Writing To Win

I remember back in high school during halftime of a football game our coach was up to his usual. If you’ve ever played high school football, which I doubt a lot of screenwriters have, you’ve sat through a ton of halftime speeches. These speeches usual consist of a loud coach telling players to get their heads out of their asses, to go out there and hit somebody, and to go balls out. Now if your team is a successful one the speeches will be drastically different, but we sucked that particular year so that’s how the speeches we got usually went.

During this particular game we were winning by two touchdowns to a team we should have been beating anyway, but the way our coach was talking I could tell he was scared of losing. He had us playing not to lose, instead of having us plan to win. We went out and got our asses kicked in the second half because the other team made adjustments and all our coach had us doing was sticking to the script and trying to hold onto a lead. Big difference, and in my writing I realized I was doing the same thing. I was writing to not lose, instead of being confident in my abilities and seeing things through without hesitation.

I read before somewhere that “writing is rewriting”, and that is most definitely the truth. My problem was that I kept rewriting while I was writing my first draft. It was as if I was scared of actually finishing, although I really wasn’t. I was just scared of actually sticking to what I had planned to do. I kept coming up with alternatives to how to end my story and it was screwing me up. Once I realized this, I also realized my indecisiveness was spilling over into the other things I was writing. That’s not even my style, so I had to check myself and get back on track.

The past few weeks I’ve shed my insecurities and the indecisiveness that was hindering me, and returned to form. Now I’m writing to win, and I realize I must believe in myself before I can expect anyone else to. I’m back to my normal output of at least 5 pages a day and by the end of the year I should have my 2nd draft polished and at least one, if not two, of my TV specs knocked out. Writers write, and you’ve got to be able to realize what your weaknesses are and confront them head on. You can’t run around talking about how you’re a writer and not back it up.