How to tell whether your screenplay is actually good.
So many services on the Internet try to answer the age-old question: Is my art working? Here's how to do an assessment without believing your (or anyone else's) bullshit.
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If your goal is to become a professional screenwriter, your scripts should be getting better every time you write a new one.
If your output isn’t improving in efficiency and quality, that’s a problem.
But it can be tricky because evaluating whether your screenplay is working requires a level of self-awareness that most writers don’t have. It has been my experience working as a literary manager to dozens of writers (and doing consultations for thousands more) that every writer either thinks that their script is the best thing that has ever been written or (depending on the day) the worst thing that has ever been written.
In every single case, neither of these is true.
Your script is never as good as you think it is.
On the bright side, that also means your script is also never as bad as you think it is.
It’s always somewhere in the middle. There are parts you don’t realize are working and parts you think are working that aren’t.
Why is this?
It’s because when you have spent months or years with an idea, you live with the characters and with every single version of this project in your head.
Past versions, potential alternative versions, future versions, and of course the present version are all knocking around in there.
So when you read the page, it’s impossible to separate yourself from the words in an objective way because you know so much about these characters and everything that has gone into this story.
Your reader, on the other hand, doesn’t have any of this insight.
They just know what’s on the page, and that’s it.
The ultimate viewer of the movie will have even less information because they don’t get to read the action lines. (Though of course to make things more confusing, they will have even more information since they get to see all the visual decisions that have yet to be made in the beautiful collaborative process that is film and TV).
Sometimes when I’m giving notes to a writer, I will say something like, “I don’t understand why this character would do XYZ.”
The least helpful thing a writer can do in this situation is explain the context required to understand the motivation behind that characters actions in that moment.
Because when a reader says “I don’t understand,” or “I don’t buy,” they don’t want an explanation.
And if someone asks you a question during a notes session, they don’t actually want you to give them an answer.
They want the answer to be in the next draft of the script so that future readers don’t have that question.
Writing a screenplay is intimidating enough as it is…
But knowing what to do with your script after you finish writing it is a mystery for most screenwriters.
I ask people who download my Ultimate PDF Guidebook to Querying, “What is the biggest struggle you have with your screenwriting career?”
Most people say, “I can’t get my script into the right hands.”
or
“I can’t get agents and managers to read my script.”
As someone who has been that coveted gatekeeper, I can tell you from firsthand experience and with absolutely certainty that neither of these things are any screenwriter’s “biggest” problem.
This sounds harsh, but I’m doubling down on it right now:
I don’t care who you are, where you are, how many people you know, or how good of a screenwriter you are, getting a literary manager to read your script is not your biggest problem.
Here are the two biggest problems a screenwriter actually faces:
Your scripts aren’t good enough to make people want to pay money for them.
No one in a hiring position wants to hire you.
This sounds harsh, but the sooner you can be honest with yourself, the sooner you can start to solve both of these problems. And these are solvable problems.
You can spend all day, all year, your entire life banging your head against a wall trying to get a manager’s attention, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to happen. But if you spend time every day building your craft and building your network, you will eventually be in demand among literary managers.
They will fight over you.
Your problem right now is not that you can’t get attention.
Your problem is that your writing is not yet good enough to get you attention.
But, let’s say that your writing is expert-level incredible. Good enough to get you a manager who is hungry for success and who legitimately believes in your work. A manager who wants to take a chance on you.
But once they do, now their job is to get other people to take a chance on you.
Most writers don’t realize this.
They don’t realize that a rep can’t actually make your dreams come true. A rep can’t actually open doors for you or get you hired. They just expand your reach. Your script, your resume, and your personality still have to do all the heavy lifting to land that paying gig.
Your manager sends your script to production companies, and they try to get those companies attached as producers. They send your script to Showrunners, and they try to get those Showrunners to agree to shepherd your project from development to a sale, then see it all the way through production. And, your rep sends your script to studio executives, trying to get someone to buy it.
Your material might be good enough to get you a manager.
But that doesn’t mean it’s good enough to get you to the level after that.
So, here we are back at my #1 yet least popular piece of advice:
You have to keep improving the quality of your material and your understanding of the craft. But my advice is always actionable, so while you’re working on your craft, here are the steps to determine if your script is actually good.
Step One: Just assume it isn’t.
