Here's a REALITY CHECK for You – Part II

And I'm back. Sorry for the delay in posting Part II, but I got derailed by a script and a fast-approaching deadline. Excuses, they say, are like assholes... and no one wants to hear assholes. So here's Part II:

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Coverage. More specifically, on whether it can give you valuable, objective feedback on your script.

Like opinions on any other artistic endeavor, opinions on scripts are subjective. So, yes, it is possible that the “relatability” of your protagonist could differ from reader to reader. My method for sorting out whether a script problem really is a problem is to seek notes from more than one reader -- at least on the earliest polished draft.

Let me be clear. I'm not advocating that you mortgage your condo to obtain multiple sources of coverage on every draft of every script. The service can run from $100 to $200 a pop – higher if you want more detailed feedback and more in-depth suggestions on how to fix the perceived problems.  

But I honestly believe that if you're going to invest months on a script, it bears careful consideration on how to maximize the return on your investment. From my seat, the financial outlay required to gain insider notes prior to sending my material to grown-ups pales in comparison to the fatal flaws I can fix while basking in sweet anonymity.

Need proof? I'm a working writer; it's how I make my living. I poured an unhealthy level of effort into making IPO as solid a script as it could be. I mean unhealthy. Like many writers, I fell in love with my work. IPO was the cat's frickin' ass and, through my smitten eyes, shined with 10,000 candle-watts of cinematic potential.

Here's a sample of the notes it received, unedited for your dining and dancing pleasure, from people who weren't as blinded by its light:

“For a thriller the concept and resulting treatment is long on dialogue, especially the hyper technical variety, and short on action.”

“While IPO is an interesting concept it depends on talk entirely too much to convey important plot motivation that should be dramatized with a bare minimum of dialogue.”

“The lengthy, hyper technical speeches on computer programming will bewilder audiences young and old alike whose command of computer science is confined to pushing a button, being frustrated with Windows troubleshooters and having to call tech support.”

“Try to come up with a more effective title.”

Ouch. Painful as these notes were to read, they informed the retooling, rethinking and rewriting that led to REALITY CHECK.

When REALITY CHECK was finished and typo-free thanks to my wife's keen editorial skills, it went out for its own round of coverage. That coverage, in turn, yielded its own unique set of notes. Happily, the dialogue was universally flagged as crackling and lifelike. Nary a “hyper technical” to be seen.

As with any feedback, I carefully weighed the implications to the story, noodling with potential fixes and gauging how much “damage” they would do to the existing story. It took two months to incorporate the notes. (Please recall that I work a non-screenwriting writing gig full time.) Other notes, especially ones where no consensus existed among the readers, I chose not to use.

The best thing about coverage? It's your call as to whether you follow each note to the letter or roundly ignore them all.

In 2010, REALITY CHECK made the rounds of several competitions. It cracked the Top 10% in the Nicholl Fellowships and was a semi-finalist in the 14th Annual Fade In Awards and Final Draft's Big Break competition. It was also a Second Rounder in the Austin Film Festival's Screenplay Competition.

And have I incorporated some of the notes that I received from these competitions? 

Hey, I'd be an excuse not to.  

Here's a REALITY CHECK for You – Part I

My second script, REALITY CHECK, is a distant relative of IPO. I guess that makes it a distant relative, once removed, of my novel. It's counted as a distinct script because it's a page-one rewrite and so utterly different from the original story that you'd be hard-pressed to spot any of IPO's DNA in its pages. Think Madonna's children.

REALITY CHECK took about seven months to write and was guided by an invaluable tool I stumbled on through screenwriting competitions: coverage.

I hinted at this in the last post. How do you get feedback from the business before you send your script out to the business – and bollocks up your chances of breaking in because your script isn't ready for prime time?

Coverage, my friends, coverage.

Coverage is a paid service provided by story analysts (a.k.a. readers) who work or have worked as story analysts for studios, production companies (a.k.a. prodcos) and other entities in the film business. It's not for everyone (coverage, I mean, not working as a story analyst), but I have found it invaluable for gaining an objective, dispassionate opinion on my work.

Readers have tremendous exposure to the avalanche of screenplays that bury Hollywood every year, and I'll bet a month's pay that they've read more scripts than most of us combined. The good scripts, the bad scripts, and the scripts that make you want to gargle with Polysporin® after you've read them.

