Screenwriting Tales from My Life in Hollywood
These essays about my career in the US film/TV business will hopefully leave aspiring screenwriters better prepared than I was when I arrived in Los Angeles.
After fifteen years as a professional screenwriter, I think it’s fair to say I have accumulated some war stories. Anyone who’s managed to stick around for that long in this business can say the same. When I joined Medium, one of my goals was to share some of them with aspiring and emerging writers because I felt such anecdotes would’ve benefited me a lot more early in my career than yet another book about “how to write screenplays”. Screenwriting is hard, absolutely, but no matter how good you are, navigating the Hollywood ecosystem of agents, producers, studio/network/streamer execs, and other deep pockets is — at least from my experience — much harder.
While I’m really only a year in here, I’ve amassed quite a few of these essays about surviving as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Some of them are bloodier than others. Some are outright scary. Some are just fucking funny. I’ll let you judge which is which.
Compiled below are the SCREENWRITING TALES I’ve written so far. More will inevitably follow. If you have questions about anything I’ve covered here, don’t…
