“What I tell young screenwriters is, ‘Take responsibility for your work.’ Collaborate with friends who want to make films, and with them produce your work on whatever scale your filmmaking team can afford. Digital video has brought down the cost of making your own films. Don’t wait for permission. Create your own opportunities. In terms of your craft, be as mentally free as you can be while you are writing—and then be ruthless in your assessment of your need to rewrite. Find readers you can trust, whose notes and advice trigger an ‘Oh, you’re right!’ response of self-recognition about the revisions that remain to be done.
And just keep writing. Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers pegs the time commitment at ten thousand hours before you begin to achieve expertise. (And for some of us, longer!) Write a script and put it away. Write another. Put it away. Go back and look at the first script again and rewrite—you’ll see that you already know more about writing, just from having written.”
Screenwriter Robin Swicord (Little Woman)
Interview with Kerrie Flanagan
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[…] “What I tell young screenwriters is, ‘Take responsibility for your work.’ Collaborate with friends who want to make films, and with them produce your work on whatever scale your filmmaking team can afford. Digital video has brought down the cost of making your own films. Don’t wait for permission. Create your own opportunities. In terms […] Original Source… […]