8 Screenplay concepts you should NOT write about.

I have been working in literary management for 8 years, which means I have read thousands of scripts from writers at all levels. These are some concepts that keep popping up that I am tired of seeing.

Welcome to my Weekly Email Newsletter! Every Friday I do a deep dive on an aspect of the business of screenwriting from a literary manager’s perspective.

Today’s post is for subscribers only. If you’re new here, I recommend checking out the free posts at this link to sample what this newsletter has to offer.

Otherwise, keep reading for a list of topics you should NOT write a script about (and why!)

---

There are hundreds of thousands of aspiring writers (seriously, the last time I talked to a Coverfly employee, they said their email newsletter has 600k subscribers).

This means there are hundreds of thousands of amateur scripts out there clamoring for attention.

There are many ways to get attention:

• Networking is key. Executives want to read scripts from people they know.

• Winning competitions or graduating from prestigious fellowships helps.

• Or you can cold query agents, managers, or producers and try to get them to request a script from just the logline.

No matter which of these strategies you use, your script will be dead on arrival if its premise is something that your reader has seen dozens of times before.

And believe me, there are plenty of topics that agents, managers, producers, and executives have seen re-hashed too many times.

The following concepts are a non-starter for me. I have to imagine that they’ll be non-starters for others because if I have read these topics over and over, it’s statistically probable that people who have been in this industry longer than I have have heard these pitches even more…

DISCLAIMER: I am not telling you that you can’t write any of these. But I am telling you that if you do, you should expect a harrowing uphill battle. If you want any hope of moving your project forward, you should deliver a version that has a personal twist that no one else can deliver.

2ND DISCLAIMER: There are successful examples of many of these on TV right now, created by famous writers. This proves my point rather than disproving it. Your competition is seasoned Show Creators. If you bring a network the same concept that Mike Schur, Dan Harmon, or Greg Berlanti does, whose do you think they are going to pick up to series?

Correct.

The project being pitched by someone who has already made them hundreds of millions of dollars.

Photo by Madalyn Cox on Unsplash

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, let’s get into it.

Here are some of the red flag topics that I have already seen too many times. Therefore, they are never going to be interesting to me:

8 Concepts you should NOT write: