Talk about getting a first break by serendipity. If novice screenwriter Heather Hale’s family hadn’t inherited her Aunt’s townhouse and if the new tenant hadn’t moved in with this "wonderful" idea that later became a Lifetime Original Movie ... whoa. I’m getting ahead of myself.

Heather Hale, a native of Southern California, has a Bachelor's of Arts in Creative Writing and a Screenwriting Certificate from UCLA. Hale has written everything from newspaper features to interactive multimedia scripts (for CD ROMs and WWW sites) to broadcast infomercials. Hale recently finished production on a series of documentaries entitled "The Evidence" and a television talk show called "Lifestyle Magazine." Her first spec screenplay sale resulted in The Courage to Love, a $5.5 million dollar budget epic period piece starring actress/singer Vanessa Williams.

Hale is a staff member for the world-renowned Selling to Hollywood Conference and the Moondance International Film Festival, a reader for the Scriptwriter's Network Producers Outreach Program and Carl Sautter Screenwriting Competitions. On the Internet, Hale founded and coordinates the Screenwriters OnLine Cooperative (http://members.aol.com/SOCwebsite ). Her website is: http://www.cao.com/Heather.

In a previous life before settling into screenwriting, Hale was a mortgage broker doing acquisition and development financing for commercial real estate.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer and always knew I’d be. When I was four someone asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. I said, "I want to do somethin' wid wurds." At ten or twelve, I won a poetry competition in the San Jose Mercury News.

I graduated with a degree in Creative Writing by default -- I just took the classes I couldn't wait to take and before I had actually declared a major, I had practically completed the entire curriculum just by following my heart. I wrote for newspapers and always thought I'd be an anchor woman or a foreign stringer.

I relocated for love and was about to get business cards and letterhead printed for my mortgage banking business. As with most commission fields, it was going to take me ninety days to get up to speed earning a decent living again in an entirely new market. At the printers, I got this wild hair and had them print cards and letterhead that read: "Heather Hale -- screenwriter". I figured if I worked as hard at being a writer, as I knew I’d have to at developing a new mortgage brokerage from the ground up all over again, I'd be successful (or at least earning a living) by about the same time.

I gave myself an arbitrary two year deadline and dedicated myself to doing all the same things I'd do otherwise: join all the necessary networking groups, continue my education, hone my skills, stay up to date on the market and trends, and never juggle less than three potential income sources.

Why'd I pick screenwriting, specifically? Who knows? I had done some feature articles for The Orange County Register, which I really enjoyed, but it ended up being false economy. By the time you factored in driving back and forth from interviews and events, developing photos, researching, and writing: I was upside down. And yet, I was making $200/minute (screen time) for corporate videos and multimedia scripts. But that wasn't really fulfilling. I wanted to write fiction. For film. I decided more people watch films and TV than read, unfortunately, so I could always write novels, short stories, and poetry later. I'd forge a career in the most robust economic forum for writers.

So I had business cards printed and lived my vision, trying to fool myself. I can't tell you how hard it was to keep a straight face the first few times I handed out business cards proclaiming myself a screenwriter. The hardest part, really, was convincing myself. Now, with one movie, some documentaries, and a talk show under my belt, I think I can say it without smirking with insecurity.

No. But I'm looking. Tony Blain is my entertainment attorney and he's been incredibly helpful in negotiating my contracts and playing surrogate agent in the interim.

Long story short: my aunt passed away. My dad became the executor of her trust. We "inherited" her over-leveraged townhouse. My parents couldn't afford to keep it -- but capital gains made it an upside down transaction if they were to sell it. So they had to rent it -- and ASAP.

As I'm carrying out boxes of my aunt's belongings and preparing for the wake amongst mourning family members, in walks the new tenant carrying a box from their moving van in the driveway. "I understand you write screenplays." "Yes I do." "My wife has an idea that would make a great movie." (How many times have we all heard this?) I politely tell him I'd love to hear all about it but that this was not the appropriate time.

