First Draft: Think Outside the Box With These Five Resourceful Screenwriting Career Moves

2. Choose a Unique Life Adventure, Live It Yourself

Hollywood is always looking for intriguing true stories. An even bigger draw is finding such stories that have the actual subjects attached.

What if you decided to live an adventure and write a screenplay—or book—about it? You could climb Mt. Everest, travel down the Amazon River, road trip down the old Route 66, or visit the actual locations of old Transylvania where the Bram Stroker’s Dracula book was set. Those adventures alone could produce excellent fodder for possible ideas for features or series pilots—and the fact that you actually lived them could be used as a marketing tool to draw in publishers and Hollywood executives.

If you’ve already lived such an adventure, survived a disaster, or have had direct experience with some noteworthy event in your life, you can use that to your own writing advantage.

Look back to author Cheryl Strayed’s memoir of her 1,100 mile solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, beginning in the Mojave Desert and hiking through California and Oregon to the Bridge of the Gods into Washington — Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. That book was later picked up by Reese Witherspoon for her to star in, leading to the critically acclaimed film Wild, for which Witherspoon was Oscar-nominated for.

Screenwriters have the same ability to use their own experiences as a marketing tool for selling their stories.

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