actually know what I’m doing here” broad comedy. Setups and payoffs. When I see lots of setups and payoffs in a broad comedy script, I know the writer has thought the script through, and, at the very least, completed a few rewrites. You can’t include too many payoffs without going through the script and figuring out where to set up them up.

For example, the crazed always angry Zoo owner lets out one of his wild boars at night to take care of people sneaking into the zoo after closing. 50 pages later, that same boar is responsible for sending John back into competition, after it mauls the other British doubles team.

And Lily is an entire compilation of setups. She acts beyond bizarre, to the point where you wonder if she’s retarded. Then we learn why she acts that way. She was abandoned by her parents as a kid and raised by meerkats. She would then get a job at the zoo because animals were the only world she understood.

But the best thing about Das Chimp is that Grezo and Knowles rarely make a lazy choice. Everything that happens here is either bizarre or the result of something bizarre.

I have no doubt that a less talented writer would’ve made Duncan (John’s friend) some corporate type, so as to properly contrast the friends’ lives (like the screenwriting books tell you to do). Instead, they make Duncan an animal shit-shoveler over at the zoo. And thank God they did. Duncan’s storyline – while in chimp costume, he falls in love with a real chimp, Princess – was my favorite of the script, and led to the biggest laugh.

In this scene, Duncan comes to talk to Princess. I dare you to read what happens next.

If I have a beef with the script, it’s that the setup could be sharper. Pierre’s ascent from chimp who likes to hit against the wall to rising tennis star is way too fast. I understand that we have to get to the story, but I never understand why it was so important that Pierre start playing tournaments. John’s motivation seems more tied to using Pierre as an excuse to be around Lily. He didn’t need to enter Pierre in tournaments to do that.

This may seem like nitpicking. But the script ends up taking its plot surprisingly seriously later on, retroactively sending me back to this first act, where the only reason things seem to be happening is because they need to for the script to exist.

Another area that could’ve been better is the Pierre tennis matches, which were too repetitive. A lot of Pierre running around for balls it doesn’t look like he’s going to get to… and then he gets to them! I speak from experience as I’ve written several tennis scripts myself. I’ve learned you need to limit the repetitive actions of the sport and focus instead on individualized non-playing situations.

For example, instead of writing an entire page of, “… and then Pierre runs over to get the ball, barely reaching it – BAM! – he hits it back…” you might focus on the fact that a ballboy suspects that Pierre isn’t human, and write in a series of moments where the ballboy is trying to figure it out.

Obviously, you have to include SOME points to build the drama in the match. But the strange thing about screenwriting and sports is you want to include as little actual playing of the sport as you can get away with. The exception would be if you’re focusing on something unique within the game. For example, if John’s racket cracks during a point and he doesn’t have a backup, so John needs to play a point WITHOUT A RACKET. We’re going to be more interested in that point because it’s unique. It’s not another, “…he reaches for the ball with all his might…”

Das Chimp isn’t perfect. But these two writers are DEFINITELY funny. I believe it’s a script worth perfecting. So I’d encourage anyone here that if they can think of more funny scenes for Das Chimp, to share them with the writers. The more laughs we can pack into this script, the better shot it has.

Script link: Das Chimp

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Give friends and family jobs that keep them closer to the story as opposed to further away. So you don’t want to make Duncan an architect or a stock trader. You give him a position at the zoo, where we can keep him close to the story without having to force it.

Genre: Thriller
Premise: (from Black List) After a shooting at a police funeral by a suspected militia member, a recluse ex-cop and fellow militia man must interrogate the suspected gunmen in his own militia before copycat attacks start a nationwide war between cops and militia.
About: This script finished on the 2015 Black List. The film will star current Walking Dead villain, Jeffrey Dean Morgan. The writer, Henry Dunham, will also be directing. Dunham first made waves with his short, The Awareness, which you can watch here.
Writer: Henry Dunham
Details: 105 pages

Just want to give everybody a heads up. Yet ANOTHER female John Wick project is going into production, this one starring Alias vet, Jennifer Garner. The script is being written by Chad St. John, whose Scriptshadow interview you can check out here. Not going to mince words, guys. If you’ve got a female John Wick script, ya better finish fast. I sense that the end of this trend is coming, especially with the so-so box office of Atomic Blonde.

