Blake Snyder wrote that screenwriters are bull-heads. It’s on Page 11 of Save the Cat, if you’re interested. “We’re going to bull-head our way through this script no matter what anyone says,” was how Blake described the attitude many writers have toward their latest idea.
Being a bull-head can be helpful. It can give you the will to start a script – or even more importantly, to finish one – in spite of the nattering voices of doubt inside of your head, and in spite of the dozens of story problems and unmanageable scenes you will likely confront before you type FADE OUT.
Most of us secretly worry that we’re wasting our time by writing; that we’re never going to sell anything or ever get a paying job as a writer. Even when you sell something, you worry that you’ll never sell anything else. Being a bull-head can help you to keep going.
But being a bull-head about your ideas can create more problems than it solves. If you don’t believe me, look at the Republicans.
Blake went on to write: “I am suggesting that you say “whoa” to all of that. (The bull-headedness.) I’m proposing that before you head off into your FADE IN: you think long and hard…”
What did Blake want you to think long and hard about? He spends a huge portion of Save the Cat trying to convince aspiring screenwriters to write spec screenplays that someone might actually want to buy. I do the same thing when I’m teaching a screenwriting class. Your screenplay set in sixteenth-century Venice or your 130-page tome about a depressed girl in Alabama may be written from your heart, but no one is ever going to buy it. Maybe you should take your story about hypnotism in France in 1820 and turn that into a novel or a play. But no one in Hollywood is going to buy your brooding script about a slacker in Oklahoma who can’t get up the courage to fight for his girlfriend.
Bull-heading your way through a movie or TV script that is never going to sell is a waste of your time. Blake wrote three books trying to convince writers of that.
I got a short movie outline the other day from a former student. The student felt there were some big story problems. I read the outline and wrote back. The concerns were correct. The biggest problem, however, was that the writer was working from a premise that was unlikely to sell. The writer who asked for my feedback wrote back to say, “I definitely think Sellability is my last concern.” My thought when I read that was, ”Bull-head.”
What is the point of writing a screenplay that has no chance of selling? Do you really think there’s some producer out there with thirty million dollars who wants to make a movie that no one will go to see? Are you kidding me?
“Well, this is the kind of story that I care about," I hear some bull-headed writer saying in rebuttal. “I don’t want to write the typical Hollywood fluff. I want to write a movie that I want to see.” Really? Even if a successful professional with years of experience working in Hollywood tells you that no one is going to buy the script? You still want to go forward with your unsellable idea?
This is the kind of bull-headedness that Blake asked writers to say “whoa” to.
There are thousands of unsold screenplays and TV scripts, and thousands more unpublished novels and unproduced plays. Why? Most of them are badly written. But a lot of unsold work is about a subject that wasn’t very interesting, or isn’t contemporary enough, or isn’t exciting enough or accessible enough to compel a publisher or a theater company or a movie studio to spend thousands or millions of dollars to buy and produce it.
Listen to Blake. Before you start writing a movie or TV script on spec, say “whoa.” Think long and hard about whether what you’re about to write is really something that might sell. Reread Save the Cat. See if you’re following the good advice that Blake put into his book.
Be bull-headed in your determination, but not with your ideas.
