Impatience is a plague among writers. Screenwriter Christopher Keane explains why sending your script out too soon hurts you, and how to wait wisely.
Impatience is a virus, a plague among writers. It crawls into writers’ brains and screams: Hurry Up! If you don’t send the script off now, they won’t want it. They’ll forget it’s coming. They won’t remember me.
So what if it needs another pass? So what if I haven’t gone deep with the characters, and the story has a couple of holes – the sheer brilliance of it will override those minor discrepancies.
Or there’s this one: It’s been two weeks, and I haven’t heard from them. Call them up, everyday. Bug them. You’re a star; they just don’t know it yet. Bugging them will make them pay attention. Don’t hesitate! Pick up the phone! Crank up the e-mail. Make yourself known!
What are impatient people called? I mean, besides that. Yes! The big three: Arrogant, Insensitive and Overbearing. Impatience is a huge career stopper. What causes it: usually, stress. How to stop it: walk away, or count to ten, or lower your voice.
Impatience has been my plague. I have hounded agents. One of them actually bought me a plane ticket to Mexico City just to get me out of town while he negotiated my deal. Funny story? Not from the agent’s POV.
I was a major pain to him and to me, and to the process. I chalked up one more notch in my reputation as being “difficult.” I left the top agency in town because the agents were not getting it done fast enough – on my time.
Of course, when I think back, they were moving at ram speed, but I was at double ram. I expected their work on my behalf to catch up to my expectations. This particular agent was probably glad to see me go.
I have also committed impatience’s greatest crime.
Welcome to a horror story: I have a friend, an MD who teaches at Harvard. He had been working on a novel for three years, for at least three hours every day. One day he calls me up and asks me to read the manuscript quickly, again. Why?
His brother is a very good friend of Random House’s Sonny Mehta, one of the publishing industry’s handful of most powerful people. Sonny Mehta has promised to read my friend’s book, as a personal favor to his brother.
I say I will read it over the weekend and give notes. My MD friend brings me the book Thursday. I go to work. friend. I tell him it’s excellent, which it is, but that he has places that need to be fixed. They will take some time, but they will make the book what it should and can be – an excellent literary effort to which anyone, I felt, would give substantial consideration. And he has Sonny Mehta who will, if he likes it, get it published.
To make these changes, I felt, would take, at the clip my friend works, perhaps two months. There is a long pause on the other end of the line. Finally, I hear, “Ah, Chris, when I brought you the book on Thursday I had another copy, which I took to the Federal Express and sent off to Sonny Mehta.”
Now there was a pause on my end, during which I tried to calm myself. I say, “It’s not bad enough that I spent three days working on this for nothing, but you might have killed your big goose.”
Sonny Mehta read the book over the weekend and in a short conciliatory note stated that the book was indeed promising but not far enough along to justify him passing it along to one of his hard working editors.
Would Sonny Mehta have published it after my friend spent two more months on it? That’s not the point. My friend will never know, because in this writing business, as they say, you only really get one shot at the top. For a time my friend was paralyzed by the rejection. Then he abandoned the work totally because it reminded him of his own terrible failure.
We’ve all heard the reasons behind why people are impatient. Self-righteousness. Fear of being taken advantage of. Hysterical childhoods brought forward.
Extremely low esteem. Egoism leading to unwarranted self-worth. Unworthiness leading to self-sabotage. All true.
So what? If you’ve got it – you need to lose it.
I have tried to learn to wait. I have occupied myself with other things so that I don’t check my messages and email every two minutes. It’s not easy. I have hyperventilated over what I imagine others are doing with my script, when in fact they have fifty other things to do before they get to it, including taking out the garbage.
I have driven myself crazy imagining every bad scenario imaginable and linking them all to the fate of my screenplay.
I have been constantly shocked when someone tells me she is sorry she didn’t call me back yesterday but she was out sick. She might have added, and I’m really sorry that it had nothing to do with your script. Impatience as paranoia.
I have been convinced that the agent or producer is literally checking the mail room at ten-minute intervals looking for my script, and getting pissed off at me, thus ruining my career forever, for my not having delivered it as promised. If I send it, driven by some fear or other, it usually means that I have sent work with undernourished characters and flimsily plot lines running through derivative stories. And I wonder why it hasn’t been picked up? It’s all about impatience.
What’s the hurry? Why can’t you stand delay? What are you going to do for yourself?
Use patience in all things.
Why?
Because impatience kills.
Christopher Keane’s new screenwriting book, “Romancing the A-List: Writing the Script the Big Stars Want to Make,” was released in April 2008. He has also written for film and television, The Hunter (Paramount), The Crossing (WB), and The Huntress (USA Network series), as well as screenwriting books, “How to Write a Selling Screenplay” and “Hot Property.” Christopher is also a script consultant. He can be reached at Keanewords. com and at [email protected]. He teaches and lectures at Emerson College, Harvard, NYU, and the Smithsonian Institution.
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