On to today’s script, which actually contains an ORIGINAL premise. Imagine that. A concept that isn’t following any trends but is rather blazing its own trail. I’ve always been fascinated by the militia. We basically allow people in our country to come together and form their own personal armies. How is that okay?? It was for that reason that I picked Militia up. Let’s find out if it rewarded my curiosity.

40 year-old Gannon lives out in the wilderness. He’s in the midst of smoking a deer for dinner when he hears automatic gunshots in the distance. These gunshots are followed by three explosions. Gannon immediately gets on the phone with a dude named Olsen and the two agree to meet at “The Safe House.”

That safe house is a reclusive lumber warehouse where Olsen and Gannon are soon accompanied by a trickling-in of militia members. There’s Beckman, the techy of the group, Morris, the giant Alpha Male with a chip on his shoulder, Hubbel, a slovenly mountain man, Keating, a deaf-mute, and Noah, the only guy here who looks reasonably presentable.

As the group listens in on the radio, they learn that someone has attacked a cop’s funeral and shot up a good 20 cops in the process. This is bad news because the first people they’re going to suspect in this shooting is the militia. And that’s where the meeting begins – how to make it clear they weren’t involved.

However, when they check their supplies and learn an automatic rifle and several grenades are missing, they realize they WERE the ones involved, and now it’s a matter of smoking out the guy who did it. Gannon takes the lead with the interrogations, convinced that the antagonistic Morris is their culprit.

But it quickly becomes clear that not everything is as at seems. And when word comes in that there have been TWO MORE major militia attacks in neighboring states, they realize that this is way bigger than just one guy. In the end, it’ll be up to Gannon to figure out who’s lying and who’s telling the truth before the police find them, raid the warehouse, and kill them all.

UGH!

I so wanted this to be great! I loved this setup.

So here’s a great tip for screenwriters looking for a big concept that can be made on the cheap. As we’ve discussed before, when your script is cheap to make, you increase the number of potential buyers exponentially.

To do this, start with a really big idea. It can be anything. A giant monster. A mega-quake. A nuclear war. Whatever. But don’t build the story around the actual subject. That’d be expensive. Build it around characters who are affected by the subject.

What this does is it makes your movie feel big even though it’s small.

That’s what Dunham does here. There’s a big attack on this cop funeral, but we don’t see a frame of it. We hear it. But we don’t see it. Then, the entire movie takes place in a warehouse with these characters trying to figure out which one of them perpetrated the attack.

Do you know how cheap it would be to make this movie? You could shoot it in 2 weeks. And it still FEELS BIG. That’s really smart writing there.

Another thing I liked about this script was that it was a SITUATION. What I mean by that is, we don’t see the attack, watch someone run away, show the cops prepare to catch them, show our attacker hide out, meet a love interest, try to move to the next safe area, get into a chase scene, etc., etc.

That’s not a situation. That’s a series of events.

Militia is a situation. A bunch of dudes in one place. One of them killed some cops. The leader has to figure out which one of them did it. Every person who walks into this theater is going to immediately understand what this movie is about. What the setup is. What the rules are. It’s a clear situation.

Not that non-situations can’t work. Yesterday’s film, Good Time, wasn’t a situation and it was a great flick. But situations tend to work really well for feature films. So if you can think of a good one, write it. Other situation-films include The Shallows, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Saw, The Hateful Eight, The Thing, The Wall, Birdman and The Martian.

Yet another great tip to take away from Militia is the mid-point RAISING OF THE STAKES. Remember that when you go into the second half of your story, you need to make things feel bigger somehow. If they stay the same, people are going to get bored. Especially in a movie like this, where you only have one location to work with.

