You need someone--friends, family, colleagues--who are willing to give you strong, often difficult feedback, and whose feedback you trust, right? I think that's important for many reasons, but it's also probably your best safeguard against sending out a clunker. Which will probably happen anyway, because writing is a difficult art and an inexact science.

That's right, Amos. First impressions are critical in Hollywood, so do everything you can to make sure your script is a professional quality caliber screenplay.

Hi Scott -- This is fantastically off topic, but the part about you giving away all your hard copy scripts caught my eye. I kinda groan when people ask such arcane logistical questions, but -- does this mean that when you read & mark up good scripts for your own erudition, they're on your computer?

I'm a hoarder and so I have to avoid accumulating stuff the way an alcoholic has to avoid booze, but I haven't found a way to mark up scripts digitally that makes my notes at-a-glance accessible the way they are with hard copies. Have you worked out a method you could share? Footnotes? The "comment" function in Word?

Thanks!

@ggglaral: I'm afraid I'm quite analog on this front. I have dozens and dozens of scene-by-scene breakdowns of scripts I created back in the late 80s when I was deeply immersing myself in the world of screenplay, desperately playing catch up considering I was a working screenwriter with no formal training in the craft. I also have hundreds of pages of notes I've accumulated on scripts I've read over the years, all Word files in an external hard drive for whenever I need to reference them.

Then I started this blog. So I use that as my means of storing notes, whenever I break down / analyze a script or movie, I post them here, and they're saved.