Why a Writers' Group is the Answer

I’ve written about writers' groups before and the importance of having one. Nearly 4 years ago, in fact, it was one of my first blogs.

As a writer, you cut yourself off from the rest of humanity and go in a room with your own thoughts and ideas and try to get them out of your head and onto a page. And unlike, say, a technical writer who might have specs to refer to about the thing he/she is writing about, you got nothin’… All you have are the ideas rolling around in your head. How do you know which one to choose to work on at any given time? Or if you’re in the middle of a script, how do you know the best way to approach the next scene?

All you have as a writer is your imagination and your creativity. Sure, you need the craft—you need to understand 3-act structure, character development, scene structure, human nature, how people speak, and on and on. But the first thing you need is that imagination.

Your unique take on the world and the people in it is what makes your work the best it can be. You need the craft, of course, that’s a given—but to make that craft work for you, you need creativity and imagination.

BUT when you’ve written a few pages, are you the best judge of whether or not they’re good? [Whatever ‘good’ is in the current moment.] Generally, you’re not—others are. And when it comes to buying your work and some company risking millions of dollars to get your work on the screen, they’re going to be the ones to decide whether it’s good. They may have lousy taste or they may have great taste—but the decision is theirs.

Unless you’re the next Emily Dickinson, you don’t hide your work in a trunk your whole life—you put it out there into the marketplace and hope there will be some takers. So when you DO put your work out there for the world to see, that’s when it needs to be the absolute best it can be, cuz you’ll only get one shot with each person who agrees to read it.

To maximize your chances of that reader choosing your script to develop, you need seriously critical friends who will read it and be absolutely ruthless in telling you what’s wrong with it. This is tough. Most writers just want to be told, “It’s brilliant—next Academy Award winner—don’t change a thing.” But NO writer has EVER heard these words from a producer, director, studio exec, agent. That’s a writer's fantasy, but it’s not reality for a million-dollar screenwriter or for you.

Hence the need for that writers' group to tell you the absolute truth. Only then do you have a chance on working on your script to make it the best it can be—so that when that reader does read it, you’ve got a shot.

Next week, how to make a writers' group work for you.

Copyright © Diane Lake

10Jan21

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