I met with his wife the following week with the sincere intention of encouraging her to write her own screenplay. Giving her tips, books to read, etc. That's how we left it. I was, however, intrigued by the story she shared with me and I was anxious to critique her work and give her some direction.

I started doing research on the character and after about three months, this woman called me up and said: "I can't do it. Won't you please write it?" She shared with me that her son was Vanessa Williams' music producer and that Vanessa had been interested in this character for over a decade, that at every Christmas and Thanksgiving, Vanessa would sit down next to her and ask how her pet project was coming along.

I thought that kind of a relationship was worth investing some time and effort on the come line, so, we handwrote a contract on legal paper, both signed it, and she gave me input and I cranked out a treatment. Even though I had done all the writing, out of respect for her ownership of the idea, I registered the treatment in both our names.

We sent the treatment off to William Morris in New York and Vanessa's agent said it was the best treatment she'd ever read! It was the first I'd ever written. (But, I must give credit where credit is due: this is entirely due to an excellent course on writing treatments that I had just taken at UCLA with Frank McAdams). Vanessa's William Morris agent said they'd like to buy the idea off the treatment -- and here's where ignorance really is bliss begins: my "partner" said, "Wait 'til you read the script. It's excellent!" (The script, of course, was not written yet). Emily Gerson-Saines, Vanessa's agent, told Phyllis, the woman whose idea it was to begin with, to send it to her in nine days. (Yeah, you read that right, nine days).

So Phyllis calls me and tells me I’ve to send the script to William Morris in New York in nine days. I didn't want to make Phyllis out to be a liar, but I didn't think I had a prayer of cranking out a hundred and twenty pages of my first ever teleplay in nine days -- no, eight, because I had to overnight it to New York. So, I called the agent and ever-so-tactfully asked how "firm" that deadline was. Emily eloquently explained, "Not firm at all. Vanessa is free at that time. And she's interested in this project. I’m free at that time. And I’m interested in this project. I don't know when we'll both be available and interested in you project again at the same time. So, no, it's not firm at all."

I got the picture. This was my window of opportunity and I had best not blow it.

Thus, I quit my mortgage banking job on the very next phone call and told my live-in boyfriend that I was really going to need his help and understanding. I wrote around the clock. Whenever I couldn't keep my eyes open, I printed out a draft and my boyfriend edited and proofed it and gave me comments when I woke up. I'd write. He'd bring me spaghetti, pizza, breakfast, whatever. I'd hand him a draft and go to bed. I read it aloud to myself into a tape recorder so I could hear what it sounded like (as I didn't have the time to organize any readers for my benefit).

I worked and worked and worked until a day early (at about three a.m.), I had a reasonably polished first draft (not one I’d normally send, but under the circumstances, I didn't feel I had an option). I had Greg, my boyfriend, read it one last time -- and Murphy's Law, he came up with a brilliant scene idea that wrapped it all together thematically and brought the characters into direct conflict with their world and one another and just brought everything to a head. I told him thanks, but that the final draft had been printed out, it was three a.m. -- and I was done. I was just too darn tired to do anymore. It was going out as is in the morning.

But wouldn't you know it? The muse would not let me sleep. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, knowing his idea was just too perfect not to include. The characters were dancing in his scene, clamoring in my weary brain to be added to that a nice, crisp, bound stack of papers that lay in the Fed Ex envelope. So I dragged my butt out of bed one last time and reworked it and chased the Fed Ex guy to make the deadline.

It sat, unread, for three months.

In that interim, I rewrote it four times, and cringed when I read what I knew was being carted around in Vanessa Williams' suitcase. I begged, pleaded, with everyone to let me send the polished draft, but no one would listen. I was willing to fly to New York (or wherever Vanessa was) just to swap the scripts.

Apparently that window of opportunity had either been totally arbitrary, or things had changed. All I knew was that my first draft had not been read, and it certainly didn't do justice to the story -- or my writing). Turns out, they did option it off that draft (or the treatment, who knows) and they hired another writer who had apparently won a Humanitas award for a similar religious-themed Showtime special. I can't blame them for going with a known commodity.

