Screenwriting - Scriptnotes with John August & Craig Mazin

The One With The Agent

Excellent podcast. Very insightful. Go here!

Query letters.
Pitch Festivals.
Script consultants. Script readers.
That charge silly amounts of money for notes and feedback.
Logline contests.
95 percent of screenwriting competitions.

And the list goes on!


These are all businesses that have been created for one thing. And that is to remove your hard earned money from your wallet, and bank account. They're there to make money. That's not to say you shouldn't pay someone a reasonable amount for their time, especially if you find their feedback useful and constructive. Just be weary of people that charge ludicrous amounts of money. Hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars. They may come across as people in the know, but really, if they were that good, they'd be writing scripts and getting movies made, or at the very least, selling their scripts.

99.99 percent of the time, they're not.

That's not to say that you shouldn't enter contests either. I only enter one contest a year, and that's just to see how my work stacks up against other writers. It's also a good way to set yourself a deadline.

And, just because you're a quarter or semi-finalist, doesn't mean you have a badly written script, it just means it didn't gel with whoever was reading it at the time. So keep at it.

It's your writing that matters.
And the stories you tell.