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Building Craft and Breaking In; Three Budgets for Aspiring Screenwriters
For a long time before my first professional screenwriting gig, I was known for being a screenwriter who didn’t spend much money trying to break in. While this was partly because my financial situation simply prohibited anything but a very minor expense, what some people don’t know is that I blew what little savings I had in my first two years writing and that taught me an important lesson; I’d gotten nothing back of any value and needed a different strategy.
When we first get into screenwriting and decide we want to pursue it as a career, it can be hard to find any sort of direction. It’s too easy to just keep mindlessly writing scripts and searching for some sort of magic bullet that gets our work in front of the person who’s going to make our dreams come true. What doesn’t help is that there are many in a similar position, frantically looking for easy answers and more than willing to pay-to-play if they think they have to. The result is break-in communities packed tight with writers who are susceptible to the advice of the deluded and the offers of the deceiving. Communities all too often believe in and promote products and services that are unproven at best and scams at worst. It can all too often look like the answer is to spend more money but, while there’s some wisdom in knowing you have to speculate to accumulate…
