“How can I be of service?”

This is the question I asked myself years ago — and it was the turning point in in my screenwriting career.

I stopped trying to please myself in my writing, and started thinking about pleasing others. The question: “What service do I offer?” became my mantra. By putting myself in the shoes of producers, studio executives, and, yes, even the audience, I went from thinking about me to thinking about you.

And now I ask the question again.

But this time I’m asking you directly.

I spent last Sunday in a meeting about this very website. We first made plans for this site in October and made voluminous notes on what we wanted to accomplish in that time. Now six months later, we have hit all our goals! I am out on the road giving seminars and meeting with many of you. I have had the pleasure of lecturing in Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, and Maine and taught classes or lectured at Chapman University, Vanderbilt, and UCLA! It’s been an exciting six months, the results have been beyond our wildest expectations — and now plans for Phase II of this website are underway.

We want this site to be the meeting place for both writers interested in furthering their skills and connections AND those who want to connect with those writers who are creating the freshest new movie scripts. To that end, as we roll out the next part of this enterprise, here are some of things we have in mind:

— A webpage for each of the students who have taken a STC! seminar, allowing them to interact with fellow writers in their group — and to promote the script they began working on.

— Script Of The Month. I want to highlight the best script I have read each month and, with the writer’s permission, post the first 25 or so pages of that script to promote their project.

— Podcasts featuring some of my radio “appearances” where I have discussed aspects of screenwriting as well as dissected some of the classic movies that will be featured in my follow up book, Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies.

— Also we want to launch an interactive weekly radio show where writers call in and pitch me their script ideas — and even discuss how to enhance and re-write that screenplay for better results.

These are just a few things that are in the works and will be available to you soon. But now I ask again: How can I be of service? If you have any suggestions about how to make this site better or how I can help you to write and sell your script, I want to know. Please use the Comment section below to tell us.

My mission is to help you sell your script.

I want to see great movies at the cineplex — your movies. I want you to have a fulfilling creative life and I will do my best to help you achieve that. Tell me how I can better make it happen for you and we will go to any length to make that possible.

I am very excited! I have never been more so. If we can accomplish all this in six months, think of what else we can do!

P.S. A big shout out of congratulations to my buddy Gurpreet all the way out in Delhi, India, whose wife just gave birth to their first child, a boy, Sehaj. Many blessings to your family!!