Married or Divorced

During my college years, I had to write short stories, screenplays and poetry. Because those writings were primarily graded, I had to make sure I followed the instructors’ assignments. Fortunately, most of my teachers would allow me some creative license. But now that I am writing purely for myself, I have the freedom to write what I want and how I want. Or do I?

There are tons of literary agents and publishers out there and we writers are hoping to connect to at least one that is able to relate to our words and understand the story we're trying to tell. But what if that agent or publisher loves 98% of what you’ve written but wants you to change a percentage of your story. Just a small 2%. That’s not a lot is it? But what if that one piece anchors the whole story? Would you divorce the idea or fight to stay married to it?

I wrote a screenplay a couple of years ago called, Close-up. When it was done, I entered my script into screenwriter’s contests and was excited that I made it to the quarter and semi-finalist portion for a few. After getting close but never winning, I began to think that maybe I should make some changes to my script. I decided to take a writing class at UCLA. UCLA screenwriting classes are known to be taught by instructors whom have a body of published or produced work.

I took a class for 8 weeks and the format was the following:

1. Student would send the teacher a script or a script idea
2. Student would send teacher an outline of a script or idea
3. Student would read pages of the script in front of the class

After reading the script in front of the class, you would get critiques from each student on what they liked, disliked, worked or did not work with your script. Seldom there may be students in your class that are really good at giving constructive criticism. But some may have never written a script or studied screenwriting while others are just not remotely interested your genre. But what about the instructor?

I liked my instructor. Though we argued back and forth about the first 30 pages along with the use of flashbacks, I decided in the end he was right and rewrote most of the beginning of my script. Excited about my changes, I sent it out again but to my surprise I never got even an honorable mention. Was it the changes to my script? I don’t know.

I recently started watching a show called, The Writers’ Room. The show interviews writing staff from popular television shows. A couple of weeks ago it had Shonda Rhimes, executive producer and creator of Scandal. She spoke about how she came up with the idea for the show—a political series about a woman who owns a crisis management firm. When Shonda was selling the idea to the network, they loved it but were not keen that the main character would be having an affair with the President of the United States.

She stood firm to that premise and if you are a fan of the show you know that story line is pivotal to the whole series. But Ms. Rhimes has established herself as a screenwriter, producer and director and I have not. Did she ever have to change a story or concept even though she didn’t want to at the beginning of her career? I’d like to know. I’m not sure what will happen when I'm given that choice. I can’t wait to find out.

What would you do?