Career Vision Part 2

So you've done the course, read all the books, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now what?

The Next Step:

Now you have to decide where you want your career to go. TV or Film, or both? Ultimately this is up to you; there is no right way.

This was the bit I struggled with. I left my degree course with one completed feature script and thought it would simply be a matter of finding someone willing to make it and pay me shit loads of money. After all it was a genius of a script, low budget, character driven, familiar genre, it couldn't go wrong. I soon discovered that I was, to put it mildly, and absolute idiot who knew bugger all of the world I was about to enter.

This is why I stress the importance of reading industry papers and magazines. You need to keep up to date with who's making what, who's working for who and more importantly what is being made. You can never keep up with trends in writing so don't even try. Once you think you know what the market is looking for, by the time you've written it the trend will have moved on. This is why it's good to have a back catalogue of scripts. If you have a cracking gangster script and ten years down the line someone asks you if you have one you're going to be one step ahead of everyone else.

You have to be proactive in this game. Production companies won't come looking for you, you have to go looking for them. Send them one or two page outlines of your scripts - make sure these are as highly polished as your script and remember they must also reflect the genre of your script. If your script is a comedy feature and your one page outline isn't funny, you won't get any interest.

Try and target five production companies per month and send them your one/two page outline. If you don't hear anything with in a month follow it with a polite phone call. Only send out an outline for one script at a time and remember to keep writing new stuff.

If a particular script isn't catching any interest then put it to one side and move on to the next. There's nothing worse than trying to flog the same script, in a different version, over and over again.

Now get out there and write.