My own ego was so bruised, though, that I wanted the people in the process to know that I really could write and that I had just been honoring Phyllis by keeping my mouth shut and making that ridiculous deadline. It was important to me that somebody in the process read my polished version.

Again, ignorance is bliss. My ego might have saved my tail in this case. I gave the fourth draft to the production company and finally revealed that what they had read had been a nine-day draft. He explained that it was good, but not good enough to get me hired. He read my fourth draft and said it was markedly better (of course) but that they had already hired another writer. Oh well, I did what I could.

It turned out that all that business actually worked in my favor for if I had not cranked out the nine-day draft, they’d most certainly have just bought the treatment for a much smaller fee and less credit (if any at all). And, the fact that I had been so insistent that somebody read a subsequent draft, unbeknownst to me, papertrailed a rewrite, and helped me to secure my "written by" credit. (See arbitration process below).

Was I intimidated? Sure. It was like appearing in a surreal on-paper courtroom to defend my creative process by deconstructing my own writing, comparing the parallels to various interpretations done by strangers to identify which lines, scenes, characters, etc. that I created had made it to the final product. It's really weird to hear your characters "say" things that someone else has written. You think to yourself: "Yeah, I guess that sounds like something she’d have said." Or they’re in scenes that are logical progressions of a spine you laid out. It seemed in many cases that things had been changed JUST to be different so that the percentage of what I wrote versus what ended up on the screen would be identifiable.

For example, I had a character disembarking from a steamboat slip off a plank into the muddy waters of the Mississippi. It was changed to her falling out of a dingy. Like that made any difference to anything -- character, theme, storyline -- it seemed to me to be just a change to be a change. And I wasn't even so sure it was more historically accurate than what I had written. Ironically, although the final shooting script had that change, what I saw on TV had her slipping off a plank.

Another interesting change, not to get into too many of the details, was that I wanted this nun to have a love interest. But, since she wouldn't proactively seek romance, it had to be someone she’d fall for naturally, someone who would be around her all the time. Since she was administering health care to all the victims of the Yellow Fever plague, I thought it was logical to make up a fictional character to add to the other otherwise historically accurate figures: a doctor who would rub elbows with her day in and day out. They changed this, but again, by the final shooting script, it was back in as the most logical choice.

I can see now how people think their ideas get stolen, but if you really sit down and consider all the options, sometimes some choices are the most theatrically lucrative and almost inevitable and any writer worth their salt might consider the same selections.

The whole process was so alien to me. I didn't ask for it. I didn't start it. I didn't perpetuate it. Actually, as it was explained to me, the woman they hired to rewrite me initiated the whole process because she wanted to bump me from second position writing credit in order to offer that to her friend who had done a 5-day dialogue polish. I don't know if that's true or not, but how on earth could that possibly be fair?

Canning the initial writer whose treatment and first draft (and fourth draft) launched the entire production and relegating her to zero credit seemed (to me, of course) incredibly unfair. Sure, there was minor money at stake, but I'll tell you (and I told everyone) I would've given up every penny just to keep my name on the thing. Without it, my career hadn't officially started.

Thus, I spent another weekend working around the clock. Apparently, you’re supposed to get 24 hours to respond, but the WGA was incredibly generous by timing their notification to me on a Friday afternoon which afforded me 24 "business" hours (plus the whole weekend) to plow through the final shooting script.

I was harassed (I think) by everyone and their dog at the production company to track down a copy of that infamous fourth draft. Few people knew it even existed, apparently, and so even fewer knew what was in it or how to defend against it.

