I've recently completed three screenplays. What should my next steps be?
I'm the one who wrote that long prickly article about selling your screenplay but the real deal comes down to this.
The business of professional TV and Screenwriting has always been intensely competitive. Today it is, if anything, for more competitive than it has ever been. Think about the world of professional sports. How well do you play baseball? Now, think about playing on a professional baseball team. The very worst professional players on those teams, the guys that you call bums when you shout from the bleachers or when you're watching on TV -- those guys are probably around a thousands better at playing baseball than you.
That is the relationship between amateurs and professionals screenwriters -- the vast majority of amateur screenwriters. I know this because in addition to working as a writer I also teach screenwriting and I routinely read the work of beginning and amateur screenwriters and I know the level at which they are writing.
I don't say this to discourage you any more than I am aiming to discourage the students that I teach -- any more than, were I coaching a team of beginning ball players than it would be "discouraging" them to suggest that none of them are ready to try out for the freaking Yankees.
If you are committed to going down this road, then your focus has to be on developing your writing skills, not on finding agents, not on connecting with development companies, not -- at this stage -- on selling your work.
When I was at NYU Grad Film, which is where I studied, my camera teacher said that any student who graduated should expect to take something on the order of ten years before he was actually earning a living in the business. And that was after getting a graduate degree in one of the top schools in the industry.
And that was just about as long as it took me before I was working full time as a writer and a story editor at New York company. Before that, I worked as a security guard, I delivered TV off the back of a truck, I operated teleprompters, I went back and ran NYU's equipment room for something like six years -- and managed to sell a treatment get a couple features optioned along the way. But none of that paid the bills.
So if you're serious about this, then you've got to make that commitment to write, to read, to take courses, to get into a writing group, and to write some more, and to not expect this process to be an easy one.
And if it is discouraging to mention to the would-be mountain-climbers out there that Mount Everest is a very tall mountain that can't be scaled in an afternoon with a pair of good boots and a lunch basket and that more people who have tried it have failed than succeeded and that if you want to climb it, it's going to take a lot of preparation, a lot of hard work and a substantial amount of natural climbing talent and even then you might fail -- don't be angry at the messenger.
I didn't create the mountain and I didn't create the current market for spec screenplays which is as challenging for professional writers these days as it has ever been and is, if anything, even more challenging today for writers trying to break in with new spec screenplays.
Doesn't mean it can't happen. It does happen. It can happen. There are things that you can do and ways that you can about it but first and foremost you need to create something that is exceptional and memorable and marketable as Hollywood understands those terms.
And that has never been easy and still isn't easy.
I hope that that answers your question.
NMS