Skimming Tangentially Against the Agented Universe, and the Scriptwriting One

[Don’t read too much into this RAMH post’s title.]

Last night, I and 40+ others participated in an interesting webinar called Agent Reads the Slush Pile. It lasted from 8pm Eastern time until close to 10:30. Each of about forty authors submitted the first two pages of a manuscript, including as “identifying” information only the title and genre — i.e., no names. Each of these mini-manuscripts was assigned a random number, which determined the order in which they’d be read. And then the agent… well, the agent read them. Commenting as she went. The idea was to reproduce, aloud, what it was like for an agent to just dive into a batch of unsolicited manuscripts. (And to answer the unspoken question: no, she hadn’t seen any of the submissions in advance.)

How it worked, more precisely: an agent at the agency read the mini-MSS aloud, one at a time, while the lead agent moderated her progress through the reading with little instructions like, “Okay, stop right there for a second…” and “Okay, pick up at the next paragraph.” At each point of interruption or discontinuity she’d point out something like a pattern of word choices or details which were helping (or, more often, hurting) the story at this point. (Considering that it’s the first two pages of a novel, one definitely wants not to include anything like impediments.)

We also had plenty of opportunities to ask questions, which didn’t need to be restricted to the reading/critiques.

I won’t get into details of the critiques. But I will say that it all drove home to me the importance of three precepts, as if you don’t already know these things:

• Choose your genre well and carefully.
• Choose the details you include — also both well and carefully.
• Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.

Indeed, much of the evening reminded me of two things I’d read recently by one Graham Linehan. He’s one of those boy-genius TV show creators which the UK seems to churn out by the handful these days, in his case specializing not in drama or science fiction but comedy. (I first encountered his name in connection with the brilliant The IT Crowd — that’s capital I, capital T, as in information technology… in short, a sitcom about a corporate computer tech-support department.) Although Linehan was addressing scriptwriting in specific, I think his comments apply pretty much across the board.

In the first of these, Linehan was being interviewed by Bobbie Johnson, at Medium. It included this exchange:

If somebody asked you for tips on becoming a better writer, what’s the one thing you’d tell them?

Show don’t tell.

People pay lip service to this concept but as far as I can see, it’s truly understood by only about one per cent of writers. You can have a scene between two people who never say an unkind word to each other and yet make it clear that they hate each other’s guts. That’s what it’s all about, and yet you often see scripts — or even finished programmes — where there is no subtext at all, where everything is written all over the screen in day-glo colours, for fear that someone might miss the intention.

And in the second, on his own blog (Why, That’s Delightful) Linehan took on the stubborn and thoroughly misplaced “confidence” of (some? many? most?) writers in their own work:

…there is one piece of advice on which I may not have placed enough emphasis, because it is almost impossible to place enough emphasis on it, and it is as follows: when someone reads your script and gives you notes, be grateful, and act on those notes.
Act on them, apply them. You are not a genius. You are just a schmuck. You need help, your script needs help. That opening you think is so hilarious? It’s not. It’s confusing. It doesn’t work. Stop pretending it’s the Odessa Steps. It’s a fucking mess.
And you know what, the scene that follows it? The one that really IS great? The one that everyone loves? That’s going to have to go too. Do you know why? Because as soon as you changed the scene-that’s-not-the-Odessa-Steps, it made that other scene not work either.
Writing is rewriting.
Rewriting is not polishing.
Rewriting is heavy lifting…
I heard of a writing partnership who handed in a first draft and said “We’re not changing a word of that.” If I had been in that room, and had been in a position to do so, I would have said “OK, you’re fired” and then laughed like Doctor Doom for a week. You might as well say “We do not know how to write, and we refuse to learn.”
So repeat after me, you fuckwits who refused to implement that very simple fix that your EXPERIENCED and CLEVER producer suggested:
He is not the problem.
I am the problem.
My script is the problem.
Writing is rewriting.
Writing is rewriting.
Writing is rewriting.

Nothing like tough love, eh?