If you’re asking yourself, “is my script any good?” it’s safe to say that it isn’t.
If you’re asking this about a first draft, then I 100% guarantee that it isn’t good. This is true for every single writer across time at every level. Even the geniuses. No one’s first draft is good. Period.
But for the second, third, and fourth drafts?
This might sound like a harsh response.
But it isn’t meant to be harsh. It’s meant to free you from the limiting (and stressful) YES/NO binary. When you’re seeking feedback on your screenplay, don’t ask anyone whether it is good. They will either make you feel bad or they will lie to you.
Neither option is productive.
Instead, ask your readers, “What isn’t working?” “Where did you get bored?” or “What was the story about?”
You can also ask, “What is working?” But this is mostly only useful in boosting your ego (Which isn’t nothing! Sometimes an ego boost is what we need to keep going).
But try to save just a couple minutes at the end of any notes conversation for this part.
Step Two: Give it time.
As Tom Vaughan is fond of saying, “The least expensive script consultant is simply to put the screenplay down and come back to it later.”
Take some time away from your script to give it a fresh, objective perspective.
The only constant in life is change. We are never the same writer or even the same person that we were a few months ago. This means when you reread your script, you’re a different person than the writer who wrote it.
This allows you to point out flaws and errors without taking anything personally.
You didn’t write it.
“Past you” did.
You’ll probably forget most of the words that you wrote. This means you get to experience one of the best feelings in the writing process: Being pleasantly surprised by something genuinely entertaining, interesting, funny, or insightful that you yourself wrote.
Just make sure that while you put that script on the shelf you’re actually taking the time off to work on a new project. This has two benefits:
You’re twice as productive as you would be if you were just waiting.
You will be even more emotionally distant from your script because you will have allowed yourself to get deep into something new.
Once you get back to your original script, you’ll be a brand new writer ready to look at it through fresh, objective eyes.
And that will make it way easier to tell what is and isn’t working.
Step Three: Learn to evaluate scripts.
Just because you can evaluate someone else’s script doesn’t mean you’re going to be good at evaluating your own.
Those activities are totally separate skills.
However, how can you hope to accurately evaluate your own script if you don’t even know the first thing about evaluating someone else’s?
Great news! I wrote a whole deep dive on how to do this here.
The more practice you get objectively analyzing the work of others, the more you’ll be able to fine tune your approach for when you’re ready to analyze your own.
Step Four: Pull directly from the text.
This is a tool I learned from taking classes from Corey Mandell and Talton Wingate.
As I mentioned above, it’s easy for writers to assume that they have included information about their character’s goals and motivations that actually didn’t end up in the text. In order to prevent yourself from overlooking this misstep, create a self-evaluation rubric using the questions I list in this deep dive on how to give notes.
But here’s the game-changing hack: Don’t allow yourself to just answer the questions.
This is cheating because you might already know all the answers in your head.
Instead, go into the script and pull direct quotes from either the dialogue or the visuals laid out in your action lines. This prevents you from lying to yourself and forces you to analyze whether important context is actually conveyed to your readers.
Step Five: Give it to trusted friends.
After you get your script into a readable state, give it to 3-5 trusted friends.
Develop these beta readers carefully. They should be people who understand and speak the language of story structure. They should be people who like movies. Ideally, they’re people who want what’s best for you and who like the kinds of movie that you want to write.
But just because someone is a good writer doesn’t mean that they give good notes.
You need to train them.
The best way to do this is to not ask them whether your script is good. Instead, give them the same evaluating questions from Step Four. But unlike you, they should not be pulling quotes from the text. Since they don’t know your story as well as you do, you want them to do the opposite.
When they’re done reading the script, sit down for a conversation with them.
Ask them about your story.
Can they relay it back to you? Did they understand the most important parts? Where did they lose interest? What emotional moments were the most memorable to them?
Probe for real, actionable responses.
In this way, you can find problems to address in your rewrite. This is much more useful than just asking someone “did you like it?”
Step Six: Test it with people you know.
Once you use helpful notes from collaborators to write multiple drafts, you’ll have a “final” draft that you’re happy with and proud of.
But before you start sending it off to producers and managers, try testing it with your ideal audience. This is when you get to start involving family, friends, and close personal industry contacts into your evaluating and rewriting process. Ideally, you have talked to these people in the past about your writing aspirations and they have explicitly offered to read your material when it’s ready.
