I just jumped into Substack and came across a guy selling his services as a script consultant. His posts were mostly listicles about why your screenplay isn’t getting read or why your scene isn’t working. Top 10 reasons your characters are flat. Such garbage. So I dug a little deeper and I saw bottom feeder after bottom feeder.
I swear to God, they’re all the same. Different names, different faces, same shark skin suits.
So please allow me to rail against fake consultants. Just fakery-fuckery.
There was a wave of people fishing around for a meaningful career and they landed in coaching or consulting. I’ve been both. I’ve been an instructor of screenwriting. I’ve coached emerging writers, but it was always in the name of community. I never charged by the hour, and it was never part of my professional livelihood. So I’ll never tell you that I’ve done great things, and therefore you should pay me for my exalted wisdom that will serve your journey to being a successful writer.
I’ve also hired coaches and consultants before working with my manager, Lucy Stutz. (Shout out, Lucy. Forever love you.) I sat in coffee shops and enjoyed the feeling of sitting across from someone who knew more than I did, and I enjoyed the feeling of investing in my growth. But the reality? I never got any advice that wasn’t already part of the conventional wisdom about the craft.
Think about that: the wisdom of the craft. Do you sit in coffee shops in Paris and see meagerly accomplished pastry chefs charging a hundred dollars an hour to sit with aspiring bakers? In any café in Texas, will you find a wannabe carpenter talking to a master of Japanese joinery? Not fucking likely.
Here’s the formula that gave us this industry of bottom feeders. Screenwriting attracts a tsunami of dilettantes to the craft — the uninitiated, ignorant nincompoops with a higher than average creative ego.
Writing a film seems accessible. 95 pages with mostly white space. Two cops chatting in a diner or a couple fighting their way through a failed marriage. How hard is that? Hell, I’ve lived that.
There’s an audacity to it. Imagine thinking that you could just buy an outfit of chef’s whites and a good set of All-Clad pans and within days you could whip up the most exquisite French meal. But that’s exactly what a big part of the field of aspiring screenwriters looks like. A tidal wave of dilettantes unleashed into Los Angeles coffee shops.
Hidden among that horde are a very select few who are driven by the love of the medium and the craft, and who possess a rock-solid work ethic and a respect for the complexities of great storytelling.
That subset will put in their 10,000 hours, and among them are a few who will actually make it into a creatively satisfying career. A bunch of others will become TV writers. So where does that leave the big blob? Some luck into some kind of development scenario. A few might place in a screenwriting contest or two that you’ve never heard of. A handful even finagle their way into a go-nowhere meeting with (insert streamer or middling production company here).
Those are the likeliest candidates to become screenwriting coaches. But it’s not just desperate individuals who almost made it, circling this school of aspiring bait fish. There’s another fleet of unscrupulous fucks who masquerade as contest hosts, charging a hundred dollars for every entry and promising a shot at career glory. And for another $95, you can have your material read by a true industry insider. Not quite has-been, never was.
It’s all a load of rotting horse shit. They’re selling shortcuts for a journey that has no real shortcuts, and all the desperate creatives — armed with a laptop and a copy of Final Draft at their favorite café table, undiscovered for just long enough — a $350 shortcut is starting to sound pretty good.
This is something that has bothered me for years. I told myself to live and let live, and then I realized that’s just another way of letting the grift slide. But it’s all just kind of gross and sometimes you gotta speak out about things that you think are gross.
Over the several years I was working with emerging writers I captured all of the things that I had learned and taught, and passed along, and I wanted to put it together into a guide that I could give my students, and so I did. It’s all stuff that you can find in most of the books about screenwriting, except for my snappy commentary from time to time.
I put a lot of value on those experiences working with young writers passing on what I’ve learned, but what I don’t put a lot of value on is the conventional wisdom. Because let’s face it, it’s all stolen or borrowed… And it’s not a bad thing to read a few screenwriting books on your way to mastering the craft — it’s actually a good thing, and I’ve done it. But in response to all of the people who are trading an average grasp of the craft for your hard-earned dollars, I am going to give this thing away. And it’s not a marketing ploy to get you to buy some other course or engage with my content in some other way. It drops mid-May. It’s yours for the taking. And I promise that it will help any aspiring writer continue to work on their craft.
And for the cynics who are still thinking, come on, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, no one gives away anything for free. Fuck off. Has no one ever cared about you enough to pass along something without charging for it? If so, maybe go share that something with somebody, anything but your cynicism. The world needs less of that.
