SCREENWRITING IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK IT IS - PART 5: THE VALUE OF REJECTION

Do not expect anyone else to care about your screenplay(s) as much as you do. They don’t have any reason to. And definitely, do not be insulted if someone tells you they “don’t like it”. Or that they think your work is “bad”. Remember that absolutely no one owes you anything. In fact …

…if you can get anyone to read 90-120 pages of your work,

YOU OWE THEM.

More importantly, you owe yourself the focus and discipline to swallow your pride and to do your best to understand WHY they didn’t like it. Again, “BAD” is a useless word. You want to understand WHY your work wasn’t effective at entertaining/pleasing/exciting your reader. You need to understand things like:

Why did they find it boring?
Why did they get confused?
Why are they not drawn to your characters?
Why was the dialogue “bad”?
Why was the ending unsatisfactory?
and so on.

If they don’t tell you in clear and certain terms, it’s your job to ask. And, if they aren’t capable or don’t tell you in clear and certain terms, THEN, you can choose to ignore them.

This is another reason why getting high-quality feedback from people who can insightfully and articulately answer those questions is so important. This is not me trying to convince you that you have to pay for feedback from a coverage service or professional story analyst, but you do need to put in the time to find people you can trust to be useful in this way. Joining or starting a writer’s group can be a great solution.

Screenwriting is all about the “long game”. There will very likely be years of rejection before you hear that first “YES”. So, one of the most important things you need to learn is to be patient with yourself and to LET GO of the idea that you can avoid this kind of experience. You can’t - and you won’t. Nobody does.

It’s also really important to see how these inevitable rejections and any critical feedback that you receive are valuable to your development. It’s not easy or comfortable for most people, but it’s better than creating childish drama by trying to force your opinions onto everyone else or blaming someone else for your lack of success.

There is no cavalry.
No one is going to rescue you.

YOU HAVE TO SAVE YOURSELF.

And, to “save yourself” you will have to master several different facets of the challenge ahead. First, you have to master the four core skillsets that I believe are critical:

STORYCRAFT
How to craft timely, relevant, emotionally impactful, and commercially-viable stories that audiences will go out of their way to pay for
PAGECRAFT
How to effectively present your work on the page in the strange, counter-intuitive language of screenplay formatting

And, to a lesser degree:
PROCRAFT
How to navigate the industry, behave like a professional and ultimately get paid for your work
MINDCRAFT
How to maintain a healthy mindset and healthy expectations through all the many ups and downs

The third and fourth skillsets are of lesser importance only because you won’t necessarily need them when you first start exploring screenwriting. But, I do hope it’s obvious that having the ability to maintain a positive mindset and hold healthy expectations will help anyone in any pursuit and that understanding the industry you want to do business in is not something you can find success without. The industry won’t cater to you. You will need to cater to it.

Second, you’ll need to become proficient in accessing your inner resources and understanding very clearly what you bring to the table that the industry can’t find anywhere else. You’ll need to look inward and use these very personal resources to develop your own unique narrative voice as a screenwriter (brand and specialty). This requires a lot of perspective and self-awareness - and TIME. Lots and lots of time.

The fact is that …

If you are not succeeding, you are not writing material
that is effective enough to succeed with yet.

In a previous post, I talked about how acting like a jerk will also kill any hope of success, but most often it’s just that the work isn’t up to snuff. Period. Full stop.

And, I’ll say again that developing the skills to succeed takes time. Writing effectively is - in fact - actually quite rare. Writing material that is effective enough to succeed with doesn’t happen all that often. Rejection is the norm and acceptance/success is the exception. So, if you aren’t finding success, don’t think something unusual is happening.

For most of us, failure and rejection happen all the time.

In his book, That’s Not The Way It Works, screenwriter Bob Saenz states …

“I have a friend who is a reader for a big production house. Big. She once told me that over a three month period she read well over a hundred scripts and recommended only one. She’s a good reader. In the past year, I’ve read close to a hundred myself and thought three of them were great. Two were from previously optioned writers.
The angry writers like to say to this “Then why is there so much crap being made?” Well, first of all, crap is in the eye of the beholder. Lots of what you may think of as crap has an audience and makes money and THAT is the whole idea of the film business.
—Bob Saenz

So, if rejection is, in fact, the norm, then the question is “How do we use rejection to better ourselves and to move closer to success”?

Embracing Failure & Rejection

In very simple terms, we need to embrace the VALUE of rejection and see it as an opportunity. We need to do everything we can to gain as much information and insight from the experience. Accept the fact that your early drafts and the work that you create during the early stages of your development as a screenwriter will very likely not be capable of moving a reader the way you intended them to.

Accept that this type of failure
is a positive and useful thing.

Or, at least it COULD be.
If you let it.

In fact, you should want to experience this so that you can gain valuable insight and understand WHY things do and don’t work.

If you were to luck out and write something that was effective and excited readers very early on in your development, I say that would be disastrous. You’d have no opportunity to learn and I would bet my last dollar that your quick success would become a terrible curse because you’d start your next project believing that kind of experience was normal and you’d get terribly frustrated when you couldn’t duplicate it.

Fast and easy success is NOT normal.

So… you MUST be prepared for rejection and for failure. And commit to learning how to USE these experiences to find your way to success. Every incident of rejection and every failure is a diagnostic gift. Accept these gifts graciously and learn from them. Receiving critical feedback is not easy, but it is necessary. It’s unavoidable, so choose to make it a positive thing and keep clear in your mind that:

It is not about YOU.
It’s about YOUR WORK.

THESE ARE NOT THE SAME THINGS.

One of the personal attributes you need to develop is the fortitude required to listen carefully and objectively when someone tells you your work is garbage. And, be aware that this could happen A LOT. Some people will not be careful with you. But that kind of blunt experience should only be considered a “bad” thing if you let it go by without learning from it. Or worse, convincing yourself the reader doesn’t know what they are talking about.

Don’t fool yourself. If you ask someone how they feel about your work
and they tell you they didn’t like it…

THEY’RE RIGHT.

If you can’t learn from constructive criticism, you’re starving yourself of an opportunity to grow, evolve, and become more and more effective. And, for a constellation of reasons, it’s going to contribute to your failure.

There’s no success in serving yourself. Your screenplay has to work for an audience of strangers, or there will be no opportunity for any R.O.I. (return on investment). No one will want to buy something that they can’t resell (as a film). Ultimately, if you can’t handle one rejection, how are you going to handle one hundred? One thousand? It’s just part of the business and you need to be ready for this inevitability.

The last thing I want is for you to give up, but if you refuse to give yourself permission to fail - to make mistakes - and refuse to learn from those mistakes, you aren’t going to make it. If you can’t learn how to turn a rejection or critical feedback into a positive thing that you can use to become a more effective writer…

SCREENWRITING MAY NOT BE FOR YOU.

Remember: You know everything there is to know about your screenplay, including what your vision or intentions were when you started. Your readers don’t. That immersive world in your head is not available to them. All they get is your script. All they get is what you put on the page. If they didn’t like it, only one of two things happened:

You failed to translate your idea into an effective read
or…
You failed to write a story worth telling

And if it’s not already obvious, both of those statements are written from the audience’s perspective, not yours. Because:

You are not the audience.

PART 6: HOW TO AVOID THE USUAL TRAPS

In the next post, we’ll take a closer look at exactly what both of those two scenarios really mean and how you can avoid them.

Thanks for reading!

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