Does it work?

Yesterday I said there's no such thing as objectively “good” writing. But if I really believe that, why am I writing this blog? What are my tips, insights, and opinions for?

Quality is subjective, but functionality is not. So don’t ask, “Is it good?” Ask, “Does it work?”

Does the story work? Does it captivate and move sufficient numbers of people?

We could debate the look of the Golden Gate Bridge. (And people did debate the look. It was designed to be black and yellow.) But nobody can debate that the bridge works.

How can you tell if a story works?

You have to show it to people. Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar, wrote a whole book about this. You have to put your story in front of an honest audience. You will soon know if it works.

It will not work for everybody. (Even Lawrence of Arabia gets some bad reviews.) But does your story work for enough people? And only you can decide what is “enough.”

I spent years writing and rewriting a screenplay. But after all that effort, nobody I knew liked it. Not my friends, not my girlfriend, not my family. Deciding I should know the worst, I posted an animatic for the screenplay to YouTube with the title “Please criticize this.” It went viral. 140,000 views. 16,000 likes. Hundreds of comments—most of them enthusiastic.

To this day, nobody in person has told me anything enthusiastic about that screenplay. (In fact, people close to me have insisted, quite fervently, that I should dump it and move on, even after it went viral.) My only fans are strangers on the internet.

So is the screenplay good? That’s impossible to answer. But does it work? Yes—at least for thousands of strangers on YouTube.

“Is it good?” is a lazy question. You can ask it endlessly without leaving the safety of your desk. But “Does it work?” is a brave question. To answer it, you have to expose your story to people. “Does it work?” is a call to adventure.