Hello, Storytellers!! I hope you are having a fabulous day, morning, evening-whatever! 

This is part two that I just decided to add to last week's blog about crushing your query which you can find HERE or just scroll down after reading this! 

So it's time to submit, but you now have to write your query and your mind goes blank. You can't form a coherent sentence, and you just write something too long, too boring, or just plain bad. Why is that?

I think it's like a game of GOLF-all in YOUR HEAD. You put the pressure on yourself to write something amazing and BAM! just like that, nothing good comes out.

There are tons and tons and tons of resources for how to write a good query, so I won't bore you with those details. GOOGLE how to write a query and I promise you tons will come up. I have some favorites, which you can see in my earlier blog,  but everyone is different, so I want you to do what speaks to you.

That said, as someone who used to run a query clinic, and I...

Hello, dear writers of the world! This is from a post I did on my first blog for writers about 7 years ago, but as I was about to write about things that go wrong in scripts today I came across it so I'm sharing it here as everything still holds true!! 

I used to be a script reader for the studios---in other words, if it didn't get past me, it didn't go anywhere. 

My biggest issues when reading scripts are:

STORY There needs to be a story-period. It has to have a strong beginning, middle, and end.

No amount of special effects is going to help that no matter what Disney, Sony, and other big studios show you. It's one of my biggest pet peeves when people tell me they love a film and I ask them why and they say the 3D was awesome, or the FX were awesome.

A screenplay needs to have a solid story.

Why are you telling this story?

What are you trying to say?

Why is this important to you?

Ask yourself these and more questions, and then you should have a good story.