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!
