2025-01-29

Today's journal image was taken in Paris last year, whilst sheltering from the rain in a cafe on the Place du Marché Sainte Catherine. I was going through an Alex Webb phase, which you can't really tell because I am in no way as talented as Alex Webb.

I've been conducting a thought experiment today, which I thought I'd share because why should I be the only one who has to suffer through my mental perambulations? The experiment is this: What does the statement "I don't take commissions" look like as a business plan for 2025?

Let's break the premise down first of all: there are two kinds of screenwriting work, broadly speaking; spec work, whereby you write something without being paid in the hope of selling it when it is done; and commissions, wherein a company approaches the writer to work on an existing project. (Don't @ me on my suspicious use of semi-colons there, I know). With commissions, you get paid for your work as you are doing it, but you're working within defined parameters, to a brief, and you don't have any ownership of the idea beyond some kind of nebulous notion of authorship (this is not entirely fair, because your authorship is actually codified in the contract, but we don't want to be here all day). Spec work is a gamble, but it's all your idea.

So I am wondering what my year would look like if I only wrote on spec and didn't take any "paid" writing work. It's a thought experiment, more than a proposal, because no one knows what the next phone call might bring, but thinking it through is potentially clarifying.

I've been lucky with commissions over the past few years, insofar as I haven't worked for any dicks (I have dodged a few bullets) and the work I've done has mostly been challenging and people have mostly been pleased with the results. I've also learned a lot, because any time you have to take an existing story and break it apart, or take a nebulous idea and give it structure, and any time you have to work with people to do that, you learn a ton of valuable stuff. Pretty much any time you're writing, you get better at writing, and any time you collaborate, you get better at collaboration (just ask Mark Zuckerberg *Basil Brush laugh*).

But other people's stories are still other people's stories and, while the bills can be paid doing that work, it's not why most of us got into this job - most of us have our own stories to tell, and an unknowably finite amount of time in which to tell them. Any time we're writing for hire, we are not writing our own stuff.

In any given year, I try to strike a balance between spec work and commissions. And for the past few years, I have failed and have spent more time writing for other people than I have for myself. But when I look at the balance sheet, it turns out that I actually get paid more when I successfully sell one of my own projects than I do working for hire. The difficulty is that not everything I write for myself sells, and it all takes a decent amount of time to work on. So do I spend three months writing my own movie and risk not selling it, or do I spend three months writing someone else's story for less, but guaranteed, money?

At this point I should digress and admit that yes, this does sound like the ickiest kind of champagne problem, but I've come to it honestly - my first ever script commission paid £250 for a feature-length script, with revisions - and I've done my time on the dole and in debt and so now these are the challenges presented to me. No, I'm not going to starve, but if I was on the breadline I wouldn't be writing a fucking Substack and if you were on the breadline, you wouldn't be reading one, so get off my case.

Where was I? Right. The idea of just beavering away on my own stuff is really appealing. It feels noble and artisan. But the reality is that, as anyone who runs an ACTUAL artisan business knows, you have to make that which people want to buy. So I might have a grand old time writing some weird little movie, but I'm not very likely to sell it. And if I want to sell something, it needs to have a part for a movie star and a nice clean storyline and plenty of peril and some action and a love story and blah blah blah. But if that's not what I want to write, then I'm in the same boat as I would be with a commission, except that I'm not getting paid for the process.

The experiment doesn't quite break down here, but maybe it becomes something a little more general... If I write a "commercial" movie on spec, then that is MY version of a commercial movie. No one is holding my hand or guiding my metaphorical pen; I can write the movie I, as someone who actually enjoys these kinds of movie, would like to watch. And I can trust that my version of that kind of movie is going to at least be distinctive, inasmuch as it has not been created by committee.

But what is the fate of that movie, in the event of a successful sale? Why, it will then be likely handed off to a development team and, probably, another writer, and it will be turned into something much more homogenous so that a streamer will buy it. As a screenwriter, it is vanishingly rare that the script you were happy with is the one that was filmed. But at least, going this route, I get the chance to write my own version of this movie once. The commission process is such that much of the idiosyncratic stuff is usually filtered out during endless discussions before you even start writing.

But either way, it's a business, right? (This is where we start to get advice-y). If you want to get paid, you have to make something people want to buy. Unless you're already Wes Anderson, it is pointless to sit down and spec The Grand Budapest Hotel, because you're not going to sell it.

And that leads me into another little digression (you cannot beat smashing out a stream-of-consciousness Substack at six in the evening): I am sometimes asked by writers who are looking for representation what kind of script they should send to agents. Often that question starts with the phrase "I've written a short film..." So let's get this one figured out here and now: no agent wants to read your short film. Sorry. It's true. Shorts are great for directors, meaningless for writers. A short film doesn’t “show you can write”, it shows you can type, but not for very long. Screenplays and TV shows are all about structure and build and atmosphere, and that is what an agent needs to see you execute.

What excites agents is selling things. So you need to send them something that is in a form that can sell. That means a full-length movie or a TV pilot. They don't have to want to sell THAT thing, but they need to see that you can write a thing that looks like something that can be sold. A fifteen-page script about a kidnapper and his victim riffing in a basement is not that. That is not to say you shouldn't make that short, that's a whole different question. But the script for it is not going to get you an agent.

Nor is, and I can't believe this is a real example but it is, sending TWENTY FUCKING SCRIPTS to an agent. Twenty scripts, because the guy "couldn't decide which one to pick". Guess how that went. Send one script. If they love it, they might ask if there's any more where that came from. If you send one script, an agent might just get around to reading it. If you send scripts plural (20, for the love of God, 20!), then the agent will not read any of them, because who can be bothered to deal with you? Here endeth the lesson.

And we're back in the room... But now I seem to have worked out my angst. The fact of the matter is this: to make a living as a screenwriter you need, aside from a shit-ton of luck, to have some eye to what sells. You're either writing specs with an eye to the market or else you're writing on commission, which means you're working for someone else who has an eye to the market. Neither option sucks, but neither is quite the ideal.

I think, in the back of my mind, I probably realised this a while back. Which is why I'm writing a novel.

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