Do you know your stuff?

It’s one thing to write a script. It’s another thing to understand the craft.

I’ve been teaching at the collegiate level, first part-time, now full-time, for a decade. Every year at least some of the graduating seniors, busily working on their feature length screenplay, ask me about how they should go about trying to sell that script, visions of million dollar sales, Hollywood parties, industry premieres, and basically the Good Life in La La Land.

That’s when I invite them on a fantasy… the same one I’m going to share with you now.

Let’s say you finish that script. And it’s a good one. It winds up in the hands of a manager. They love it. Before you know it, you’ve got representation. Awesome!

On the strength of that script, your manager sends you out for meet-and-greets with producers and the like who have read your script, like your writing and want to do a face-to-face with this new talent.

So you make the bottled water tour from Burbank to Universal City, Hollywood to Culver City.

At one of these meetings, things are going particularly well, the big time producer taking a real shine to you. She laments how there’s this one story she’s hugely passionate about, they’ve brought in a bunch of writers, but no one has cracked it yet.

You ask, “What’s it about?”

She tells you the basic concept. As you listen to her, the heavens open, a shaft of glowing golden light hits your brain, and suddenly you see the story.

Off you go, pitching your take. And man, you are spitting pearls, one great plot twist after another, this incredible story spinning out as you become more and more animated.

The producer is getting excited. Her assistant in the corner is furiously scrawling down your pitch. At the end, the producer is pumping your hand, saying, “We have to take this to the studio.”

In your car as you fight L.A. traffic, your cell suddenly rings. It’s your manager. Turns out the producer pitched it over the phone to the studio and they bought it.

“Congratulations! You’ve got a deal!”

Cut to several weeks later. You’re in your lawyer’s office flipping through the deal memo. There on the page in front of you, the total amount for the commencement fee, then the completion fee for the first draft. We are talking six figures.

Amazing, right?

Then you flip the page where you see the date when the draft you are supposed to write is due.

It’s ten weeks from today.

Ten. Weeks.

At which point, you have to ask yourself this very honest and very important question: Do you know your stuff?

Because while everything in this saga so far has been a wondrous ride in fantasyland, the fact is there is a harsh reality looming out there whereby you actually have to go write the script and deliver it in a timely fashion.

Do you have an approach to all aspects of prep-writing from research to brainstorming, character development to plotting to know how to break that story in two weeks? Do you have the confidence based on your history as a writer that you can churn out a first draft in four weeks, then revise and edit it in another two?

Do you know your stuff?

My basic point with students is learn to walk before you run. I advise them to write at least three original screenplays before they go to market with any of them. They need to have the experience and understanding that can only come from writing several scripts in order to be able to have a legitimate belief in one’s self that they can nail that project.

Know what? That’s my basic point to you, too.

This is why I say it’s not just about the script, it’s about the writer.

Watch movies. Read scripts. Write pages. Study the business. Learn your craft. Test out techniques. Find your voice. Know your strengths. Understand your weaknesses. Do whatever you can to turn those weak areas into strengths.

This is not to suggest you absolutely must know everything before you can submit your scripts to buyers and put yourself out there. No one knows everything. You will always be learning. You will make mistakes. You will get rewritten. But hopefully you’ll also find some successes. Some, even much of what you learn about the craft and yourself as a writer, you will come to understand by doing it in the run of play. So don’t allow some gauzy notion of having to be a Perfect Writer stifle your creativity and ambition.

However, you would be wise to know as much as you can and put that into practice with your writing, so that by the time you do put yourself out there to buyers, you have at least some confidence you can pull it off.

I recently interviewed a well-known screenwriter who has written several hit movies and has had a fifteen plus year career in the business. He told me one thing he knows about himself is this: “In ten weeks, I’ll have a screenplay.”

Those are the words of a screenwriter who knows his stuff.

Do you?