Stop Trying to Write a Hit, Says a Veteran Hollywood Screenwriter

I was just talking to my creative partner this week about the feature we want to make, and we hemmed and hawed about comps, how ours was unique, and whether it mattered. I told him we’re at the point in the process where we’re wondering if there was any point to what we were doing. I’ve been there every single time I’ve written anything. But to get there is part of the journey, so we celebrated anyway.

Most of us hit the same wall eventually. Why make anything if, potentially, no one is going to see it?

Screenwriter Glenn Gers has spent 25 years in the business, and in a recent talk about creative insignificance, he said… stop trying to matter. Gers wrote Fracture and Mad Money, made the micro-budget indie Disfigured, won an Emmy, and now teaches moviemaking on his YouTube channel and Substack (both called Writing for Screens).

Let’s look at his advice.

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Everyone Is Insignificant, Even Shakespeare

Gers's starting point sounds harsh, but it’s true.

"I am a fan of embracing your insignificance," he said. His reasoning climbs all the way to the top. “On a grand scale, we are all insignificant.”

Shakespeare, he pointed out, is increasingly inaccessible. Most people won't sit through the plays, even as the basic shapes of King Lear and Macbeth keep getting passed down and referred to.

Then he named Edna Ferber, a mid-century best-seller who wrote the novel behind Giant. Barely anyone remembers her now. If fame fades for even the best and the biggest, then chasing it is a poor use of your energy. That might be dark, but it’s also oddly freeing, and it lines up with what we've written about pushing past self-doubt to keep creating anyway.

None of the artists we revere set out to be monuments, he said. They did the best work they could inside the situation they were given, and they created because they had to create, and that is the most anyone gets to do.

We all want to be important and remembered, but reaching a huge crowd or a tiny one doesn't change the value of the thing you made. Once you accept that, the pressure to be significant stops running your life.

You Can Make the Work, Not the Result

Gers draws a hard line between effort and outcome. "You can't create a result. You can create a work and it may or may not get the result, but you can't create the result. You can't write something as a hit," he said.

Everybody is trying to write “a hit,” he said, and only some of them land. The forces that decide whether a script sells or a film connects are pretty much outside your control. What you can control is the pages in front of you. That's the same reason we push writers chasing the market to write the spec they actually believe in rather than the one they think buyers want.

For example, if Westerns are out and romcoms are in, you can write the romcom and improve your odds of a sale. But if your heart is in Westerns, make the Western, even if only a tiny company ever touches them. If you chase the hit against your own instincts, he said, and you risk looking back at a career you spent hoping rather than making. The Westerns, at least, are yours.

Luck Is Part of the Deal

Gers is blunt about how he broke in. He spent 12 years as an office temp before getting a foothold, and he doesn't chalk it up to a sudden leap in talent.

"I did get better as I went along, but the truth is I just got lucky. Somebody, the right person, read the right script at the right time," he said.

I appreciate the honesty, because the myth of the meritocratic break leaves a lot of talented people feeling like failures. Luck can't be manufactured. What you can do is put more work into the world (and put yourself out there), so you have a better chance of getting lucky. We've discussed ways to break into the industry, and nearly all of them come down to doing the work and staying in the room long enough for the right person to walk through the door.

The Freedom in Being Small

So what about the fear that a small audience means failure? Gers flips it. He compares musicians who fill stadiums, performing to crowds so large they can't make out a single face, with someone playing a club for a handful of people. He finds the small room more satisfying, and he pointed out that plenty of performers operating at that scale get burned out or walk away entirely.

A tiny audience, he argued, is a feature. If 30 people watch your YouTube video and a few of them comment that it was cool, you’ve won. And when you have little to lose, there's not much anyone can take from you.

Put your scripts online. Make shorts. Show anyone who will look. Think of a ceramicist, he suggested, opening a little shop at home or setting up a folding table at a street fair. Nobody looks down on that. Do the same with your work, whatever it is. This matches what indie filmmakers tell us about self-distribution and about surviving the constant "no".

Make Something You're Glad You Made

Gers practices what he preaches. He’s written 12 unproduced spec scripts, the ones he loved most, alongside the paid assignments that made his career. Not one of those 12 got made, but he’s fine with that. He's posting them online now, just asking if anyone wants to read them, and he counts it a win when a few people tell him they had fun.

His test for any project is straightforward.

"You should want to do a movie that if it's in an empty theater, you still look at it and go, 'I'm glad I did that,'" he said. Do the work anyway. When we ask filmmakers what they'd tell someone starting out, they advise defining success on your own terms, and continuing to make things.