How to be Successful as a Screenwriter

When you’re learning to write a screenplay, or you’re writing your first or your whatever, and you have no experience or contacts in the movie world but you’re passionate about your work and you have a powerful dream, you’re pretty vulnerable. You tend to believe anything anybody tells you so long as they do it convincingly.

You’re easy pickings for self-styled authorities who earn a grand living with books or lectures or seminars on how to write the perfect screenplay, how to avoid the mistakes that amateurs make. Who tell you that unless you write the perfect screenplay you won’t be able to sell it. And they of course know how to identify that perfection and formularize it. They make it sound so cut and dried.

You think – right! All I have to do is do what they tell me and I’ll be able to write the perfect screenplay and I’ll be made. QED, Quite Easily Done, as a mad Maths teacher once told me with a scary giggle. Better get onto that Oscar speech.

The vulnerability of scriptwriters not confident in their own judgment, humble enough and willing to learn and desperate to succeed has made for a giant sector within the movie industry. There’s everything right and nothing wrong with learning from pros, but it’s the gurus who believe they have plumbed the depths of the success formula and who seamlessly forge a connection between what they can teach you at a goodly price – or simply for their ego trip - and you being able to sell your screenplay that gets my goat.

If they’ve so got their finger on the success pulse, why are so many terrible scripts made into films? Here’s the reality: there’s no formula to success in selling your screenplay.

Take this scenario: you write a screenplay, you hand it to an editor. They tell you to throw it in the dumpster, there’s nothing of any value in it. You follow their advice. Well that’s the end of that, isn’t it? The next day you retrieve it and show it to another editor. They think it has merit but you need to change the sex of your protagonist. You don’t want to, so you show it to another editor, who says the sex of the protagonist is fine, but you need to change the storyline and they tell you how.

If you were to follow their advice you’d of course be ghostwriting their screenplay. But you follow it anyway, because you’re a novice and they know what they’re talking about. Or that’s what you believe. Eventually you write something that pleases this editor. You don’t feel as passionately about it as you did your original story. But you get to show it to a producer. Who doesn’t like it, says the story doesn’t feel authentic. You take a risk and say actually it’s not. The producer asks what you mean. You tell them, you originally wrote a different storyline altogether. The producer says what was it? You tell them. They like it.

As it happens, this is a true story. The writer was a South African, the producer from New York. The writer had attended a very prescriptive course and was told unless he changed his screenplay completely he didn’t have a chance in hell of it ever being read by a producer. He’d be lucky if it ever made it to the pile of reading matter in any producer’s toilet.

You can’t formularize why somebody succeeds and somebody doesn’t. You can read screenplays that you think are brilliant – and that probably somebody else thinks are dreadful – and learn what you can from them. You can study the craft, and structure that goes back to Greek plays. You can study people in depth so that your work reflects your insight. But, some people want that in films, some people don’t get it and don’t care. Or you can not understand people at all, and write something childish and shallow. Some will love it, some will hate it. You can please some but you can’t please all, no matter what you do.

Robert de Niro said once about auditioning that it’s pointless trying to impress the director. The best you can do is forget about impressing anybody, but just do the best you can. Be as authentically you as possible, because that’s where your greatest strength lies. I thought it was pretty good advice for any kind of creative enterprise.

Once you’ve done your best with a screenplay, you can show what you’ve written to anybody you want, but how do you know that any suggestions they make will make your work better or more marketable? You don’t. The impact of art in any form is totally subjective; there is no ultimate good or bad, especially with movies. Personally, I think it makes sense to do the best you can, then set about doing the best you can to sell it to a producer. If one says yes, I’ll buy it and here’s the money but I want you to change something, then if you want the money you can say fine, I’ll change it, when the money’s in my bank account.

Otherwise, you’re kind of pissing into the wind by changing things because other people think you should. You could spend your whole life trying to ‘perfect’ one screenplay. Better to write a score of less than perfect and try and sell them, and learn by your own experience how to be more powerful in what you want to say in your writing and in pitching to producers. Whether that power actually creates success or not I can’t say, but I do know it impacts on people. It’s kind of an animal thing.

Here’s what else I know; writing a screenplay is a huge amount of work. I can’t imagine anything worse than spending my whole life writing to try and please somebody else but never pleasing myself. And imagine if I never sold anything anyway. What a total waste of a life that would be.

Facebook, Twitter, Apple et al - Helping us Make a Better Connection? Really?

