DIE TRYING 021

Publish, Project or Perish

Author

Michael Barnes
February 04, 2026

One crafty writer’s never-say-die quest to tell a story for the page or screen.

DIE TRYING is a work in progress.

Watch me tickle, in real time, the fat bottom of a garish rooster that never crows.

I’m attempting to sell a screenplay. If that fails, I’ll publish it as a novel. If that fails, I’ll document why.

And it will soar. No grim failure porn here.

This isn’t motivation, “branding” advice or Hollywood mythmaking. It’s a candid record of submissions, silence, false momentum, real momentum and the head toll of trying to make something exist in a market designed to ignore you.

If you write, read scripts professionally or are trying to understand how stories actually move through the system, this is for you.

If not, it probably isn’t.

WRITERS PRESS KEYS ON GRIPE-O-WRITERS

When not spitting words, writers love bitching up a storm.

Screenwriters particularly love complaining about The Black List, the evaluation service and annual survey of the best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood.

Don’t believe me?

Visit the screenwriting subreddit and take in writers' tears about who didn’t get an 8, the equivalent score of a SAT 1400. Black List beneficiaries who scored an 8 or better pipe in to defend the industry gatekeeper.

Over the holidays, I did a rewrite of my sci-fi action script Going Perm based on a previous Black List eval.

Last month, I paid another $100 to hopefully get the magical 8 score that you can use in the subject line of a query to get agents, managers, and other Hollywood insiders to actually open your email, request your script and launch you into the club.

In the most recent BL eval, my score dropped from 7 to 6.

Am I going to slag The Black List here or take their tough love, try to improve my script, keep paying to score the elusive 8 and launch my screenwriting career?

SCRIPTS AS SLOT MACHINES

First, I will defend The Black List.

The latest BL reader complains that the Going Perm “descriptions feel overly excessive.”

I concur.

The beginning of my script reads like a novel with excessive detail instead of spare screenwriting pose.

Here are the first few paragraphs of my script:

There are chunks of text, even though the paragraphs are short. There is no dialog to break up the thiccness.

I won’t mention the camera directions (“The CAMERA ASCENDS…”) that are a no-no for emerging screenwriters who should at least get their foot in the door before trying to do the director’s job.

Compare this to the opening of Ryan Coogler’s Oscar-nominated Sinners script:

In both scripts, the second paragraphs have exactly 15 words each.

Sinners appears shorter, more streamlined and easy on the eyeballs due to the voice-overs breaking up the descriptions. Also, there is a lack of novelistic detail.

In Coogler’s script, just “faces” cry out to the guistarist on the woodcut. No adjectives. No verbosity. Just an evocative but bare noun.

In my script, the qubit computer chips are “mounted, “CROSS-SHAPED” and “hand-sized.” That’s five words of detail on one image.

The opening of my script is dense, which could alienate a reader with a slush pile of scripts to get through.

In short, I agree with much of the BL reader's critical feedback. I do have a sneaking suspicion that I, as an emerging screenwriter, am a tiny cog in a money-making machine.

I read a gripe on Reddit where a screenwriter complained that his script consistently scored a 7 across multiple evaluations.

In casinos, they strip clocks out of the gambling halls, so you never know it’s time to leave. They serve you either free or cheap drinks to liquor you up and prime the gambling pump.

Casinos are engineered to keep you playing and losing to the house.

Is The Black List, enticing you with not-just-good enough 7 score, amassing a “lot of material for revisions to work with overall,” as my reader concluded in the strengths section of the eval?

Are you on a carrot-dangling-in-front-of-your-nose constant treadmill? Keep paying for pricey evals, hoping to score the elusive 8 and keep the whole Screenwriter-Industrial Complex running smoothly?

Maybe this take is cynical or tears of bitterness from a butt-hurt wannabe.

I do know that my father used to hustle pool. You would let the mark win a few games, get cocky and bet big on a game where you would eventually destroy them.

I will rack the balls again. I will pull the lever on the slot machine. I will rewrite my script, try to make it better and score an 8.

I won’t be a perma-mark, though.

THIS WEEK IN DIE TRYING

  • Number of executives my logline is shopping: 8

  • Time spent rewriting last week: 3 hours

  • Reads requested: 0

  • Mood: “Man isn’t a noble savage. He’s an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved—that about sums it up.”—Stanley Kubrick

MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

If you’re reading this because you write, read, develop or sell scripts:

What is a better way to break into screenwriting:

A.) Stuff scripts into bottles and float them from a deserted island in the Pacific, hoping they wash up on Malibu Beach outside a Hollywood producer’s home, or

B.) Engage in the Screenwriter-Industrial Complex?

Reply A or B. I wanna know!

—Michael