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belief in your material, creative freedom, GET OUT, inspiration, make it great, PULP FICTION, rejection, SEVEN, STAR WARS - June 26, 2019

When To Pack It In: Rejection in Screenwriting (The Answer is Never)

If you truly believe your script is great, and you have objective reasons to think that opinion is credible, there is no reason to ever give up on it. The crucial point here is that the reasoning behind the belief must be at least somewhat validated in reality. In other words, if this is the first script you’ve ever written, and everyone who reads it hates it, that might not be the hill to die on. But if you’ve gotten objective third-party reads that have been enthusiastic, and you’ve spent years polishing your craft, and in your heart of hearts...

Write Something They Won’t Make: Ironic Lessons from GAME OF THRONES

Writing in the hopes of your script getting produced can be, counterintuitively, limiting. Setting limits on your imagination before the script has gone into production may seem pragmatic and business-minded, but it can also weaken the final product. This is the ironic lesson to draw from GAME OF THRONES. In an interview with the New York Times before the show came out, George RR Martin explained the genesis of his epic fantasy series – he was a frustrated TV writer. “To some extent, the project was also a reaction to my own Hollywood career. I was out there for 10...

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