What To Expect And Not Expect From The Creative Industry
The creative industry, who you plan to work with if you’re aspiring to be a writer. All you need is hard work and talent, and the rest sorts itself out, right? Well, maybe not.
You might think you just make a few enquiries until you find the right person – sometimes get rejected but sometimes find someone who’s interested. The reality is far bleaker for unproduced writers, so brace yourself.
Something you should keep in mind at all times is that unproduced writers should expect 95% of enquiries to agents, screenwriting managers and producers to receive no response at all. It’s nothing personal, that’s completely normal for the industry if you’re an unproduced writer.
The remaining 5% of enquiries will generally either be a carefully worded PR response for why they’re not interested or can’t read your submission, or if you’re extremely lucky, someone who’s interested in one of your projects.
You should not expect to receive many requests to read a script, and even if you do, you might not get an Option Agreement to produce that project, you might only get feedback about your script (which is still progress – count yourself lucky if you even getthat far!).
If you do only get feedback, other agents/screenwriting managers/producers might be willing to read your script, due to gatekeepers networking with each other. It’s possible, particularly if you received feedback about your script and then made significant improvements to it, that one of the agents/screenwriting managers or producers who reads your script after that might offer you an Option Agreement.
There are several reasons why it’s so difficult to receive a response, let alone a script read request, but the main ones are:
1. The creative industry being cautious and risk-averse in relation to a. original projects/franchises b. an unproduced writer
2. Wanting to avoid the possibility of being sued for stealing ideas from a rejected submission
3. The vast majority of scripts from unproduced writers are terrible and they don’t want to take a chance on potentially reading a solid or even great script but risk reading another terrible script from timewasters (writers who are inexperienced, lack talent, or are unwilling to fully commit to writing)
4. An original project with too high of a budge