This is SO TRUE:

“An industry friend read one of my scripts. He said he couldn’t put it down, he loved it, and how excited he was about it; but after he gave it to a reader at his agency and the coverage came back not so glowingly, he got scared and pulled out completely. What happened to HIS initial reaction? Granted, it was not the best script on earth. I would say the coverage was fair to harsh. Everyone has different tastes. But the fact is, far worse scripts have been bought and made money. ”

My friends read my scripts and love them! But the couple of times I have gotten a break and a read in the industry, my coverage has come back as a “consider” with not so flattering comments.

I agree that readers all have different tastes, and perhaps had another reader read my script (dark comedy) they would have had more favorable comments. But I also think that many of the readers in the industry are worried about recommending anything. And as for the comments, how the heck are we writers supposed to take a one-page-paragraph and figure out how to fix our script? Ugh.. frustrating. But we love what we do… so we keep on plugging along.

I did come upon a company called LitCentral.com. They are not an agency or production company, but they offer coverage services to writers for a pretty reasonable price. The cool thing is that your feedback comes in the form of a bar graph. I have never seen another company do this, so I gave it a try.

They break your script down into story structure elements (20 of them) and then they give you comments broken down by each element and a bar graph showing you what you need to work on. I was able to see the areas of my script that needed work (I received a score of 2 and 3 in a few areas) and I easily understood what I needed to do, since the comments were broken down and descriptive.

So I’m rewriting now based on their comments. So we will see…

Connections are definitely valuable in any endeavor. I think you can make it without them if you try hard enough, but it takes way more energy and effort, and a lot more time. Anywhere you go, there’s some tight knot of people controlling things, and if you can break into that circle, you can make it., because they’ll help propel you toward success. Great topic!