Writing Coverage vs. Your Own Writing

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  • Writing Coverage vs. Your Own Writing

    General question for anyone who spends all day reading and writing coverage:

    What kind of impact, if any, do you think this has on your own writing?

    Positive? Negative? Positive long-term, but negative short?

    I don't know -- I'm dragging when it comes to my own work right now and I'm wondering what, if anything, is going on in the soup of my subconscious, vis-a-vis duking it out with the coverage all day.

    I'd be curious to hear what other reader-writers have to say about this.

  • #2
    Re: Writing Coverage vs. Your Own Writing

    I've written coverages (none paid for, though money was offered by some writers on one script site) for maybe a hundred fifty scripts.

    What I've noticed is that many of the guidelines I use for my coverages (three-act structure with clean act breaks, clear theme, genre, etc.) are guidelines that I push aside in my own writing, at least for the first few drafts -- and often beyond that, since I like to mash-up genres and keep themes low profile.

    Whether this makes me a hypocrite for not following my own rules, or a bloated ego for thinking I can go beyond them -- or both -- I'll leave for the reader to decide....

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    • #3
      Re: Writing Coverage vs. Your Own Writing

      I wrote at least one piece of coverage every week for 6 years, sometimes as much as a 10 a week, and there's no doubt it made me a better… director and producer.

      It was reading all those scripts that made me a better writer, not writing the coverage. But learning to articulate the ins and outs of film narrative helped me in every other way.

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      • #4
        Re: Writing Coverage vs. Your Own Writing

        Having to write a synopsis of every script I covered was a great way to remind myself that digression and redundancy are the death of drama.

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        • #5
          Re: Writing Coverage vs. Your Own Writing

          All good points. There's no doubt in my mind that reading so many scripts is invaluable.

          What I'm more wondering right now, though, is whether or not writing coverage saps your creativity in its own right. I feel like I don't have much sharpness left to give to my own writing.

          Maybe I need to force myself to write at 5am and spend my mental dollars there first, before work. In any event, thanks for the thoughts.

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          • #6
            Re: Writing Coverage vs. Your Own Writing

            I've found giving notes to other writers to be one of the absolute best ways to improve my own writing. It's a different set of mental tools.

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            • #7
              Re: Writing Coverage vs. Your Own Writing

              I was a full time reader for many, many years. For the first year or two, it was useful and valuable. Every year after that, it got a little worse, until by the end, the job had sapped all of my energy and my writing career had pretty much died. It took a full year after I left the job to understand how much it had harmed my writing and to move past the bad habits it had taught me.

              Coverage is all about saying no. Writing is all about saying yes. You have to be open and accepting of ideas when you're writing, you have to be able to make choices quickly, you have to be able to be confident in what you're saying and how you're saying it, and (at least for me) writing coverage bred the antithesis of that in me.

              Now, when people say to me, "How do I get a job as a reader?" I tell them, "Don't."

              Writing before you start your reading for the day is a decent idea. Give it a try. I used to take weeks off as a reader just to write, or I'd write on weekends. I understand finding another job might be too difficult, but that would be my first choice in your situation. Full-time reading is such a solitary pursuit as well -- pretty much any other job will give you far more networking opportunities as well.

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              • #8
                Re: Writing Coverage vs. Your Own Writing

                Originally posted by jcgary View Post
                I was a full time reader for many, many years. For the first year or two, it was useful and valuable. Every year after that, it got a little worse, until by the end, the job had sapped all of my energy and my writing career had pretty much died. It took a full year after I left the job to understand how much it had harmed my writing and to move past the bad habits it had taught me.

                Coverage is all about saying no. Writing is all about saying yes. You have to be open and accepting of ideas when you're writing, you have to be able to make choices quickly, you have to be able to be confident in what you're saying and how you're saying it, and (at least for me) writing coverage bred the antithesis of that in me.

                Now, when people say to me, "How do I get a job as a reader?" I tell them, "Don't."

                Writing before you start your reading for the day is a decent idea. Give it a try. I used to take weeks off as a reader just to write, or I'd write on weekends. I understand finding another job might be too difficult, but that would be my first choice in your situation. Full-time reading is such a solitary pursuit as well -- pretty much any other job will give you far more networking opportunities as well.
                100% agree with everything jcgary said here. I was a script reader for a few years and a creative/production exec for three years after that. For the first year in each job, it was an incredibly valuable experience. Learning how to look analytically at a script, and how to look at a script from a producer's or company's perspective was invaluable experience that made me a better writer, no doubt. I learned a hell of a lot about what not to do, and avoided making many of those pitfalls in my own writing.

                There is a critical mass, though. When you're working on the other side of the screenwriting industry, it will reach a point where you've learned pretty much all you're going to learn, and then it becomes a soul-crushing grind. You're constantly at war with yourself... the writer part of you wants to respect every script and afford each writer the courtesy of carefully considering each word... and the reader/exec part of you wants to find a reason to pass on the script as soon as possible so you can move onto the next one in the stack.

                The most telling factor, at least for me, was that during the five years I worked as a reader and a creative exec, I didn't finish a single script of my own.

                I would come home and night exhausted from a long day of thinking about story and character, passing on stories and characters, writing script notes for other stories and characters, breaking down scenes for production budgets and schedules, etc. By the time I got home, the last thing I wanted to do was sit at a computer for a few more hours and think about crafting a story and characters.