I was told first that they had never read it (after I had been told how good it was), then that the boss had it in his briefcase (after they claimed they had never seen it). Why on earth would someone travel to a film festival with a screenplay from two years ago (that hadn't even been used) on a film already in the can? I don't know how much or if any of this was true, but I literally had frantic people calling me every fifteen minutes on that Friday -- and even an uninvited courier show up on my doorstep to pick up a copy of my creative work to use against me somehow. It was frightening. I didn't answer the door. It became almost comical. I called my entertainment attorney for advice. How could I prepare my case with all this chaos going on? I just hid in my house, ignoring the phone and the door and worked on my argument -- plowing through the drafts and identifying what I thought was my creation.

I did my very best to show how all my characters retained their characteristics. It was especially difficult because the story was public domain, so they could argue (like the Amistad court case) that it was not of my creation but simply the result of research that they did on their own.

So it came down to characters I had actually created (like the doctor love interest) or what I could defend that couldn't have been the fruits of their own independent research.

The fact that I put the main character (Vanessa Williams, the nun) at the Quadroon Ball (my original title) was the saving grace, I think. We all knew the real character's mother had been at the Quadroon Ball, but there was no evidence or proof that this woman had ever been there. So, historically speaking, they could tell the story of the nun or of the Quadroon Ball. But if they wanted to put the nun at the Quadroon Ball (which was ripe with thematic and theatrical opportunities), then I had copywritten that specific element -- and it was undeniably my creation -- borne out of Phyllis' original idea -- and what had attracted (I believe) Vanessa in the first place.

Because of my mortgage banking background, I had just instinctively kept every scrap of paper, conversation logs, notes from meetings, and each and every draft printed out on a hard copy and on disk. Had I not learned these skills from the forever-looming threat of an IRS or DRE audit, I would've been in big trouble. But as it stood, I had a banker's box of evidence to help me papertrail and defend my case.

I learned a lot as a result of that process: don't save over ANY drafts -- rename them and keep each and every one -- if even just on a back up Jazz or Zip disk. Print out and keep in a binder each major revision. Track which version got sent to whom and when -- even if "only" to your own writing partner. Save notes and cards that come with flowers (ie: "This would never have become a reality without you") or Fed Ex, UPS, and courier receipts. I'm even starting to keep a journal of which changes I made -- and why.

This, I think beyond helping me in case I ever must defend my work again, I’ve found helps me creatively as well. Sometimes you’ve to kill a darling or lose a scene you love - and if you track WHY -- maybe somewhere down the line you've taken out whatever element made you change it in the first place and you instead of just thinking "I tried that", it'll help you to remember and rekindle some of those initial inspirations.

My contracts have changed a lot, as well. I’ve about four partner projects going, and knowing what could happen is helping me to keep those friendships and professional relationships intact by having clear communication via contracts, e-mail, phone, and in-person meetings.

I think my trial with fire has made me an infinitely more professional writer. I got hit with an arbitration straight out of the gate, something I’d imagine many writers go their whole careers without ever having to contend with. I think it has already served me well by adding to my arsenal of "real world" skills and expectations.

Well, considering I was trying desperately to hold onto my second position "written by" credit and was perhaps even at risk of getting no credit whatsoever, I'd say it was quite the coup. It was totally flip-flopped around: I was awarded FIRST POSITION "written by" credit! While it was going on, I'd have done anything to stop the process. They actually made several offers -- all of which I agreed to -- but none of which came to fruition.

The woman who initiated the arbitration refused any and all of these settlement offers and instead of maintaining her secure first position, she essentially bumped herself DOWN by perpetuating the whole process.

I think the WGA was incredibly judicious in determining fair credit and went above and beyond the call of duty of "protecting" me as a fledgling writer -- they righted a wrong, in my opinion. I was lost in the shuffle, ignored, not even put on a back burner -- I wasn't even in the kitchen. And when push came to shove -- and I wasn't even the one doing the pushing (I was sitting quietly in the dark in the pantry, working on other projects, trying to be thick skinned with a stiff upper lip), out comes the WGA to fiercely protect my rights as the originator. I felt like I had a big bad tough guy fighting a battle I didn't even know how to begin and hopelessly felt I had to just let it go until I had more projects under my belt.

