Reader question - Better know a bitter script reader

Daniel asks several questions:

Hello Bitter, I'm sure you've covered some of this before on your blog, but please refresh our memories.

On average, how many scripts do you read per week?

It varies with submission volume. There were about two or three years when I was covering at least 12 scripts a week, and often as many as 15 or 16. These days, unfortunately, it's been less. I try to get at least ten a week, but it's not unusual for me to fall a bit short of that.

Do you find time to work on your own scripts in between reading, and is it distracting/frustrating/tiresome reading other people's work all the time?

It is both frustrating and tiresome. I won't lie about that. After a full week of reading scripts, often the last thing I can make myself do is sit down and write my own script. Once I've gotten some momentum going (usually after I've gotten the first act done) it's a bit easier to keep the words coming. It's also less taxing to get motivated to do rewrites than it is to finish that first draft.

I've pretty much found that when I'm ready to move to the script stage with a project, I need to pick 3-4 days where I can just focus on getting started. That means putitng reading on hold and either reading a lot ahead of time and banking money, or putting stuff aside and catching up later.

I've also learned that the creative part of my brain is far more active at night, which is no doubt a learned process from when I'd stay up until 3 or 4am in college. Once I get a project going, I can sometimes work and write in the same day, provided I finish work around seven, take two or three hours to veg, and then dive into the writing for three or four hours.

How many scripts have you written? In what genres?

As far as specs that I'd be willing to show an agent or producer? Let's see... probably four, maybe five feature specs. Those include a comedy, a comedy/thriller, a fantasy/action film, a legal thriller/superhero film and a thriller. Looking at my list of unwritten projects, I see a lot of comedy and thriller ideas, as well as a few genre-mixers so I guess you could call that my wheelhouse.

I also have one thriller TV pilot that I need to rewrite with a writing partner, a half-hour comedy pilot I'm currently writing, and a spec script for Law & Order: SVU that I wouldn't dare show around town.

That's not all I've written though. I've got two completed screenplays that I wrote with different partners. One's a horror, one's a romantic comedy. I'm not especially happy with how either of those turned out, so they'll probably never see the light of day. I've also got a few completed short films and some unproduced scripts for a few webseries.

As I assume the case is with most writers, there's a pretty big chunk of my writing portfolio that isn't strong enough for me to ever consider showing to someone. I learned plenty from the experience of writing those scripts, but they're not worth the effort to go back and revive. I'd rather just move forward.

What made you want to be a writer?

I've always enjoyed reading and telling stories, so I think it was a given that I'd end up as a writer. In school, I always worked on the school paper, often was the editor of the paper, and frequently got praised for my writing.

I even discovered that some of my English teachers were holding onto some of my papers and giving them out to subsequent classes as examples of what their writing should look like. My younger brother was rather dismayed when his 9th grade English teacher gave his whole class a copy of my character study of The Scarlet Letter's Roger Chillingworth, as it meant he would not be able to copy my work without being caught.

But if I had to guess, I'd say that being a winner in a national writing contest when I was in fourth grade was probably the moment that my creative impulses were really stoked. My teacher that year was very big into creative writing. Unfortunately, few of my subsequent teachers were as encouraging of the practice until I got to high school.

With my interest in film, it was only natural that I'd look to screenwriting as a career

What are some of your favorite scripts? Favorite movies?


My mind goes blank when I try to think of favorite scripts. I think it's a defense mechanism because I read so much. Last week, I got an email from a producer responding to coverage I'd sent him less than two days earlier and it took me a full five minutes to recall the particulars of that screenplay. (And that was a Consider!)

As far as favorite films: Superman, Jaws, the Star Wars trilogy, the Indiana Jones trilogy, the Back to the Future trilogy, Scream, Ghostbusters, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Terminator 2, That Thing You Do, Dumb & Dumber, The Silence of the Lambs, Jurassic Park, True Lies. Those all pretty much fit the bill of a film I can turn on at any point and just sit there and watch, no matter how many times I've seen it.

Also, assume that for every film I listed, there were at least two or three that I forgot.

Reader question - Should there be questionnaire for submitting scripts?

Christian H asked:

Why do you think HWood is not demanding a form to fill out before sending a script? It could have questions that would tell you if it's worth it. Kind of like a Coverage sheet but with things like:

Last Theory
Last Book Read
Define a transition, etc.

It would be a lot easier to determine the proficiency of the writer BEFORE AND AFTER reading the script.

A movie is a script written with care and technical proficiency. It should have character contrasts, scene transitions(auditory and visual) and above all should have bad grammar and sentence fragments in the dialog.


