What a Top Lit Agent Wants: Voice, Economy and No Saved-Up Ideas
Summary
Meridian Artists founder Glenn Cockburn says the market has shrunk by roughly 40%, so a writing sample that gets no meetings is not good enough.
"Glenn Cockburn, founder of the Toronto and Los Angeles literary agency Meridian Artists, says voice is the rarest quality he sees in scripts, No Film School reported from his appearance on producer Jesse Ikeman's The Business of Film podcast. ""It is the most rare thing in scripts and that is voice,"" he said, describing it as a writer's rhythm and idiosyncrasies on the page.
To find it, Cockburn suggests rewriting the first ten pages of a script under an odd constraint, such as using only very short sentences or deliberately more adjectives. A former reader for New Line Cinema, he also stressed structure, saying a script without a foundation ""is just painting on air,"" and economy: every scene should carry a lot of information in few words.
He named three common mistakes: premises that amount to ""people in a place"" with no built-in conflict, holding the strongest idea for later instead of putting it up front, and scenes that run too long. He recommended timing the scenes of admired shows to see how short they really are. With the market down by what he estimated at about 40%, he said, ""If you're not getting meetings off a sample, it's not good enough."""