The Internet is the all-powerful leveling force. You can project an image as professional and as cutting edge as the giants -- and often much cheaper and more quickly responsive. As an individual, you can shift to market trends instantaneously without waiting for Board directives or democratic consensus. You can network around the clock -- around the world -- in a flash. You can gain access and cyber-bond fairly quickly if your sense of humor and intelligence can be transmuted electronically. Which, if as a writer, you can't express yourself through the written word, then you might want to consider a different career option. It enables writers who might be less attractive, geographically undesirable, or even socially inept to compete in the big leagues by virtue of just their written skills.

The Internet can cloak gender, race, and socioeconomic status. In our commuting rat race world, there's not a lot of chance encounters. You don't get to meet people unless you proactively create those situations and opportunities and the Internet is the fastest, most efficient means of meeting "strangers" that you want to network with, become friends with, and perhaps even partner or work with.

I wish I could say yes. I know that's the "writerly-correct" thing to say but I don't. I write in bursts. I may not write at all for weeks, just paint and garden and nap while my subconscious develops things. (Or I may be working around the clock on a contract for someone else writing things I certainly wouldn't choose to write by my own volition and simply don't have time to work on my own speculative projects).

I may overhear tidbits of conversation and write them down; play ineffectively with 3" x 5" cards and treatments; talk about the story a lot to others (pitching it, brainstorming, etc.). Then I write in a blitz: I'll write around the clock for days, eating at my computer and just taking naps when I can't hold my eyes open anymore, sometimes until the first draft is done.

In rewriting, I seem to be more disciplined and write in a more reasonable schedule where I can break down exactly what it is that needs work and how I plan on going about doing that. When I write with partners, it's all different. You’ve to merge your different styles and take advantage of the convergence and divergence of your skills and work patterns.

I use Final Draft.

I think I did pretty well. I followed my heart and lived a lot of life. I made a lot of mistakes, took a lot of risks, got my heart broke a lot, and made a fool of myself plenty.

I love generously, live fully, and ignore barriers and shortcomings other people try to point out. I just don't see them or accept them. If I had it to do all over again, I’d have done a semester at sea. I wouldn't have been in such a rush to graduate from college. I wouldn't have fallen so irrationally for my first love -- but who can help that?

From this point forward?

I plan on adventure traveling and extreme-sporting as much as I can. Living so well within my means that my love relationships and peaceful home are never jeopardized. I will continue to strive to write that which I feel passionately about to produce products I'm proud of. And to surround myself with people I want to be with -- people who are smarter, funnier, wiser, kinder, and more compassionate than I am -- so I’ve to always strive to keep pace with their excellence and character.

I’ve lots of projects going. I just finished shooting fifteen television talk show episodes (in three days), and six studio segments of a series of documentaries (in two days). I’ve a rewrite assignment on Stupid Crooks and then I'll be working on several of my own spec projects.

Bait & Switch is a dramedy that's getting a lot of heat. Whorehouse on Wall Street (a comedy) and Fish Out of Water (a coming of age family comedy) are both partner projects that are getting some interest. I’ve a couple of potential attachments that might lend more interest.

I’m co-writing a black comedy called SuperHero. I also have the rights to two life stories, both of which would make excellent movies of the week for Lifetime, Oxygen, or CBS. I also have a children's series with excellent ancillary marketing potential. I’ve about fifteen production companies chomping at the bit to read some of the rewrites, but I've been so busy, I've had little time to work on my own spec work. I'm on hiatus now, so I'm heavily rewriting and polishing all these projects to market. I'm looking for my next income-generating contract, and trying to land an agent -- probably in that order.

An "A" list Hollywood writer.

I'd like to be married, with one child and another on the way. I'd like to have a beautiful garden, sun-room home office, and a painting studio as creative spaces. I'd like to be able to pick and choose my projects, ideally generated off my own pitches or at least based on others' ideas that have swept me up in their contagious passion. I'd like to travel to Timbuktu and celebrate Thanksgiving in Turkey. I'd like to be able to take care of my parents.