One of the most critical elements of success in any field, and especially, in Hollywood as a screenwriter, is to take consistent, directed action in moving forward toward your goal. Whether you are focused on marketing to literary agents, writing the best screenplay you possibly can, selling your script, getting a script review, or simply studying and then rewriting, the most important thing is to keep taking action. And the whole time, you may feel like you’re never going to “get there.”
You’ve probably already noticed that it is a challenge to write a 100+ page screenplay that people love. And no matter how many times you get feedback and make changes, the next person who reads your script will have yet more advice on how to make it better. Then finally, you decide to market it, and a whole new set of challenges and opinions arise. It just seems like there’s no one way to do it right and that your job is never done! The never-ending effort that’s required can be disheartening at times.
The constant effort that is required to move forward can seem very disheartening if you let that feeling of “It’s never going to be ready,” get to you.
However true it may be that you need to keep working on things, there is one bit of relief that you can look to for air, and that’s this: Every improvement you make on your script… every step forward you take… is yet another building block toward your goal.
Pink Floyd’s song said, “It’s just another brick in the wall…” But I like to think of it as another brick in building your career.
Whether you’re working on your first script or you’ve been writing screenplays for years or decades, it can get frustrating when things don’t happen as fast as you would like. Many times I’ve worked with screenwriters who seem to be doing “all the right things,” but nothing big is happening. Usually they feel like they must be missing some BIG STEP and that’s why things are not happening. Or they may believe that everything would magically work out IF ONLY they could just get one particular person to read their Great American Screenplay — if only they could get it to them.
But none of these ideas are accurate. You might be doing all the right things, everything you need to do. But it could still come down to a numbers game where you just need to keep talking to more people until you find just the right person. On the other hand, your idea may just not be in the zeitgeist — it may simply not be the right time for your idea yet.
The problem is, the only way you know it’s not the right time for your script is in retrospect. Let’s say you go ahead and market your script now, but nothing happens, so you put it on the shelf — for a while. Then let’s say a few years later, you dust it off and market it again, and this time production companies love it so much they fight for it! The only thing that changed is the timing.
In retrospect — and only then — might you surmise that the time was not right the first time you marketed it. But you can’t know that until you later discover the time is right and nothing else changed! But how could you know that? You can’t. Sure there may be a handful of times that you could know the timing was good or it was bad — such as if there’s a big tragic story in the news — but then again, that could make the exact opposite could be true, too.
If something happens in the news and you have a script on that topic, it might now be the perfect timing to market your story — OR — it could be the exact time not to! I was in the middle of helping one of my screenwriting clients market a terrorist-themed script the week that 9/11 happened, when the Towers were destroyed by terrorists in New York City. It was so devastating on a massive level that we knew we had to stop marketing because it had become bad timing.
On the other hand, the woman writer who wrote a book revealing that Thomas Jefferson fathered black children had marketed her screenplay on it for some years and it had gone nowhere. But ten years later, the facts about Jefferson came into the national spotlight and all of the people she had approached originally started burning up her phone! See how that works. Either situation could be true.
If your script is on a topic that’s suddenly in the headline news, your story could become the hottest thing out there — OR — it could stop a deal in its track. Most of the time there’s no way to know, because very few situations are as obvious as the two examples I gave so you have to market to find out what producers think. Many stories are somewhat timeless, so the immediate news probably won’t be a big driver on when to market. Therefore you’re back to square one and really should start marketing as soon as your script is ready. But what then?
If all of this is true, and there’s no obvious reason not to market at the moment, then what CAN you do to improve your odds?
The most important thing you can do is approach your work with the understanding of this idea of creating a Tipping Point. It’s a concept introduced by the very successful book author Malcom Gladwell. It has to do with how doing little actions over time can ultimately make a big difference. In screenwriting, this means you would keep doing more and more of the correct actions so they pile up, and at some point, the whole thing tips over and flips in your favor. Like the straw that broke the camel’s back but in a good way.
One action, for example, is to pitch your script to more and more people, to create more and more opportunities to sell your screenplay. If you are already doing the right things, then it’s a matter of continuing to do those things and to do more of them. You could also do small refinements on each step along the way. All of these small actions, small improvements add up.
Over time, THE BIG step, the Tipping Point, results from consistently taking small steps. It’s NOT just one big thing you need to do.
A tipping point for your scriptwriting is a critical mass, the domino effect, paradigm shift, quantum leap, the straw that broke the camel’s back. The idea being that lots of smaller things add up, one by one, building until at some point, there is a huge shft and something big happens.
But the only way this Tipping Point will happen is if you keep taking these actions and piling them on. This is the reason that you’ll hear an old adage that all you have to do is write a great screenplay and they’ll find you. It’s not true literally, but the idea is that if you DO write a great screenplay then you have a strong and steady marketing effort over time, at some point, they’ll find you — namely because you helped them.
But when is it enough? When is it time to give up? It’s impossible to say. Your Very Next Contact could be the One Contact you’ve needed. You could literally be One Contact Away from a contract. There’s no way to know unless you keep going.
To create a Tipping Point, you must keep taking the smaller actions in your career, improving on them, and dreaming up new small actions and simple improvements.
You might reach out to producers over the course of a year in search of the Right One, and even if you don’t get an option or a sale, you could potentially have 4 or 6 or 8 more Hollywood producers, directors, agents or managers who know and like your work. That is, you could potentially be building contacts for your next script.
But you need to keep taking action. Put a few of these small things in place, and you will find at some point, along with your conscious effort to improve, that a huge shift will happen in your career, one way or another.
You will not be able to tell which action will push your career to the tipping point — at any point it could be the very next action you take — so you will need to trust the process and keep taking actions until it happens. And of course, you won’t want to stop then!
TIP: Add to your list of practices that every time you receive another Screenwriter’s Marketing Caffeine tip like this one, then decide what EXTRA step that you could take TODAY to move your career forward.
Most likely, even right now, you may very well know an action you should take on your screenplay but just haven’t done it yet — so start doing it. If you like this idea of creating a tipping point, you must take actions, and that is totally in your control.
Do you want to get your script to producers? Would you like some help with that process? If so, you might want to consider doing a script marketing campaign with Smart Girls where we find the best list of producers for you, help you with your pitch letter and more.
Whatever it is you decide to do, just stick with it, and remember the Tipping Point. Over time, your actions can build and eventually you could reach a tipping point that puts you smack dab in the middle of the big game.
