Go Into The Story: A screenwriter's nightmare

If you are trying to generate mainstream commercial ideas, what Paul has experienced -- and yes, me -- is likely to happen to you, too.

What can you do? Here are a few things I've figured out over the years:

* If you lose a story because someone else sold something similar, allow yourself one night to drown your sorrows, then get back to work the next day. It's not bad luck, it's not the universe conspiring against you, it's not karma, it's simply the fact somebody else worked a little bit harder and a little big quicker than you.

* Generate a lot of story concepts so you have a number of them to go to in case a project gets blown out of the water. [This is just a good practice anyhow and should be a core part of what you do as a screenwriter].

* Understand this: The fact you came up with an idea that ended selling - albeit not by you - is a sign that your creative instincts align with Hollywood's. [Yes, that's right: I just turned a negative into a positive. Screenwriters are forced to do things like this or else we'll go insane].

* Become Charlie Kaufman: If you come up with obscure ideas like Synecdoche, New York, chances are nobody will be in competition with you.

And there's this: Sometimes a competing project that sells is not a bad thing. As Paul mentioned, there was a situation with K-9 where the project ended up in a race with Turner & Hootch. What I was told is that T&H had been languishing in development hell at Disney. Then our script sold. The Disney folks figured, "Well, if Universal thinks there's a movie in a cop-and-dog story, let's dust off this script we already have in development." In other words, T&H might never have gotten made if it hadn't been for the sale of K-9. 

Remember the business ethos of Hollywood: similar but different. If your script is different enough, it's possible Studio B will buy it to go up against Studio A who bought another script with a similar concept.

The final thing is this: If your project gets snatched out from under you by the sale of another similar script, you have to chalk that up to fate. It just wasn't meant to be. You can be bitter about it with your screenwriting friends -- it's a favorite gripe as every writer has sad sagas like this in their personal history -- but do not let that bitterness eat away at your creativity. Instead it should motivate you to work harder, work better, work faster.


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