I can't bring myself to suffer through most (if not all) contemporary movies, partly because the screenplays are so unbearably bad. I think there's a lot of room for Hollywood and Independents to improve the quality of text they accept and work with. The Black List could have been a promising opportunity for improvement, but what you say about the sameness of the judges strikes me that it's more of the same: looking backward to see what worked last week, or last year. Fearful symmetry.
Thinking about this made me wonder if there weren’t more ways of making and distributing films on analogy with small publishing. More modest production standards, maybe shared revenue, more writerly creative process. Louis C. K. had this interesting series, Horace and Pete, that felt a bit like theater, and you could buy episodes directly on his web site. I wonder if other people are using forms like that.
I am still scratching my head over the agents/publishers who commented favorably on The Black List for novelists in the New York Times article. When writers try to convince me the query or submissions system is broken, I often explain that while writers may not like it, it actually works quite well for the agents and publishers, for the most part. They're not hurting for quality material, at least as far as I can tell. But reading this piece, you'd think that agents/publishers DID think the system was broken. Obviously, there are many ways the system is flawed, weak and unfair—it's just that in terms of offering initial consideration based on the quality of the material, I think it's more fair to writers than other creative industries. No one ever has to see you, meet you, or talk to you on the phone; agents/editors in many cases will in fact judge things based on words on a page. (Nonfiction can be quite different of course—that's another discussion.)
For the debut novelist analysis I did (thank you for mentioning!), I made a huge error in how I framed the "no obvious connections" bucket. I never meant to imply people in other categories have connections that the average writer doesn't. All I wanted to indicate was: I saw no evidence of professional writing or publishing activity whatsoever for that 20%. They seemed to land a book deal out of thin air. In the other categories, at least you could see an effort to write and publish in some kind of professional manner, even if that was just having an MFA degree. In other words: you could see the writer making an investment in themselves and there was some investment from others before they landed that first contract. But I don't think they had connections that outweighed the quality of the work.
Thank you so much for this illuminating comment, and for reading! I always get so much out of your own work on publishing. I wondered if the positive reception the Times found sprang from the prospect of pre-vetted, agentless deals, where publishers could have more control. Perhaps the idea got some of its traction with the Times and others from an eagerness in elite publishing circles to appear to care about their historically elite personnel and hiring practices, without really doing anything about them.
I can't bring myself to suffer through most (if not all) contemporary movies, partly because the screenplays are so unbearably bad. I think there's a lot of room for Hollywood and Independents to improve the quality of text they accept and work with. The Black List could have been a promising opportunity for improvement, but what you say about the sameness of the judges strikes me that it's more of the same: looking backward to see what worked last week, or last year. Fearful symmetry.
Thinking about this made me wonder if there weren’t more ways of making and distributing films on analogy with small publishing. More modest production standards, maybe shared revenue, more writerly creative process. Louis C. K. had this interesting series, Horace and Pete, that felt a bit like theater, and you could buy episodes directly on his web site. I wonder if other people are using forms like that.
I am still scratching my head over the agents/publishers who commented favorably on The Black List for novelists in the New York Times article. When writers try to convince me the query or submissions system is broken, I often explain that while writers may not like it, it actually works quite well for the agents and publishers, for the most part. They're not hurting for quality material, at least as far as I can tell. But reading this piece, you'd think that agents/publishers DID think the system was broken. Obviously, there are many ways the system is flawed, weak and unfair—it's just that in terms of offering initial consideration based on the quality of the material, I think it's more fair to writers than other creative industries. No one ever has to see you, meet you, or talk to you on the phone; agents/editors in many cases will in fact judge things based on words on a page. (Nonfiction can be quite different of course—that's another discussion.)
For the debut novelist analysis I did (thank you for mentioning!), I made a huge error in how I framed the "no obvious connections" bucket. I never meant to imply people in other categories have connections that the average writer doesn't. All I wanted to indicate was: I saw no evidence of professional writing or publishing activity whatsoever for that 20%. They seemed to land a book deal out of thin air. In the other categories, at least you could see an effort to write and publish in some kind of professional manner, even if that was just having an MFA degree. In other words: you could see the writer making an investment in themselves and there was some investment from others before they landed that first contract. But I don't think they had connections that outweighed the quality of the work.
Thank you so much for this illuminating comment, and for reading! I always get so much out of your own work on publishing. I wondered if the positive reception the Times found sprang from the prospect of pre-vetted, agentless deals, where publishers could have more control. Perhaps the idea got some of its traction with the Times and others from an eagerness in elite publishing circles to appear to care about their historically elite personnel and hiring practices, without really doing anything about them.