I Blame Ninjas

I’ve sent a few scripts to production companies or studios over the years, mostly responding to inquiries following contest placements, but actively querying management agencies is something new for me. I just never felt as though I was quite ready for that step before now. I’m starting with a few agencies where I have invitations to submit for various reasons. If nothing happens with the first round, I’ll move on to cold queries. In the meantime, I’m plugging away on the contained horror script, which I figure won’t be such a bad answer if I’m asked what I’m working on next.

For folks who aren’t familiar with screenwriting, a quick explanation. Most working screenwriters have representation, either an agent, manager, or both. The specifics of each relationship vary with the individuals involved, but generally a manager works with the writer on ideas and scripts, plus sets up meetings at prodcos and studios to pitch specs or seek open writing assignments. The agent negotiates script sales. Each works on commission, normally 10 percent apiece. You normally acquire a rep by sending a query letter on your script. If it strikes his or her fancy, the rep requests the script to read. If the screenplay looks like a seller, or the rep’s just impressed with your talent, you might get signed as a client.

But, like I say, this isn’t an aspect of the business I have much experience with. I’ll try to share what I learn in general, but I’ll have to be circumspect with specifics.

What do you snack on while you’re writing? I like grapes, chocolate-peanut butter malt balls, or butter toffee peanuts, although I can only eat a few of the last two – too much sugar. I normally drink ice water, sometimes caffeine-free diet root beer, but I’m trying to get away from soda. Sometimes hot apple cider in winter or diet lemonade in summer.

I had a fun break, but two days off writing was just enough this time – I’m antsy to get back to writing my new screenplay while I await notes on the others.

It’s going to take a few days to be certain, but I think I’ve finished a final draft of Ghost Train. Coupled with the hopefully final draft of After I finished, what, last week, that gives me two feature specs ready to send out to a couple of places where I already have opportunities to submit, plus wherever else I decide to go and contests. So I’m going to attempt to take a couple of days off from writing. This is actually pretty hard for me. I have good days and bad days, and some days where I don’t write anything for whatever reason, but other than my vacation trip to Monterey, I’ve worked pretty steadily on screenwriting the past 10 months or so. Particularly the past couple of months as I worked to get these two screenplays to a point where I feel comfortable sending them out. So I’m going to the zoo, and then to a matinee or two, before I dig back into my next project.

My Ghost Train script has an honorable mention on the 2011 Lugnut List for the top screenplays read by the Screenplay Mechanic coverage service last year, which is pretty cool. As far as I know you don’t get an actual lugnut, although that would be even cooler. I’m actually digging into what I hope will be the last rewrite on Ghost Train (as a spec, anyway) today – still not all quite where I’d like it to be, but, like the A-Team, I have a plan. Did the A-Team ever fight ninjas? They must have, right?

I’ve been swapping script reads with other writers as I fine-tune my current projects, and I’m reminded once again of the pernicious evil of passive voice. See, it even crept into that sentence! (I blame ninjas). But it’s probably my biggest note on most scripts I read: Replacing passive voice with active, vivid verbs immediately brings life and color to your story. “Joe is entering the room” to “Joe slams into the room” or “Joe saunters into the room,” or something else. While years of newspaper copy editing have left me nearly allergic to passive voice, I admit there are times when it has its uses, like to position a key word at the end of a sentence for impact (another screenwriting trick). Or blog posts, I guess. In general, though, just get rid of it. For a lot of writers, it’s the fastest way to improve your script by 100%.

I’ve added a new category of links to the right, Contests & Coverage, with some of my favorite screenplay contests and coverage services. A lot of pros seem to be very down on paid notes services, but as someone outside LA without a lot of access to groups of working screenwriters or friends who are writers, I find them very useful. (Though I don’t think I’d ever pay the hundreds or thousands of dollars the top ones charge). And while most contests don’t mean much in terms of breaking in, they are useful for getting a sense of how your work stacks up with that of other aspiring screenwriters.

I spent most of 2011 working on After, my post-apocalypse action screenplay, chiefly on trying to complete a workable first draft. I love the script, and it’s already opened some doors, but career-wise I might have done better to punch out two or three scripts (particularly ones that won’t cost somebody eleventy-billion dollars to film). I did  break away to work on a fresh idea a couple of times, but something kept pulling me back.

Even so, I can’t say I regret spending all that time on it, because at some point in those sometimes frustrating, sometimes agonizing months of struggling with After, something just… clicked. I came up with a style of writing action scenes that I really like, following a couple of years of experimenting with different formats. Structure and story beats became second-nature. I began seeing openings for set-ups and callbacks the first or second time through a scene instead of the tenth.

Once I had a satisfactory (for the moment) draft of After, I tore through a nearly page-one rewrite of Ghost Train in about a month, and it really just flowed in a way no other draft has for me.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I’m finished learning about screenwriting – that will never happen – or that I’m unilaterally declaring myself ready for Hollywood. And I suppose the real test will come when I’m staring at a blank screen on my next first draft.

But it does feel as though I turned a corner as a screenwriter somewhere back there.

The 2011 Black List has gone up. (This link goes to a Deadline Hollywood story; the Black List site itself is backed up at the moment and provides only a PDF download). Film executives vote on their favorite unproduced scripts of the past year, and the votes are compiled to produce the list.