I would say, A, you can't really teach anyone how to write good characters, because it's something you have to teach yourself or already have innately in you as a storyteller, and, B, coming up with a good screenplay is a very, very small fraction of what it takes to be a good screenwriter.

Robert Ben Garant

Categorized in : You Good Small Yourself

There are a huge amount of people who sell a TV pilot, every year, but most of them never get produced. It's very easy to make a living and never get anything produced.

Robert Ben Garant

pilots people years

You have to be willing to throw [writing] stuff away and replace it.

Robert Ben Garant

willing stuff writing

If you can learn to be incredibly passionate about your work without fighting for it just because it's yours, that's a huge thing.

Robert Ben Garant

passionate huge fighting

Not taking criticism of your writing personally is an enormous step towards surviving the studio system.

Robert Ben Garant

criticism steps writing

The State trained us to make other people's terrible jokes work, which is the other part of the game when you're here.

Robert Ben Garant

states games people

When somebody would come in with a sketch that was not so good, you figured out in a room how to make that sketch work.

Robert Ben Garant

rooms

For a living I write stuff that I know is gonna sell to a studio and make a lot of money at the multiplex.

Robert Ben Garant

sells stuff writing

I liked writing, and I loved movies, obsessively loved movies, but I had never made the leap of thinking I would actually come out here and write stuff.

Robert Ben Garant

stuff writing thinking

You need to know that going in, and you also need to be able to write all the time. So when somebody looks at you across the table and says, "What do you think about a movie where Miley Cyrus switches souls with a basset hound?" You need to be able to sit there and figure out how to make that possibly shootable.

Robert Ben Garant

soul writing thinking

You write a spec, and you pour your heart and soul and life into a spec, and you think that spec is the movie that's going to sell and get made... I've never heard of anybody that happened to. What happens is, you write a spec, people get it, they see your writing, they see you're good, they bring you into their office and they say, "Boy, that spec was really good - we'll never make that in a million years. We have rights to the board game of Monopoly. What do you think about a Monopoly movie?".

Robert Ben Garant

heart writing thinking

Probably your first agent is going to be some guy who also handles dog acts.

Robert Ben Garant

agents guy dog

My college years are a blur.

Robert Ben Garant

blur college years

Sketch shows change gears so drastically every two minutes. I think sketch shows are for sketch fans; they're not really for everybody.

Robert Ben Garant

sketch think fans change

It's always hard to watch bad actors improv on your skit.

Robert Ben Garant

your bad always hard

In cop shows, the police don't get to rag on each other and rag on their commander and rag on the person they just pulled over. That was all 'Reno' was, and I think that's all cops do 90 percent of their day.

Robert Ben Garant

person day think police

'Reno' was originally going to be a sketch show, with the cops as a transitional element.

Robert Ben Garant

element show sketch going

I don't think people realize how many scripts you write that go nowhere.

Robert Ben Garant

realize think you people

L.A. is like an oil rig. It's not pretty. It's awful. The air is bad, the view is bad, the people are bad.

Robert Ben Garant

view bad like people

I write manically.

Robert Ben Garant

i-write write

We joke a lot about how, in Hollywood, the writer is one step below the doormat. That's not self-loathing. That's true!

Robert Ben Garant

joke true step how