Frankly, I don't think the people requesting the scripts would have the patience to vette the submissions so thoroughly. I also don't really know if a questionnaire would be all that useful. At the end of the day, it's going to come down to two factors: (1) how good the writer's ideas are, and (2) how strong the quality of their screenwriting is.

The way I'd screen the submissions is have the writer send me only the first ten pages of their script once I deemed their query letter intriguing enough to follow up on. Ten pages is more than enough to weed a weak writer out from a strong one. Best of all, it only would take ten minutes of my day per script (possibly fewer if the writer was really bad.)

No one in development will care about what film classes you've taken, what books you've read or what film theories you subscribe to. There are probably some very good writers who don't have an exceptionally comprehensive film education and there are definitely some very well-educated people who couldn't write an interesting screenplay if the fate of the free world depended on it.

When I sit down to read, no documentation of the writer's educational credentials will make me think, "Wow, even though I'm yawning and re-reading the same passages multiple times, I'm not really being bored to death by this script because the writer's questionnaire shows he knows what he's talking about."

It's all about the writing.

Tuesday Talkback: How do you get published?

Usually I answer your questions about writing, but today, I'm hoping that some of my readers are savvier than I am when it comes to knowing how to get published. I'm pretty well-versed in the screenwriting resources on the internet, but when it comes to book publishing, I know rather little.

So is anyone able to point me in the right direction to find out the best ways to approach non-fiction publishers? This includes what said publishers are looking for - a completed manuscript? A proposal and chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the book? Market research showing there is a market for a book in the proposed field.

And please, don't limit your suggestions to the web. If you know of some good books to pick up, please tell me. Or if some of you happen to work in publishing, feel free to drop me a line directly at zuulthereader@gmail.com.

Thanks in advance everyone.

Reader question - Writing a big-budget writing sample

Claire asked:

What are your thoughts on ambitious projects to really show off your voice vs realistically-might-be-bought-from-a-first-time-writer?

If the initial goal is really to be noticed, surely a big budget period epic will serve your writing better if that's what you really want to write, rather than coming up with a low budget containable thriller or something for the sake of it. Or would the big budget period epic risk making the new writer look as though they don't understand budgets/the market and therefore unprofessional?

When I see a big-budget period epic spec from a first-timer, usually only one thought passes into my head: "Ugh. This will be a waste of time that can only result in a PASS." It's pretty much as you describe in your latter sentence.

The market for period pieces? Dead. D-E-A-D. Unless you're hired on assignment I wouldn't write one because it will probably be a waste of your time.

Writers are typecast as much as actors are. If you submit a writing sample that's some 16th Century epic drama, it's probably not going to do much for showing how you might write a thriller, or a romantic comedy, or a horror film. As a writing sample, all it really shows is how well you write that sort of period drama.

On the outside chance that the writing is superb - and I'm talking "can't-put-this-down-I-have-ever-reason-to-PASS-and-move-onto-something-marketable-but-I-can't-stop-reading" superb - yes, you might be invited to submit another spec script

But guess what? All that means is that the other spec you send them is going to have to be more in the vein of what they want. And honestly, if you had something that they were more likely to respond to on its own, why on Earth didn't you submit that first?

Sci-Fi is another genre that's risky to spec, but at least there's more of a market for sci-fi than for period epics. If my two specs were 2012 and Robin Hood, I'd lead with 2012. I know that I personally would probably be more likely to give a recommendation of "Let's see what else they've got" if their submission was a marketable genre (if not for a newbie) than if it wasn't much of a viable project at all.

Ambitious projects are only worth writing if you've really got the goods to pull them off. Most of the time, a writer will need to have been around the block for a while before they've reached that level.

For some other thoughts in this vein, I'll direct you to these two posts:
Everyone starts somewhere, so don't insist on being pretentious right out of the gate.
Everyone starts somewhere - even Undressed has distinguished alumni.

Friday Free-for-All: Hanukkah Carols

We're in the middle of Hanukkah, so what better way to mark the occasion with one of the traditional holiday classics, two great Hanukkah songs from South Park: "Lonely Jew on Christmas" and "The Dreidel Song."



And as a bonus, here's "The Hanukkah Song" by Adam Sandler.

Reader question: mistakes on treatments

Escarondito asked:

What are some common mistakes that people make on treatments? And if you don't know that. What is the one thing that automatically when you see it in the first 10 pages of a script you already know it's over(their chances).

Well, I don't read many treatments, but I think there are two mistakes people are likely to make with treatments.