So the midpoint news that it wasn’t just this one funeral attack that happened, but that there was a coordinated attack against cops across three separate states? That’s when I was like, ooooh, this is good. The movie was growing beyond its original setup. That’s always a good thing.

But all was not perfect with Militia.

My big issue with it was that the character-to-character interactions felt a little… phony. I didn’t get the sense that the writer really understood what militia men were like. And this is a common issue in screenwriting. You pick an idea because you like it, but you don’t know anything about the actual subject matter.

So you have a choice. You can do some research and combine it with what you’ve learned through similar movies that you’ve seen, or you can really do the hard work. That means doing a fuck-ton of research. That means finding and locating an actual militia member and talking to them. Learning what their day-to-day life is like.

Nobody likes to do this. So the more common route is the former. And, unfortunately, when you do the former, there’s a lack of authenticity to the proceedings. And I’m not saying it was insufferable here. Some of the interactions felt real. But there were enough moments where I wondered, “Would this really be happening this way?” that it affected my enjoyment of the story.

With that said, I love this setup and I have a feeling that with some rewrites, these authenticity problems can be fixed. So I’m going to recommend Militia. It’s a fun script.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: If you really want to make your descriptions pop, use analogies. When you have a guy with a deep voice, you don’t want to say, “His voice is deep and throaty.” That’s boring. Do what Dunham does. Here, he describes mountain man Hubbel’s voice with an analogy: “Every word from Hubbel sounds like gravel being raked.”

I used to play tennis competitively growing up. For awhile, it was the only thing I cared about. I played as much as I could. I would routinely stay after practice after everybody else went home, either practicing against the wall or practicing my serve. I used to set up five cones in each service box and I wouldn’t leave until I’d hit them all down.

I worked my way up through the tournament system. I got a city ranking, then a regional ranking, then a national ranking. Then I graduated college. After college, the only way to keep playing is to play amateur tournaments and work your way up into the pros. It’s extremely competitive.

As I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life – was I really going to try and pursue a professional tennis career? – I attended a professional tournament (as a spectator, not a player). Off near the food court was a serve booth with a radar gun. This allowed them to measure your serve speed. I was curious to see how fast my serve was so I went to try it out.

Keep in mind, I’d hit half a million serves by that point in my life. I’d mastered everything from the deep leg bend, to tossing the ball out in front, to left arm up, to rotating your hips, to pronating your wrist. To give you some perspective here, the fastest servers in the world can hit 145 mph. I went up there, put everything into it, and I hit… a 117 mph serve.

While this was happening, there was a group of guys off to the side making fun of their friend. He was a tall guy, kind of muscular, and they were trying to get him to serve because he’d never touched a racket in his life. He finally relents, grabs a racket, and prepares to serve. Whereas I had had perfect technique, this guy clearly had no idea what he was doing. He wasn’t even holding the racket properly!

As his friends cracked up off to the side, this guy managed to toss the ball up and…

I’ll get to what happened next in a second.

First I want to talk about how long it takes to make it as a screenwriter. Because my opinion is that ANYBODY can become a professional screenwriter. Yes, you read that right. I think anybody can become a professional screenwriter. However, how long it takes will depend on two main variables – how much talent you have and how hard you work.

10 YEARS
10 years is how long it’s going to take most screenwriters to make it. That may sound like a long time. But let me ask you this. In what other field does it take less than 10 years to become one of the best 10,000 people in the world at something? You have to do your bachelors, your masters, your doctorate, and your internship. That will take a decade for most of you. However, it’s possible to make it sooner.

7 YEARS
The 7 year plan requires that you’ve taken writing seriously before you got into screenwriting. A lot of people who get into screenwriting do so simply because they like movies. But people who have been writing short stories and reading lots of books and who have taken an interest in the craft of writing before they ever wrote a screenplay are going to have a head start. But 7 years still sounds like a long time to you. How can we get there sooner?

