Last week, I had the pleasure of getting lunch with a young man my youngest daughter had asked me to talk with about screenwriting. She’d had a conversation with him at her job and the topic got around to his dream of being a screenwriter for a living. She responded, “That’s what my Dad does.”, and thus our lunch.

He was all smiles, an earnest young man just out of the Marines with a tour in Iraq. I thanked him for his service. He smiled and said he had a lot of questions for me.

“I read up on you and you have a bunch of movies you wrote out there. That’s so cool.” Flattery will get me to pay for lunch, so he started off very well.

He took out a notepad and a pen and readied it to write down my infinite wisdom. I told him to fire away with his questions.

“Well,” he said, “I’m planning a two week trip to Los Angeles and before I went I thought I’d fill out the applications first and get them out. Do you know where I can get some?”

I was confused. “What applications?”

“Screenwriter applications. To get a job writing movies. I took a screenwriting class at my junior college and did pretty good.”

There are times in your life you are faced with telling somebody something they don’t want to hear or are not prepared to hear. Sometimes you feign ignorance to get out of it or soft peddle it keep from hurting someone or stomping on their dreams. Sometimes, you wince, bite the bullet, and storm forward. As he sat there, across from me in the booth, all smiles, I stormed forward because in the long run it was the right thing to do.

“There are no applications.”

Then I explained to him the realities of the job. The only way you get a job as a screenwriter is to have a bunch of great screenplays already written, and then become a business person and market them and yourself to the industry. Then if they like the way you write, they either buy one of your screenplays (and let someone like me rewrite them) or they like your style so much they hire you to rewrite a script, probably one of mine. I chuckled at my joke. He didn’t. His smile was now half gone.

“Oh, I don’t have any scripts written.” Then he perked up. “But what if you have some great ideas?”

I explained that nobody buys ideas from first time writers, they buy the realizations of those ideas, that you can’t even copyright ideas, and that as a writer what makes you special is how you take those ideas and use them to write a completed story that is unique.

One quarter of the smile was left.

“That could take a long time.”

“Yes”, I explained, “it does. It took me eighteen years.”

His eyes flashed sideways like he was looking for an escape route. He steadied himself and looked back at me. No smile now. He was in serious mode. “Ok. Well then, I guess I need to write some scripts.”

Whew.

Then the other shoe dropped. “Ok. Then how do I get my Star Wars idea to the Star Wars people? I have the perfect idea for the next set of films.”

Man, he was not going to make this easy. And I was off, explaining to him that the Star Wars people didn’t want his idea, didn’t need his idea, and would never ever look at his ideas, which was upsetting to him. I explained to him about intellectual property and how Star Wars was a business. Just like a bakery or an automobile factory. You wouldn’t walk into either and tell the owners to how to bake their cakes or design their cars. I explained to him that the whole movie industry was a business. A big money making (sometimes) business that, despite how much we sometimes don’t want it to, operates like any big business, not some heaven-like playland where you apply for screenwriting jobs and the next day they’re making your film starring whatever actor YOU want. Now he was frowning.

It’s not fun smashing someone’s preconceived notions. Especially a young man so well meaning and genuine. But he rallied, much to my relief, and said he was ready to learn.

So he used his pen and pad and wrote down everything I had to tell him about getting started. Some good books to buy, where to read scripts, websites to share scripts and get feedback after he’s done, about doing research, about writing what you know, about using his Marine experiences to maybe write a good yarn based on what he saw and experienced in Iraq…

He took it all in and wrote it all down. And… I think he’ll follow up. I hope he does. I told him how hard it was going to be, but also told him, “Hey. I do make a living at this, so it can be done.”

I paid the check, we shook hands, and parted ways. I wish him nothing but success. He’s a nice young man. And I feel good I opened his eyes and got him pointed, at least, in the right direction.