Readers provide feedback (a.k.a. notes) on story, structure, characters, dialogue and more. They typically summarize the script in a synopsis – which can inform the synopsis that you'll ultimately have to write if you haven't already – and tell you what works and what doesn't... from that particular story analyst's perspective.

And there's the rub. Based on one reader's viewpoint, how do you know if your protagonist really is unrelatable? Isn't it possible that she could be highly relatable to a different reader?

Well? Isn't it?

Get the answer in Part II... 

What's the Point of Scripted Living?

If this blog leaned toward the existential, the glib answer would be what's the point of anything? But it doesn't, so here's the point:

Scripted Living seeks to chronicle the labyrinthine journey from story idea to completed script to sold script – all from the perspective of a screenwriter who hasn't broken down the door to Hollywood. Not yet, anyway.

Did I mention hubris runs deep in my family?

Along the way, you'll get an in-depth, real-time glimpse into a screenwriter's murky journey from baby writer to paid Hollywood screenwriter. Or so I hope.

Hope is the operative word here.

Let's face it: there are no guarantees that I'll find the handle on the door marked “Hollywood” or be able to crack the sucker open when I do. Even my hubris has its limits. But I can say with absolute conviction that I'm bringing all my writing talent, dogged persistence and ever-growing knowledge of the industry to bear on the challenge.

Here's full disclosure on me and my writing background, offered only so you can decide whether Scripted Living is worth following and compare it with your own writing experience/situation. Please excuse the excessive use of the first-person pronoun:

• I don't live in Los Angeles. I am, however, located on the same continent, three time zones ahead.

• My day job involves writing and editing a quarterly trade magazine for a major defense contractor. Pays my mortgage, buys my groceries, and fixes my car whenever it coughs up a lung. Between it and my wife's magazine editor position, we manage to keep the creditors at bay.

• I wrote a novel that attracted a literary agent in 2004, but didn't attract a publisher. Ain't it wonderful when you can summarize four years of your life in 15 words and four numbers?

• I've written two non-fiction books that were published in 2006 and 2007.

• I developed and launched my own publishing company and ran it for nearly two years. Make that ran it into the ground. Meh...

• I've written news releases, website copy, marketing materials and much more. My freelance work has appeared in newspapers and magazines throughout North America.

Oh, yeah. I've also written four screenplays since 2007. More on that in future posts.

So that's me. Some successes, lots of failures and scads of rejections. Welcome to the world of writing – please remain seated until your laptop and/or writing hand come(s) to a complete stop.

And maybe, just maybe, my efforts to break into screenwriting can help your efforts to break into screenwriting – or at least tell you what isn't working and thus serve as a cautionary tale when I shit my own pants.

My INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERING (a.k.a. My Sacrifice Fly) - Part II

And we're back. If none of the following makes sense, please read Part I of this post.

After chopping away 75% of the novel’s plot, subplots and characters, I was left with a viable story that could be told in less than 200 pages, which was only 80 pages longer than the absolute upper limit for a spec script. This stage, incidentally, took nearly two months. And I hadn’t written a word of actual screenplay – just outlines.

When the time finally arrived to start writing the script, I downloaded free screenwriting software from Celtx, cleared the decks, and got busy crafting the opening scene. Finished it 17 pages later. Can anyone say First Act?

First of many lessons? Choose fewer words that do more work.

Two months after crafting that opening scene, I completed the first draft. It was 162 pages of, to paraphrase Hemingway, shit. But it was also a start – something to hold, mold, cut and hack.

Two months later, after dropping the E-plot and combining a few characters, I had a 137-page second draft that seemed impossible to pare down any further without undermining the story’s foundation.

One month later, a pathological focus on widows, orphans and arriving late/leaving early in every scene trimmed 10 pages from the script, landing it at 127 pages.

One month later, a pathological focus that made my previous pathological focus look like A.D.H.D. relegated eight more pages to the dustbin of history. At last – a viable page count under the magical 1-2-0!

Now all I needed was a viable frickin' story. Discovered this irritating fact after letting the script cool for a few weeks and then re-reading it in one sitting.

Another two months was needed for scene shuffling, scene deletions and scene additions in order to fill yawning plot holes and to defuse some massive logic bombs. But at long last, IPO was done…

Or was it?