5 YEARS
If you make it as a professional screenwriter within 5 years of starting, you’re a legitimate superstar. These writers are like the 7 yearsers, but on steroids. They’ve not only been writing since they were young, they’ve probably had things published in local newspapers or on popular niche websites. They probably worked at their school paper. They may have written a couple of self-published books that did okay on Amazon. This is also where the importance of talent starts creeping in. These people seem to have an accelerated understanding of the English language and how words are put together. They also inherently understand how to hold readers’ attention. That’s what gets them to the finish line faster. But 5 years is, like, so long. How can we get there sooner?

Before we get to the 3 year example, I want to share with you what happened with that first-time-ever server from the tennis tournament. So yeah, as his friends were laughing away, the guy awkwardly tosses the ball up and, out of nowhere – BAM! – he just freaking clocks the thing. Everybody looked to the radar gun. The verdict? – 135 mph.

A snapshot of his friends showed 5 guys with their jaws dropped. But their jaws were nowhere near as close to the ground as mine. This guy had clearly never played tennis before and he had just hit a serve that was 20 mph faster than the accumulation of my 15 years of tennis experience.

Something about this moment woke me up. I realized that I didn’t have an inherent talent to play this sport. If some bozo off the street could whack a serve faster than anything I could dream of, maybe it was best to move my pursuits to another endeavor. So I moved away from trying to play competitive tennis. How is this in any way inspiring? Stay tuned. There may be a silver lining to this story yet.

3 YEARS
The people who make it in three years are true wunderkinds. These tend to be people who were in all the advanced English classes growing up and likely went to Ivy League schools – not because their daddies got them in. But because they genuinely displayed a talent for the written word. These people are vociferous readers and respect the process of writing and pick everything up lightning fast. They’ve likely already been successful in a parallel writing industry before they came to screenwriting (journalism, novels, writing for a major online publication). 3 yearsers rarely come out of nowhere. They’ve been primed to be successful at this. And, of course, they’re extremely talented.

1 YEAR
At this point you’re talking about the elite of the elite. This happens maybe once every few years? Personally, I think 1 yearsers are pocket 3 yearses. They’re everything the 3 yearsers are, plus they had a major contact in the industry and they got lucky (maybe a producer was looking for that exact type of script they wrote at that exact time). However, these people are still super talented. I know Dan Fogelman (This is Us) told me he broke in off his very first script. So it can be done. But I wouldn’t count on this.

This leads us to the question that everybody wants to know. Which is: How do I get there faster? I want to be a 5 year, not a 7 or a 10. And my answer to that is, you only have control over one thing: how hard you work at it. If you write, say, 4 hours a day, you’re going to get there twice as fast as if you write 2 hours a day.

And, on top of that, you want to work smart. You don’t want to blindly write as much as possible. You want to get feedback, you want to find out what you’re doing wrong, you want to be working on improving weaknesses in your writing with every new script, every new draft. Talent is going to affect your half-life, but hard work is going to be the ultimate difference-maker.

Going back to our never-played-tennis-before 135 mph server. Here’s the thing with that guy. If you would have put him on the court with me? I would’ve destroyed him. Sure, he has his 135 mph an hour serve. But he would’ve gotten maybe two of them in the whole match. And because of all the hard work I’d put in, I would’ve known exactly how to beat the guy (basically, if I just kicked up every shot to his backhand with a ton of topspin, I would’ve made him look like a fool). The point being, talent is important. But hard work can get you past the talented people.

One last thing. For everyone who’s been at this for more than 10 years and they still haven’t made it, I can tell you exactly why that’s the case. You’re doing one of four things wrong. You either haven’t been writing enough, are too closed off in your thinking, haven’t gotten enough consistent quality feedback, or haven’t gotten your writing out there enough. And you guys know exactly which of these you’re doing. So make that change and, I promise you, good things will start happening.

Now get to work!