I’m going to be honest with you about something and offer some tips for writing screenplays here and now: This is a tough, tough, ugly, brutal business most of the time. Feelings get hurt, egos get a lot more than bruises, and sometimes you can go months without a paid writing job. So why do this? Why go through all the trouble in the first place?

Simple – because you have to. Writers don’t write because it’s fun or because it’s easy, we write because we have to. We do it because we have stories that we desperately need to tell, and we think the world would be a much poorer place if we didn’t hear them. And you know what? Here’s another tip for writing screenplays: It would be, so we mustn’t let that happen by continuing to write, by continuing to find the will to create, even when the spark seems gone.

Your friends and family, the people who love and care about you, mean well, and as a result, they’re going to offer you their own “screenwriting advice,” which is to try and talk you out of this. work line. They’ll tell you to take a desk job, work 9 to 5, and raise a family, “settle down.” But that’s not you, you’re a writer. I’ve always been a firm believer in the fact that you don’t choose this line of work, it chooses you, it’s a calling, it has to be. Otherwise, why the hell would anyone put themselves through all this madness in the first place? There is simply no other reason for it, and keeping that fact in mind is very, very important to your overall long-term success in this business.

Editing is monotonous, tedious work and I honestly don’t know how they don’t burn more in record time. But more importantly, I realized that I had settled: I was so happy to have a paycheck that I didn’t really think about the kind of work I was doing. I didn’t want to correct other people’s writing mistakes, I wanted to get paid to write, and although it took me a while after I left that job to find a paying writing job, I finally did. Much to the relief of the producers, directors, and other clients whose stories I help tell on a daily basis.