I've been following this whole roundtable and it's been awesome throughout. Really getting the vibe of how young and fresh these guys are, and how grateful they are to be where they are now which is fantastic to see. Looking forward to Part 4! Question for Scott (or if anyone else drops by) - Did you have a moment where you thought you were ready before you actually were? Where you wrote a script, thought it was great, got notes back - "nah, not so great". If so, how did you come back from that?

Some really disheartening (and encouraging) stories here! Thanks again and keep them coming!

At the beginning of today's roundtable there was discussion of story beats. Do you feel it's completely wrong to use formulaic storytelling? Because I believe the general movie-going audience like the familiar. Most of those romantic comedies are just a rehash of 'take XYZ aspect of a wedding or getting married' and there's your romantic comedy. As long as you hit the story beats, you'll draw that audience and do fairly well at the box office.

Hi. I'm apparently the guy who doesn't talk much. But I had a thought re: your question Ned. There's this great story about Michelangelo that's probably apocryphal. But it goes like this: the sculptor was commissioned by a secular noble to create a statue for the noble's garden. So Michelangelo took the job, went to his workshop, toiling away alone until he'd finished the thing. The guy shows up to collect it, is happy with the work, loads it on a cart and takes it away. A few weeks later, however, he wakes up in the middle of the night to this horrible tinking sound coming from outside. He goes to his window, and there's Michelangelo, in the renaissance equivalent of his bathrobe, chipping away at the statue. The noble yells at him to leave it alone. The work is done, and now it belongs to him. But Michelangelo ignores him, having woken in a cold sweat to the realization that the damn thing wasn't finished. He could have done so much more... With every project I write, there's a wonderful moment of euphoria that comes shortly after writing Fade Out. For a couple of days I walk around happy, safely smug within the comfort of my own genius. I attach it as a PDF and send it to people to read. And then, like clockwork, the realization strikes that what I've written is actually the worst thing anyone has ever written in the history of bad writing. And now I'm ready to sell a kidney to get those emails back. But it's too late, and the thing is out there. And this happens every single time. The frustrating paradox of writing is that the greater your skill becomes, the greater your ability to spot your own weaknesses becomes as well. So, unfortunately, that feeling of having written something you thought was great only to learn that it wasn't never goes away. Neither do the notes. I'm in the middle of developing a couple of projects with some big name writers. People who you'd think were immune to being told your stuff wasn't ready, or that you had farther to grow. And the notes and critiques they get are just as brutal as the ones we do. What I've found is that I've had to actually readjust what my definition of "ready" actually means. There's never a moment where you can put the cherry on top and everyone is satisfied. Even if the studio buys it, and someone has to love it for that to happen, the moment you're in the room with them they're already heaping their perceived flaws on you to motivate you to do whatever you've done differently. For me, then, ready simply means "Have I honored the intentions that we believed would cause this thing to be worthy of becoming a movie?" That's all you can really control. Whatever talent you have, whatever opinions your collaborators hold, however hot or cold you are as a writer, these are all things beyond your scope of influence. If you know you cheated, if you know there's a scene or a moment that you didn't murder every brain cell you had to try and make better, then you're not ready. But if you did, then you attach the PDF, hit send, and leave the rest of it up to fate.

In my view, genre and structure are the places where you don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel. The tropes are there because they provide a grammar the audience speaks and can use to understand your story. What hopefully isn't cliché is the unique perspective, handed down in the voice of your character, on whatever situation your structure demands of your protagonist. It's fine to have a meet cute in a romantic comedy, because, after all, they do have to meet. But what transmutes you from someone going through the plot motions to someone who's creating a genuine emotional experience in your audience is the choice to experience these moments from a singular point of view. For me, that's how I'd define voice, and that's actually what people pay you for. They don't pay you for structure; they can buy that for $15 from Syd Field. It's also unfortunately the miserably hard part to find, which is why writers drink. I don't know if I helped, but I got to pretend I was Ernest Hemingway for the last five seconds there, so at least there's that.

the only reason I dropped by to this was the word, ROUNDTABLE... so, where's the pizza? havn't had lunch yet. (Roundtable pizza is a chain store, how big exactly, I don't know) :-)

Totally agree with y'all on structure. So much of this 'gatekeeper advice' from these books is about imposing a limiting structure on your story, tends to make films bland and samey. I watched a Studio Ghibli film last night, 'Arrietty'. For the first 20 mins I couldn't shake the feeling that something utterly terrible was going to happen. Received conditioning by all these mainstream western movies - "something pivotal must happen in the first 10 pages!"

$15!!! I borrow from the library. Anyway, great advice and I appreciate you taking the time. I'm glad you said structure was important. I think finding a winning concept is perhaps the hardest part. You guys hit that point home in the first part of the series. I think we have to write one of those passion pieces that is a MFNO (movie for no one), in order to learn that hard lesson.

MFNO? I've got a couple of those.

Justin, thanks for taking the time to answer, interested to hear you think there's a grey area of between ready and not ready. Also perversely reassuring to hear everyone gets negative notes from time to time!