Let it go

I was on a screenwriting board recently where a new writer was asking about motivation and I gave my two cents. And every single other person disagreed with my two cents. I didn't make a big deal out of it but I thought I'd go into it here where I can explain my opinion in detail.

The basic question was, Is it okay to abandon a script to work on something else?

And I said yes. And everybody else said no.

Allow me to explain.

I finished my first script. It was okay - not something I'd shop around, but not too bad compared to other first screenplays. I got one hit off my logline, but of course the script wasn't good enough so I never heard from that agent again, and to be honest I think she asked for my script less because of my logline and more because I raved about how much I liked the pictures of cats she had on her website. Which, by the way, was a good lesson to learn about the importance of personality in selling yourself.

Anyway, I finished a TV episode and another script and a pilot and another TV episode and that's when things started to go wrong.

The TV episodes were okay but the longer scripts were bad. Real bad. They were both about professional assassins - not the same story, but they both had connections to Mafia dealings and the like, which is something I know absolutely nothing about. So the scripts were terrible.

Then I started a script about three brothers who are professional thieves.

I a) do not have a brother and b) know nothing about professional thieving.

So halfway through the script I realized it wasn't working. I looked back at my previous work and noticed that the reason I was having such a difficult time was because I kept trying to write about things that were completely out of my range of experience. So I scrapped the script completely, 60 pages in.

I decided to try writing a Supernatural. I wrote one draft and it was clearly very bad so I started a rewrite with a new storyline and it was clearly bad and I started a third rewrite with an even newer storyline and it was clearly bad so I decided to give up on Supernatural. That show is surprisingly difficult to write for.

I started a My Name is Earl and realized five pages in that I only had one joke. My plot was about Catalina being threatened with deportation so Earl has to marry her but Randy gets pissed because HE wants to marry Catalina.

Anybody remember that season where that happened? Yeah I was pretty happy that I hadn't written that episode after all, and even happier that's I clearly have the right idea even if I don't really do "jokes".

My point here is, if a script is obviously not working then why not switch to something that does? I learned things from each of those abandoned scripts, but I really don't think my wasting any more time struggling through them, passionless and knowing they wouldn't work, would help me be a better writer. In each case I swapped that script out for something that DID work.

I'm not suggesting to abandon the script when things get tough. When I was working on Not Dead Yet I came to a moment where I wasn't sure I could keep going, but then I realized that I liked this script too much and it had too much potential for me to let it die, so I pushed through and got some help and finished it, and now I'm proud of the result.

If every script you start ends up half finished, you have a problem. But if you are dying to work on that fairy tale drama but feel like you have to wait until you finish this piece of crap torture porn thing you started five months ago and have dragged ass through because you have nowhere to go from here - I say put it down. Go work on something you want to work on. There's no reason to force yourself to finish something just to say you finished it if it's obviously not going to work.

That's just the way I see it because I'm not a big fan of wasting time.