1) Not making them detailed enough - if they haven't produced a full breakdown of their story with all the plot twists and character arcs, the result might be a thin script with little depth. The idea is to come up with enough details so that your scenes don't come up woefully thin when written in script form. If you can, use the treatment to highlight how every scene provokes a change in the story and relates to the protagonist's arc.

2) Spending too much time on them - writing treatments can quickly become an exercise in killing time. You might convince yourself that doing all of this prewriting is saving you a headache in the long run. You'll spend months on the treatment, all under the claim that it's helping you write a better script, when all you're really doing is procrastinating. Prewriting is important, but there comes a time when you have to stop easing yourself into the cold pool that is the script and just dive in and get used to the water.

As for the second one, what can tell me in ten pages that a script is beyond saving?

- Bad formatting
- Terrible, terrible dialogue - especially bad exposition in dialogue
- An excessively long script. A script over 120 with more than one these problems is on shaky ground. ANY script over 130 will suck, and if your script is over 140 and you STILL submit it, you have a bright future in writing argumentative emails to me telling me I don't know what I'm talking about.
- More than one instance where an action paragraph is more than five lines long.
- Description of a main character's breasts or ass that is longer than the description of any of the other main characters.
- Any sort of extra materials like concept art, a CD to listen to, or a market research pack. ("No, really. I SWEAR there's a market for this!")

Oh, and if they do what this genius did. Just go read that entry. I can't do it justice with a summary.

Great question. Keep 'em coming, folks!

Reader question: using prior experience to get an agent and how to dodge the moving to LA issue

Hoss has a question:

About ten years ago, I wrote a couple of screenplays that were made into B movies, then I got sucked into an 8 yr Deadbooks web project, now I'm free again and am back to screenplays...

And need to get an agent.

If you were querying - which I'll probably have to do -

Would you mention the movies?

The web project?

And since I have no intention of moving back to LA, but love to visit ( I know the obstacles that that will create), when would you mention that?

Thanks for your help

Yes, mention any relevant experience. I've you've written professionally, mention it, scream it from the hills. Anything you can do to show that your hand has been stamped by someone on the inside can help. Having a few B movies produced gives you a serious leg up on a lot of the wannabes who are submitting.

Depending on what the web project is, I might suggest mentioning that too. I'm not very familiar with Deadbooks, but if money exchanged hands for you to produce some sort of creative writing, that speaks in your favor.

"I HAVE BEEN PAID FOR MY WRITING! PEOPLE TOOK MONEY THEY COULD HAVE SPENT ON SOMEONE ELSE AND SPENT IT ON ME! HOW MANY OF THE BLIND QUERIES IN YOUR INBOX CAN SAY THAT?"

Agent seeking is not the time to be modest - you've got an edge, so use it.

As far as not wanting to move back to LA... don't put that in the query. Don't put anything in the query that gives someone a reason to consider not representing you. Don't even bring it up until they ask. If you're lucky, that won't happen until they've read your stuff, decided they love it and might even have a stake in working on it even if you refuse to move to LA.

But if you tell them beforehand, "I'm not moving," what they hear is, "I am making this harder than it needs to be" or worse, "I have a naive view of how this business works." (You note you know this comes with problems, so I'm not calling you naive.) If you can hook the agent before this becomes an issue, then it means your writing is strong and possibly marketable.

90% of the people who tell me, "I want to write but I never want to move to LA. Why can't I just do everything over the internet?" are the sort of pie-in-the-sky dreamers who'd probably never cut it in this business even if they were in L.A. If I was in the business of responding to queries, I'd never request anything from someone who actually put that in their query because the numbers tell me that the writing wouldn't be worth the time it takes to skim.

(Yes, I'm sure that you, sir, the one about to write me an angry comment or email, is a complete exception to the rule and that once you lay out all the particulars of your situation, I'll have no option but to concede you know what you're talking about more than I do, but surely even you can agree that 90% of the people like you aren't that exception.)

I never would have said, "I'd love to play for the Detroit Lions, but I hate Michigan. Can't I just work from Seattle?" or "I one day want to be a Silicon Valley CEO, but can't I just do that from Vermont? It's all computers anyway." And I sure as hell wouldn't bring it up in a job interview.

But let's say you're a tech CEO who's so brilliant that the company is beating down your door. Then you can name your terms. You can say, "If I'm so awesome, I'm going to telecommunte from home and you can all work around me." When you're coming from a position of strength, you can make demands like that and be taken seriously.

In other words, with regard to your residency, if they don't ask, you don't tell.