BEHIND THE LINES WITH DR: Lie to Me

Doug Richardson’s first produced feature was the sequel to Die Hard, Die Harder.Visit Doug’s site for more Hollywood war stories and information on his popular novels. Follow Doug on Twitter @byDougRich.

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“You mind if I ask you something?” asked the middle-aged man. Uninvited, he had already lowered himself into the seat across from me. Before I could come up with an answer, his follow-up question emerged, tripping over his gums like an echo I’d heard a thousand times over. “Can you let me in on the best way to find an agent?”

“I dunno,” I said after contemplating whether or not to even answer. “I assume you have something an agent wants to read.”

“Course I do,” said the stranger. “I have a screenplay and a book.”

“Pick one,” I said.

“Okay. Screenplay.”

“And is your script awesome?” I asked.

“It’s okay,” he answered. “Good enough, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“It’s okay, I think.”

“But not awesome.”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Well,” I answered. “When you can say with relative certainty that your work is awesome, then maybe you should think about an agent.”

“Well, what if it already is awesome?” asked the stranger.

“Has anyone told you it’s awesome?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, here comes the hard part,” I said.

“The hard part?”

The man’s leathered face screwed into a question mark. He was wearing a worn denim vest and equally faded jeans. The creases in his face revealed more than a few miles of hard living. Perhaps it showed the relief of a man with a story worth telling. My initial reaction had been to politely remind the stranger that I was eating my lunch and that the workshop I was conducting later that afternoon had a few openings. If he wanted to sign up and wait for the question and answer session, I’d be more than happy to answer his question.

But I hadn’t shooed him away. I’d allowed him to engage.

“The hard part,” I repeated, “is getting your screenplay read by a circle of trusted friends.”

“That’s not hard,” he said.

“Lemme finish,” I urged. “Your circle of trusted friends is going to lie to you.”

“They won’t lie. They’re my friends. Why else would I trust ’em?”

“Believe me,” I said. “They’ve lied to you before. And they’re going to lie to you again. At least when it comes to what you’ve written. Doesn’t mean they’re bad people. Doesn’t mean they’re not your friends, either. They’re grownups and they’re your friends which is exactly why they’re going to lie.”

“Cuz they don’t want to hurt my feelings,” understood the stranger.

“Exactly.”

“So how do I know?”

“That’s why it’s the hard part,” I said.

In fact, the answer is almost like a riddle inside a conundrum. If my closest friends are going to lie to me to preserve my precious feelings, how on God’s green earth am I going to get them to give me their honest, unvarnished opinion when it comes to my work?

The answer exists, in fact, not within them. But within me. I need to give those close and trusted friends permission to pound me. Well, not me. But my screenplay or book or short story or whatever I’m trying to pass off as readable. I need to show them that it’s okay to whack on my work with a sledgehammer to see if something breaks. And to accomplish such a feat I need to be my own harshest critic. Instead of teeing up my test readers with all my hopes and concerns that they may or may not love my stuff, I sharply point out areas where I’m worried that I might be falling short. A sequence I keep rewriting because it feels balky. Or a character that perhaps feels too thin or one-dimensional. Or even my use of description or possibly a run of tin-ear dialogue. In those areas, I ask for more than help. I ask for a lashing.

Yet despite giving my trusted cohorts the green light to be brutal, I fully expect their critiques to come sugarcoated. It’s not that they want to soft sell their punch. It’s more about a long-ingrained social habit of sparing a dagger strike to an artist’s psyche. They know—or assume—that writing is a lonely, ulcer-inducing, applause-free grind. That I’ve spent hours, weeks, days, even months or years, producing the document I’ve asked them to critique. Instinct informs and prohibits them from being the horrible pal to inflict the ugly truth upon me.

So what I must do is question their critique and implore them with this simple yet salient fact. If my work is anything less than awesome, I’m going to fall on my fat, feckless face. Unless my trusted few jettison their fears of pummeling me, then by their timid inaction they are all but dooming me to fail.

Yeah. You see what I did there?

I’ve just yoked my trusted reader to my potential fall. I’ve shackled them to the impossibly heavy burden that is me. Picture Wile E. Coyote holding that famous anvil after discovering the Road Runner had chained it to his ankle. If I crap out, so do they. This is the critical moment. Getting here is the hard part—but for somebody who wants to improve, so very much worth the effort.

“That’s hard,” surmised the uninvited stranger.

“Indeed,” I answered. “But when you get there it’s like a breakthrough.”

And I mean that the breakthrough is not just for my reader and her/his newfound honesty. But it’s a perspective-changer for me. Notes on my work become crystallized. My view and understanding of what I’m doing and where I want it to go instantly improve.

“Once you train your circle of readers to be totally unfiltered,” I told the stranger, “then, a draft or two or ten down the road—when you get the call and they can’t wait to tell you that your stuff is awesome—maybe you can actually believe that it’s true. Maybe then you’ll have something to show an agent or manager.”

The stranger thanked me, shook my hand and left me to my lunch. In the end, I’m appreciative of his untimely interruption. From it I’ve written this blog and when asked that question again and again and again, I can merely direct the curious here.

Check out Doug’s popular novels and his newest release, 99 Percent Kill.

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