It’s a world of instant gratification, where we’ve all been massively conditioned by a constant barrage of advertising and new, better, bigger – well, actually smaller – products every few months. A world where we’re all racing to save time and make more money to pay for all these new necessities. Or working way too hard for not enough money so the person or company we’re working for can buy whatever they want. If we’re in that scenario we’re imprisoned by our own prejudices against ourselves – that we don’t deserve anything better – and by a pretty generally accepted idea that’s it our fault we’re not more empowered.

Time is money but there isn’t enough of the former, ergo never enough of the latter. We’ve been taught with Machiavellian cleverness and in ways that we’re not even aware of that social media keeps us connected but in fact it keeps us distracted, uses up that precious time and leaves us starved for something real. Because the connections we make are long distance but immediate, often with shorter and shorter sentences composed of horribly distorted and truncated words.

Our minds are deluged with information that’s outrageously seductive and feels fulfilling but only for a few seconds. Then we need more. It’s not the real stuff of connection and fulfilment, it’s a drug and dangerously addictive.

We are the slaves of Apple, Facebook, Twitter et al. Devices get smaller and smaller and we use less and less of our physical capacity. Hunched over a tiny screen, using tiny movements of thumbs. Body tense. Eyes straining to see the print.There’s nothing pleasurable about it and nothing intrinsically good about lousy grammar and small, but we don’t question, we just buy, buy, buy and use, use, use. Or feel left out, left behind if we can’t afford to keep up.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that all this information, all these new and better products, this fast-paced life, is giving us more and more, making our world bigger and bigger.

It isn’t, though. It’s imploding in the places it matters the most. Our capacity to express creatively and originally. To really think for ourselves. To realize that the worthwhile things in life take time and space to develop, and that it’s the journey which brings fulfilment not the immediate achievement or gratification.

And what about our capacity to connect in a meaningful way face to face? Either we don’t have time, or we’re hooked on social media, which has made cowards of us all. We throw words and images out into cyberspace hoping somebody will like them and leave some kind of cryptic comment. But if they don’t, hey, we’ve moved on to something else anyway so we don’t care. There’s no risk-taking and very little reward, so it leaves us overstimulated and understroked; dessicated at a deeper level. With an overactive brain and an aching heart.

It's not hard to imagine where this could end up. A world where, even face to face, everybody’s desperate to be heard by a living, touchable human being – to have that real experience without which none of us can survive in those places it matters the most. So desperate that everybody talks but nobody listens.

Positive Think Your Way to Abundance

Abundance. It's a nice word, isn’t it? It's a great concept, the idea that abundance of everything is there for everybody, it doesn’t matter who you are. And if you haven’t got enough of it apparently you can just think your way into it. Or you can be lucky and win the lottery. Just kidding.

Abundance of money, abundance of opportunities, abundance of dreams, abundance of dreams fulfilled, abundance of self-esteem, abundance of love and respect. We all want that. Especially love. Everybody wants a happy relationship, where they’re treated with respect and there’s real connection.

All of it always seems so miraculously possible, so utterly achievable - and real – when you’ve just read the latest motivational book, or seen the latest “spiritual” film. The big Aha moment. They make it so clear, don't they? Your thinking brain comes alive with all the possibilities it didn't see before. Often they tell you that just seeing those possibilities is all it takes. Just getting your head around the bigger idea. Manipulate your brain. Just think! And now that you see and think, you know. And because you know, you can act differently. So your life will be different from this point on. Better. Fulfilled. Successful. Filled with abundance. To know is to change, isn’t it? 

It's a fabulous idea. How hard can it be – you watch a film, read a book, intellectually embrace an idea, and miraculously your life turns around. All the things that don’t work in your life just melt away. The men who haven’t treated you well? They’re gone, and they’re somehow magically replaced by different men, who treat you with incredible respect, make you feel deserving and loved and important. And all you had to do was think differently. Be positive.

Sounds logical, right? Actually it’s bollocks. 

I Have a Dream

  "The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams"

Eleanor Roosevelt

 
Of all the billions of people in the world, probably every single person has a dream, if not scores of them. Is there even a figure for the number of dreams being dreamed at this moment? Dreams that haven’t come true yet, but many of which will, one day. That’s a lot of creative energy in action right now. 