                It took me a lot of years to realize that I was spending all my professional time working on the creative efforts of others... to the point where I didn't have any enthusiasm for my own.

                If you do have a creative job like that, I would strongly recommend doing your own writing first before you get to work and have to focus on everyone else's writing. But if you have a choice, I'd only recommend doing something creative for a limited amount of time, until you feel like you've got a good handle on how things work. Then get out and find a job that doesn't sap your creative energy all day, so that you can come home (or wake up early) excited to dive into the world of your characters and write stories about them.

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                • #9
                  Re: Writing Coverage vs. Your Own Writing

                  Originally posted by Rantanplan View Post
                  I've found giving notes to other writers to be one of the absolute best ways to improve my own writing.
                  Without a doubt, R.

                  Originally posted by jcgary View Post
                  I was a full time reader for many, many years. For the first year or two, it was useful and valuable. Every year after that, it got a little worse, until by the end, the job had sapped all of my energy and my writing career had pretty much died.
                  Yeah, I am somewhere on that continuum right now. It's getting worse. You mention that it gave you bad habits -- those I have yet to see, in terms of my own writing. (Although that's always going to be a process I can't see very well anyway, right?)

                  Originally posted by SoCalScribe View Post
                  Learning how to look analytically at a script was invaluable experience that made me a better writer, no doubt. I learned a hell of a lot about what not to do, and avoided making many of those pitfalls in my own writing.

                  There is a critical mass, though. When you're working on the other side of the screenwriting industry, it will reach a point where you've learned pretty much all you're going to learn, and then it becomes a soul-crushing grind. You're constantly at war with yourself... the writer part of you wants to respect every script and afford each writer the courtesy of carefully considering each word... and the reader/exec part of you wants to find a reason to pass on the script as soon as possible so you can move onto the next one in the stack.

                  The most telling factor, at least for me, was that during the five years I worked as a reader and a creative exec, I didn't finish a single script of my own.

                  I would come home and night exhausted from a long day of thinking about story and character, passing on stories and characters, writing script notes for other stories and characters, breaking down scenes for production budgets and schedules, etc. By the time I got home, the last thing I wanted to do was sit at a computer for a few more hours and think about crafting a story and characters.

                  It took me a lot of years to realize that I was spending all my professional time working on the creative efforts of others... to the point where I didn't have any enthusiasm for my own.
                  Totally. I have learned all I'm going to learn from the day-in, day-out deconstructing and analyzing and articulating, etc. I absolutely feel like it's diminishing returns at this point. What it boils down to, when you think about it, is the difference between being a coach and a player. And yeah, right now, thinking about writing is definitively the last thing I want to do in my free time. I want to do something that doesn't include letters -- as in, fvck the alphabet and the horse it rode in on. And SoCal, you mention that you were spending all your professional time on other people's work -- I would add that you were spending all your (daily) creative capital on it, too. (Google "ego depletion theory" for more on that last line. It's a very interesting idea and it has a lot of intuitive truth to it.)

                  Thanks for the input, all.

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                  • #10
                    Re: Writing Coverage vs. Your Own Writing

                    Originally posted by Armak View Post
                    I wrote at least one piece of coverage every week for 6 years, sometimes as much as a 10 a week, and there's no doubt it made me a better... director and producer.

                    It was reading all those scripts that made me a better writer, not writing the coverage. But learning to articulate the ins and outs of film narrative helped me in every other way.
                    This. But also, by thinking more like a director and producer, I find myself making much better decisions while writing. Instead of giving myself complete creative freedom and having to cut major things later, I start off holding the reins a little tighter to steer the story along budget and marketability lines. I'm happy with the result, the rewrites are easier and the notes I get are much more focused on story.
                    Vancouver Screenwriters Meetup Group

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                    • #11
                      Re: Writing Coverage vs. Your Own Writing

                      I've purposely steered clear of such jobs after watching what happens to professional readers. I've known a few who were also aspiring writers and over time, their own work became conceptual and dry. It's like they'd spent so much time analyzing it put them in a permanent conceptual head space that is not conducive for producing meaty, raw intuitive stories.

                      Also, not all pro readers are good writers. I know a couple who believe because they've read and covered pro scripts, they're a pro writer too - but their scripts are not pro level. They're totally amateur and have big issues. But they don't "see" it because of who they read - they think they're in the same camp. It's a weird disconnect. These readers completely lost the ability to effectively evaluate their own writing.
                      Last edited by lostfootage; 02-11-2013, 09:33 AM.

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                      • #12
                        Re: Writing Coverage vs. Your Own Writing

                        I don't know if anyone would want to be a full-time reader, but I've certainly found that reading a script and writing some coverage can be a good way to make a little money on the side that fits in well with the writer's schedule.

                        eg, I write for a couple of hours, need a break, read a script, do some coverage, go to the gym, come back ... write some more. I'd need that "down time" from my own writing anyway, and this way it's productive.

                        Whereas any job you have that requires you to go somewhere is going to have a more rigid schedule which won't flow with your own writing quite so well.

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                        • #13
                          Re: Writing Coverage vs. Your Own Writing

                          I found it was writing the synopsis that wore me out. I can write evaluations all day without losing inspiration, but something about boiling the characters, plot, and subplots down to two pages fries some part of my creativity brain.

                          Also, being exposed to bad writing is hard on the soul. I had to read regular doses of Hegelund, the Coen brothers, Sorkin, etc to keep my creative compass pointed North.

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