Write Without Writing

29^th December 2017

Hello there Kelly,

Reading your ad here on Craigslist it looks like writing in general is not something you know all that much about. I can tell you that a good number of the books on the subject have told stories of people who come up to writers and say “I have this idea for a film, and all we need to do is write it”. It’s almost a cliché of the industry at this point. 

Beyond that point I can tell you that working with another writer can be some really miserable business. I worked with a fellow for about a year on his project that he said he had a producer for, and all he ever did was undo everything I did with his script. I gave up on trying to get a reasonable script out of him. In the end I told him that if I couldn’t talk to the producer myself then I had no interest in speaking with him.

The truth here is that no writer needs more ideas. I have half a dozen ideas buzzing around my head at the moment, and if I lived two hundred years I’d never run out of new ideas to work with. Then again, writing is only part of film making and that means the question is ‘what are you bringing to the table?’

Do you know someone in the industry? Do you intend to finance a project?

Marketing a script is one of the hardest things there is to do in the writing industry and adding another writer is rarely a good idea. It opens your work up to lawsuits about who did what, and you never really know if you can work with someone until you do and by then you’ve spent a good deal of energy.

What you want to do here is think of this as a job interview for a job that no one needs filled. What about working with you is better than working alone? Remember that an author has very little incentive to give up half of what he may make unless you can really put it forward that you can double his money.

Never stop imagining,

Richard Leland Neal