We can’t even see that it’s having any impact on the material world at this phase. Not one of us billions knows for sure that our dreams are in the process of coming true. We can't see it; our senses aren’t finely tuned enough. It only becomes obvious when it crosses that line between the reality of idea and physical reality. At the point of dreaming all we’ve got to rely on is our audacious capacity of faith, belief, hope.  

Turning dreams into reality is laborious and challenging. Dreams are a quick thing but the material world is clumsy, especially at the beginning. In that phase, when all you’re getting is no or no response at all, it’s easy to get discouraged, and to believe that you’re not good enough in whatever you’re doing. Life and people and God and Universe won’t reward me because I don’t deserve it.

Of course that innate belief cauterizes your success, it shuts you down, it stops you from going forward. In those times when you so desperately want some kind of affirmation from the world, sometimes the only thing you can do is remember that nobody ever knew when they started out that they would succeed.

It’s dangerous to predict your future by what’s happened in the past, or even what’s happening in the present, unless you can see it from this perspective: every time I’ve stumbled or been rejected or not supported in the way I longed for woke me up a bit more to how little I believed I deserved any of the good things in life. Each time I did as much as I could to repair.

And I didn’t give up. Repair is incremental. All my stumbling, all my groping in the dark, all my failures to get any kind of meaningful traction in the material world haven’t been failures at all. They’ve actually been about an accumulation of understanding and wisdom about myself and life and people and God and the Universe. 

Every time it seems that life is knocking me down down and I get up again, every time I feel lousy about myself and I reach out for love and protection my entitlement and self esteem and my core belief in myself grow stronger. I begin to behave differently towards myself and in the world. I'm more protective, less adaptive, less apologetic. All of which amounts to a sure and steady movement towards the fulfillment of dreams.

This has been my experience of life and it's the story of empowerment in individuals and in societies the world over. Minorities and the suppressed long for freedom and the experience of flourishing and being treated with respect. They stumble and fall, stumble and fall, butting their minds and bodies against the seemingly unbreachable and materially very real walls of fear and prejudice of those in power.

And the disbelief within themeselves that they deserve. Gradually the wall is eroded and their self belief is strengthened. Dreams are powerful. Do whatever you need to do to hold onto the ones that give your life prospect, because that's what gives you the energy and strength to carry on. One day, the dream starts to be materially visible, like a shoot poking its head up above the ground.

What if our destiny is for our dreams to come true, and it’s already happening, and nothing can stop it?

Believe in America. Everything Has Changed

It's hard to believe that the election is over. I feel privileged to be living in an era when so much change is happening, so much of it for the better of humanity, and for each individual. It’s easy to look at developing countries and the Middle East where people are so fighting so valiantly for really basic rights and believe that’s where all the action is happening.

But for me the US election was right up at the top there, too, although it’s manifesting in a far less violent way. America has always been at the forefront of the search for the kind of freedom that allows for a person's rights to be respected and for their creativity and individuality to have the opportunity to flourish, whilst also contributing to community.

It's a fine balance that’s a challenge for anybody to get even remotely right. In America, it’s constantly evolving as a social dynamic too. Whatever people say about this phenomenal country, nobody can deny that things are always on the move, which I think the results of this election illustrate beautifully.

Yesterday, once the results were in, CNN anchors and contributors started in quite quickly on the gloom and doom, which surprised and sickened me. There was such an unwillingness to let the world celebrate something beautiful even for a day and to acknowledge what an extraordinary thing had happened. The strangest distortion was how everybody was saying that so many billions were spent on the election and nothing had changed. They're wrong.

Everything has changed. The change isn't about the logistics of a Democratic President still in power with a Democratic Senate and Republican Congress. It's about a fight for that balance in society, and for people’s right to have it in their lives. It's about people realising how much they stood to lose if they didn’t fight. And because they did, this election has proved that the upsurge of conservatism in America was actually the death rattle of a way of life dominated by fear, greed and racism. If billions had to be spent for that to be achieved, it was money well spent.

America will never go back from this point. The older, white conservative male Republicans, who formed the bulk of Romney’s supporters, are losing their power because minorities, younger people, and women are finding their voice. They’re passionate about their rights, passionate about their desire for a life of balance and a society that nurtures it. And unlike other countries around the world, they are not being imprisoned for it, or slaughtered.  

And now they have a President who recognises that they embody the spirit of everything that once made America truly great. How can anybody say nothing has changed? Everything has changed. God Bless Barack Obama and Michelle Obama and America for showing the world how to do it.