Lessons Learned
I spent a pretty fantastic day at the LA Times Festival of Books recently. It’s like Comic Con for book nerds held outdoors on the USC campus with indoor panels featuring tons of amazing writers. I saw three panels this year and when it came time for the audience to ask questions, I heard the same question throughout the day:
What advice would you give yourself when you were just starting out?
I hear this question often at panels and I really love it. It’s better than the overarching “What’s the best piece of writing advice ever?” which usually ends up with someone shaking their head and saying, “Just write.”
Instead, imagining the advice you’d give yourself makes it personal. And the unsaid part of this question, and the reason I love it, is what’s really being asked is this:
How did you fuck up?
Because face it, every writer has said “wow, I wished I’d done THAT better.” Or wished they’d avoided that slow-motion car crash that everyone but us saw coming. Or imagined that the industry and our career in it would operate in a certain way and boy, were we wrong.
I’ve written my basic “getting started as a screenwriter” advice before which boils down to this:
Write great scripts
Meet great people
Make great stuff
Easier said than done, I know but you can read a more detailed explanation on why that’s the advice I give new writers here.
But to be completely honest, I wouldn’t give that advice to my past self because I was already doing that stuff. And it worked out! I wasn’t brilliant or anything, I just followed my gut, made awesome friends, worked hard, and got really lucky in so many ways.
So when I think about the advice I’d give my younger self, it wouldn’t be the me just starting out. Instead, I think of the advice I would give to the me who had his first professional win. The me who just went pro and was screenwriting full time - THAT guy needed some help. Because he made mistakes. Not Earth-shattering, but still…I fucked up a lot.
So here are the three things I wish I could tell “past me” (in chronological order):
1. The moment you sell your first thing in Hollywood, start writing something new because by the time you finish the new thing, your first pro deal will finally close.
My first win in Hollywood was selling a pitch to Revolution Studios to write an original “romantic fantasy” script. I was elated. I quit my freelance gig flying around doing comedy shows at stockbroker conventions (fore real) which now that I think about it, is my sub advice to my younger self: DON’T quit the sweet gig doing fun shit with my friends that paid really well and didn’t take up too much time until I absolutely had to. But that’s another blog post.
Instead, I did a lot of free theater because what the hell, I was about to be a paid screenwriter so might as well have fun for a little while.
My deal took three months to close.
You can do a lot in three months. You can write a new script. You can fly around doing fun comedy shows. You can do tons of free theater. I only did the latter unfortunately. And after three months, when my deal closed and I got to work, only then did it occur to me - “Hmm, I guess I kinda wasted a bunch of time waiting for my deal to close.”
Nowadays, most writers don’t make that mistake because deals take WAY longer to close, many many months, even years. So if anyone reading this sells something anytime soon, take a night, have a nice meal with a loved one, maybe get away for a weekend to celebrate. Then on Monday morning - start the next thing.
The second piece of advice I could give my younger self is this:
2. General meetings, developing pitches for open writing assignments, and pitch meetings are part of the job of writing, but never forget - writing is the job.
When you sell your first thing in Hollywood, everyone wants to meet you. It’s really nice doing the water bottle tour (which I talked about here). You’ll go up for OWAs (open writing assignments). Developing pitches for those OWAs take time. You have to figure out the pitch, practice it with your reps, take the meeting. If you’re not careful, a year goes by and you haven’t sold anything and you haven’t written anything new. Then all of a sudden, you have less meetings. Less OWAs coming your way. Your momentum is fading so you need a new script to get it going again. A script you haven’t started yet.
I feel like this lesson has been presented to me again and again. Never more so than in my year after working on White Collar. I had just signed with a new manager and was out pitching a new idea for a TV show and taking general meetings with studio execs, hoping they’d consider me for staffing jobs.
I spent that year meeting everyone and came close on a couple things. But nothing sold, and I didn’t get staffed on another show. My TV sample had already been seen by everyone - it was what got me my job on White Collar. All of a sudden, I’d spent a year not getting work and not writing a new sample. That began a six year stretch where I didn’t work at all. It sucked. And it could’ve been avoided if I remembered advice #2 which leads nicely into advice #3:
3. Write something new every year
And by this I mean write something new every year and send it out so people in the industry know you are still in the industry. It really is that simple. Memories are short. People get busy. They may remember that script you wrote a couple years ago. But time passes and they will forget you ever existed.
I can’t take credit for this advice, I’ve heard it from many writers, including Eric Heisserer (Arrival). Early in his career, he was writing a lot of horror remakes like A Nightmare on Elm Street. He told his reps that no matter how much work they got him, he was going to write a new script every year. And you know, his career turned out okay (huge understatement, he’s a total rock star).
I still forget this advice. It’s been a couple years since I’ve had a new screenplay written by just me to remind people…yes, I’m alive. I’ve written a book that’s out to agents, got a movie released, and my partner-in-crime Ben Rock and I have a deal on the table to write something new. All of that is awesome. But nothing beats having a brand new script that people can get excited about.
Getting started is hard.
Selling that first thing is really hard.
Keeping a career going after that is possibly the hardest.
I guess another way to look at advice I’d share with my younger self is by calling them “lessons learned.”
And like most lessons, I’ve learned them the hard way.