Spent another month polishing, polishing and polishing. And another month incorporating my wife’s observations on the story, its coherence, characters and so on. Also cleaned up the dozen typos she discovered, planted I’m sure by an al-Qaeda sleeper cell bent on keeping me out of Hollywood.

Lesson? A fresh set of eyes to review your material is a must – as is unrelenting vigilance to root out terrorists who think nothing of substituting “form” for “from” in unsuspecting spec scripts.

In case you stopped counting, that’s about 12 months of ass-in-chair time to get from outline to “completed” script. (I read somewhere that screenplays aren’t so much completed as they are abandoned.) Here’s a more compact, three-stage breakdown of the process:

1. Noodling and Outlining: Two Months
2. Writing First Draft: Two Months
3. Turning Vomit into Something More Palatable: Eight Months

In 2008, I lobbed IPO at several screenwriting competitions, mostly to see if it would stick anywhere. On the outside, I kept my expectations low whilst awaiting the results.

“Oh, I’m not expecting to place or anything,” I told my wife. “I just want to see how I stack up against my peers.”

Complete bullshit, of course.

On the inside, planted in the same mental fertilizer that grows every late-night/hair-brained scheme into a million-dollar idea, I harbored fantasies of a well-publicized win and all the fame, fortune and Larry-King interviews that would follow.

Also complete bullshit, of course.

IPO didn’t advance or place in any of the competitions, but it did garner some incredibly insightful notes. Turns out “hyper-technical” dialogue is a bad thing. Who knew?

The contest judges, that’s who.

Lesson? Feedback from those working in the business is a good thing – especially if you get it before sending your material to anyone in the business. More on this apparent contradiction in a later post.

Despite its many flaws – and like any first script it had many flaws – IPO cracked the top 10% in the 2008 Nicholl Fellowships. This silver lining only came to my attention because the Fellowship’s director, Greg Beal, took the time to pen a short note below his signature on the “Sorry, but your screenplay did not advance” letter. (a.k.a. the “Sorry, but your screenplay bombed like the Enola Gay” letter in less polite society.)

Lesson? There are people in Hollywood who care about nurturing fledgling screenwriters. (Sure, they also say you can die of encouragement in Hollywood, but sometimes a little extra buoyancy is all we need to weather the storm.)

And sometimes a clichéd metaphor is all we need to end a blog post.

My INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERING (a.k.a. My Sacrifice Fly) - Part I

Over the past few years, a fair number of people have mentioned to me that they have a great idea for a screenplay.

Some have writing backgrounds as freelancers, journalists, copywriters, essayists. (Is essayist still considered a vocation, or did that die out in the 1800s?) Most have no writing background beyond typing passwords into sketchy websites. All can't wait to get working on their idea... someday.

My response to their screenwriting ambitions is the same regardless of their background: Go for it, but don't expect your first script to be anything other than 110 pages of -- how to put it diplomatically? -- dreck. Actually, this being their first script and all, I usually pad it out to 180 pages of dreck.

A suck-ass first script is, in my humble opinion, a universal constant. It's a rite of passage, a learning experience. It's many things, but it isn't a script. Trust me, I speak from experience.    

The first script I wrote was a thriller called INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERING (henceforth referred to as IPO), an adaptation of the unpublished novel I completed in 2004 and mentioned in my first post.

In February 2007, I dusted off the novel with the intent of rewriting it and taking another stab at gaining representation. Incidentally, this was around the same time that my publishing company was crashing down around my ears. Perhaps you heard it. Can anyone say denial through distraction?

Anyhow, around 100 pages into the novel and 100 pages into a copious set of notes on how to fix it, I hit a wall. It sounded something like this:

“Sweet Mother McRee, do I really want to spend another two years rewriting this frickin’ brick?”

Then it hit me. Why not adapt the novel into a screenplay?

Why not indeed. Never mind that I’d never seen a screenplay before. Never mind that I’d never adapted a novel into a screenplay before. Never mind that my bank account (and my wife’s, as it was and is joint) was hemorrhaging coin like the U.S. Treasury. Let’s make a movie!

Intermission: A month passes while I read every article ever written on screenplays that’s available in English on the Web. No actual screenplays though. Duh…

Stay tuned for Part II. Hey, if Tarantino can deliver Kill Bill in two parts...