How many licks does it take?

Question: How many scripts does it take to get good?

Answer: Infinity. Or one. Or forty. Or six.

I can't shut off my imagination. At night when I'm bored I imagine what it would be like to be on an adventure somewhere fighting for survival or uncovering a terrorist plot.

In college I mostly shined at creative nonfiction but I could never stop wanting to make up stories. My thesis director always wished I'd stick to nonfiction. I refused.

Then I graduated and stopped having a push to write.

One day I thought up a story about a girl who is the only survivor of a space ship that crash landed with only children on board. Lord of the Flies meets War of the Worlds meets Cast Away meets an episode of Star Trek.

I kept planning to write the novel. And I kept planning and planning and planning until I had a whole story and no words on paper to prove it.

Then I read Bruce Campbell's incredibly inspirational first book (referenced in my sidebar) and discovered that people actually write movies down. So I looked up the format and asked all the standard newbie questions and in one day I had twenty pages of my story in a Microsoft Word file.

And it was easy and fun and on the page. And it was mediocre. But it was my first. I actually got an agent interested with the logline but I never heard back. And I'm glad because I wasn't ready.

I moved to LA. I wrote a script about a teacher who's secretly a badass martial artist who leads a bunch of kids out of the ghetto one night while they're being chased by gang members. I wonder where I got that idea?

It was awful. Then I wrote half a script about something I don't even remember. Then I wrote another half a script about something else I don't remember.

Then I turned to television. I wrote a pretty good Lost script that became obsolete two months later. I wrote a really good House script. I wrote half a Supernatural. Then I wrote another half a Supernatural. Then I wrote another half a Supernatural. Then I gave up on Supernatural.

I tried to write a My Name is Earl but it wasn't funny. Then a month later they used my plot so I'm really glad I only wrote five pages.

Then I wrote a pilot about a guy who's recruited into the mafia. It was a great idea but I was too lazy to do research and you could tell.

Then I cowrote a pilot about the aftermath of a school shooting. It was a great idea but it never felt right. And since there's a school shooting every couple of months, it will never be commercially viable until I have a proven record of pulling off edgy material. That ain't happening any time soon.

Then I discovered short films and found out I was really good at them. I co-wrote one, then I wrote another one, then another until Writing Partner and I turned them into a feature. Then I wrote some more. Now I write shorts just for fun when I'm bored. I have about eight I'd be proud to show anybody.

Now I'm writing my zombie flick. Will it be good? I don't know. I think so. I feel so. I've had much more fun with this than anything else I've written. I feel like I know what it takes to tell a good story, like I've learned a ton from what didn't work in all those crappy features.

So I don't know how many screenplays you have to write before you stop sucking. How many did it take you?