IF YOU WANT TO WRITE A MOVIE, DON'T WRITE A SCRIPT

Why aspiring screenwriters should give up on screenwriting.

My dream was to write movies.

For thirteen years, I was a part of The Walt Disney Company, but I didn’t have a glamour job there as a writer.

No, I worked in TV Traffic, meaning that our department scheduled commercials, promos and public service announcements.

We worked all day scheduling the stuff you were just going to fast-forward when you watched your favorite Disney shows on DVR. But, it was a well-run team and I loved my job and the people I worked with.

I left Disney and Los Angeles in 2015 to move my young family to Portland, Oregon, so my wife and I could raise our children closer to my wife’s parents and her sister’s family.

Leaving LA was sad and defeating for me. For twenty-four years, from 1991 as a 21-year-old recent college grad to 2015 as a 46-year-old father of a two year old, I tried like hell to make a TV-Film writing career happen. I had a few agents and a couple of small deals over the years, but nothing I could build a career off of.

I knew leaving Los Angeles was finally putting the nail in the coffin of my failed Hollywood dreams.

I struggled with what to do with my creative energy after I left California. I set my sites on self-publishing, but failed to finish any of the book projects I started.

For example, between 2003 and 2004 I traveled to all 50 States. I thought I would write a travel book on my experiences. I only got to chapter three and quit.

I thought I would write a book about being a Star Wars fan and describe what it was like watching the Star Wars phenomena grow from when I was an 8 year-old child in 1977 going to see Star Wars for the first time, to being a Disney employee when I heard on my lunch break that the company had just bought Lucasfilm, with plans to restart the Star Wars brand with The Force Awakens. Never wrote more than a few chapters of that book, either.

It took two years after I left Los Angeles before I found a self-publishing writing project that I could put the same amount of energy into as I had done for one of my screenplays.

I knew there wasn’t a very good market for the books I had attempted to write since leaving Disney. That’s probably why I gave up on them, because I knew they wouldn’t sell, and there wasn’t a future in them.

Of all the markets for self-published books, I thought the only one I really had a shot at writing for was science fiction.

I just needed an idea.

And in June 2017, I got one.

What if E.T. had adopted Elliot and raised him on his home planet?

It wasn’t quite that simple, but that was the basic idea.

During an alien invasion of Earth, an alien soldier comes across an orphaned human baby. Rather than let the baby die, the alien sneaks the boy back to its’ home world and raises the child as his son.

From there, I was off to the races and immediately wrote the first three chapters. I took those first few chapters home with me to North Carolina for my high school’s 30th reunion at the end of June.

On the trip, I also went to my old college campus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

There I stood at the historic Old Well with the first three chapters and promised myself the next time I came to North Carolina, I would have the finished book in hand. I really didn’t want this to be another failed project that stalled after a hopeful start.

The hardest part of writing the novel was simply finding the time. My job at that point was requiring about 50 to 60 hours a week in working time, plus on top of that I had a two hour round trip commute.

Then, when I got home, I had to help my wife with a three-year-old son and two-year-old daughter.

I found the time to write late at night or sneaking in a few hours in on the weekend. The biggest thing I did was using my saved up vacation time and giving myself two big writing weeks in the fall of 2017, to do the major lifting, as far as getting the actual words down on the page.

On September 17, 2017 (twenty-six years to the day after I first drove into Los Angeles to start my Hollywood adventure) I finished a first draft of my novel A UNIVERSE APART.

I would spend most of my Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday time at my computer rewriting the book.

Yeah, my wife loved that. But I promised her it would pay off in the end. She just had to trust me.

Finally on December 30th I self-published A UNIVERSE APART on Amazon for ebook Kindle downloads.

In the first few days I could track the pages being read. It appeared to me that three people had read the book, about 230 pages, in one day each.

I was so excited by those early promising results. With no advertising or promotion, these readers had found my book and read it in a day. Who reads a book in a day? I’ll tell you who, someone that just can’t put the damn thing down, right?

I thought I had stumbled onto the next Harry Potter or Hunger Games. Was A UNIVERSE APART really that good?

No, it wasn’t.

After the first few days, no one bought the novel again and the book’s ranking on Amazon fell to

#721,064.

In those first few promising days, I had boasted to my wife the we were going to have a writing franchise on our hands. I already had the ideas for two sequels that I just had to write in 2018, so we could have the three-volume A UNIVERSE APART trilogy gift set ready for Christmas shoppers.

After the book fell so far, so fast, I had to admit the book was really just going to be a hobby and not much more.

I did at least want to buy a few Facebook ads just to see what would happen. So my wife and I agreed to an acceptable budget to buy the ads.

My Facebook ads started running on Sunday, January 14, 2018 and nothing happened. No one bought the book.

Hell, at that point I realized I was better off just giving the book away for free, just to see if there was any interest in it at all. I had put so much time into it, I wanted to at least have a few more people read it.

So I started a two-day promotion on Amazon, that would let people download the e-book version of A UNIVERSE APART for free.

I changed the creative on my Facebook ad to let people know it was a free download on Amazon and all they had to do was click the link and the book was theirs for the keeping.

I also turned to my Facebook friends and let them know they could download the book for free.

While I wouldn’t make any money on the free downloads, the downloads would be reflected on the book’s ranking.

Thanks to my Facebook friends and revised Facebook ads, A UNIVERSE APART jumped from being ranked #721,054 on Amazon to being ranked #1492 and climbing. On January 16, 2018 it was listed as the #6 top free download for Sci-fi Alien First Contact novels.

My little book that could, had just leapt over 700,000 books in one day.

Okay, okay, the truth is if you sell just one copy of your book on Amazon, your sales ranking will jump by several hundred thousand positions alone.

And okay, okay, these were free downloads, so I didn’t make a dime off of them.

But the key for me in self-publishing was never going to be making a living off my Kindle downloads.

The dream for me was that I would get enough downloads, likes, posts, shares, tweets, reviews that my book couldn’t be ignored.

My hope was that once you show that your little self-published novel has found an audience, a bigger book publishing fish might be more likely to come along and perhaps offer you a real book deal.

Once you get a real book deal, with a real book publisher, guess what happens then? It is more likely that a Hollywood studio or producer will take an interest in your book. And if you can sell the movie rights and get the movie actually made, then it is a whole new ball game.

So if you want to write a movie, don’t write a screenplay. Write a novel and publish it yourself.

To write a movie, at least 20 key decision makers have to say yes.