(I pulled this tactic from Nathan Barry’s interview with Tim Grahl).
Send the first 10-30 pages of your script to your friend.
Ask for their feedback. Ask what they think. If their response is, “it’s good!” then you know that your script either isn’t that good or your friend is lying to you. If they offer constructive feedback, awesome. You can use it to make those first 30 pages even stronger.
But if they respond with, “Wait, you only sent me 30 pages. Where is the rest????”
Well then now you know that you have a script that starts off in a legitimately compelling way.
Step Seven: Send it to industry professionals.
Only do this once you have gone through multiple drafts and gotten multiple rounds of feedback from various people that you trust.
Once your script is ready to take out to the town, start with industry professionals that you know. Reach out to them via email and ask if you can send them a draft of your latest script. Include the logline for it.
Warm queries to people you know are always better than cold queries to strangers.
Don’t know any industry professionals personally?
That’s a problem that you need to fix ASAP. Don’t worry, I have a deep dive on how to build a Hollywood network here. (You should start building this network before you even finish your script.)
As you send out your script, Gauge the responses of your readers.
Do they offer you money? Do they ask if they can send it to people that they know?
That is how you know that it is good.
If this is the case, you might consider sending the script to even more people. But if your script is great, you’ll quickly find producers who want to attach themselves to the project and start advocating for it on your behalf.
Then you won’t have to.
If you get a lukewarm, negative, or radio silence response to your script, it’s time to consider your next steps. The options are:
Shelve your script and work on something else.
Use any feedback you’ve received, and start working on a new draft.
Hollywood is full of uncertainty, but you can control your networking and you can control how often you show up every day to further your understanding of the craft.
Never minimize or lose sight of the parts of this process that you can control.
Do whatever you want! It’s a free country. But notice that I did not suggest:
Submit your script to competitions or fellowships.
Pay for script consultations.
Query agents or managers.
List it on a paid coverage site.
I’m not saying that you can’t or shouldn’t do any of these things.
But know the benefits for each.
Competitions and fellowships can be good for getting attention and exposure. But they’re an inaccurate (and slow) barometer for whether a script is “good” or not. And the notes and coverage you receive in response can be unhelpful or unreliable.
Script consultations can be really helpful.
I stand by the expert advice and insights that I give in my own script consultations.
But it isn’t a “thumbs up/thumbs down” kind of service. My job is to dig into your script, probe for problems, find them, and help your script become the best that it can be (or at least get you to an even better next draft). Too many times, writers come to me asking, “Do I have what it takes??”
I get it. You want reassurance.
And I can give it to you: Of course you have what it takes.
I also can’t give it to you: Just because you have “what it takes” doesn’t mean that you are special. You’re not. Everyone has what it takes to become a professional screenwriter. That doesn’t mean that any of you are going to do it. It’s going to be hard, and it is going to take way longer than you want it to.
But I firmly believe that screenwriting is worth pursuing because it is so difficult, so overwhelming, and so tough to stick with.
It’s the challenge that makes it rewarding to finally succeed at.
Finishing a first draft and sending it to a script consultant to “see if it’s any good” is a waste of your money. Not because they can’t help. They can. And they will.
But, due to the laws of physics, a trusted advisor can only read your script for the first time once.
Therefore, to get the most out of an expert’s notes, follow the steps listed above first.
The goal should be to try and take this script as far as you possibly can on your own.
Then, when you get stuck, you can call in the big guns (paid professionals who are experts in their craft) for help taking your script to the next level.
When you get stuck, this is the time to take a class and dig into new skills and new ideas so you can implement them in future projects and in future drafts.
If you’re asking yourself, “is my script any good?” I promise that it isn’t.
And that admission should feel liberating to you.
It means now you can focus on the real fun: Diagnosing exactly what is and isn’t working and solving the puzzle of how to fix it.
To get an idea of what some of these problems can be, check out to deep dive I wrote on common script notes I give and how to fix them.
Excellent post, Audrey. Your advice to put the script down, work on something else, and return with fresh eyes is essential to self-editing.
Love this and I'm going to include it on a list of resources I'm putting together for aspiring novelists. Thanks for articulating the tough love part of writing.