When attempting to sell your screenplay, social skills are important. Screenwriters are not always, by nature, social creatures. We can be somewhat cantankerous by nature, and the cliché of the “difficult writer” has been around, more or less, since the beginning of time for a reason – there’s a tremendous amount of truth to it. However, making movies is a collaborative medium, which means that in order to get anything done, you are going to have to deal with, and spend large amounts of time with, other people — mainly producers, if you’re lucky and get to sell something, and you’ll need to be full of more than just screenplay writing tips to get something done.

At this point, once you’ve built up your database of rising talent and used IMDBPro to get the contact information of screenwriters who you actually respect, you can start reaching out to both categories of these people. However, because they are at different stages in their careers, you will need to create different types of emails for these people. I know, I know, it doesn’t seem fair — but it’s a necessary evil.

Tip 1: Take The Time To Tell Your Favorite Writer How Great They Are

One of the universal aspects of the human experience is that, no matter who you are, people love to be complemented. And in Hollywood, an industry where tons of people lie to one another on a daily basis, any expression of sincerity, any time someone says that they like your work and actually means it, is a big deal. So be sincere.

Tip 2: Say Something Nice and Sincere to the Screenwriter

By extension, another good screenplay writing tip is to take the time to say something nice to a writer whose work you really respect — if you can’t find a direct mailing address, send an email to their agent. The key thing here is to not ask for anything — don’t ask them to read your script, don’t ask them to get you a meeting. Just tell them what their works means to you, and you might be pleasantly surprised at the response you get. I am not a religious man, by any stretch of the word, but I do believe in good karma and that what you do will come back to you, so if you pay some good vibes forward, it’s pretty reasonable to assume that you’ll get some in return.