Week 20
the beauty in failing publicly (pro tip: find your failing peeps)
This week, I workshopped my new pilot script, the first thing I have submitted for feedback in… uh, quite awhile. I submitted only 28 pages, less than the other members of the group submitted (not that I’m counting), but I’m pretty proud of myself that I churned that out in three days while still working during the day and not going to bed later than 11 p.m. I knew the draft was pretty rough, and I suspected the flaws baked in: a not-quite active enough protagonist (the cardinal sin of screenwriting after being boring is having an inactive protagonist), a not-thoroughly consistent tone (my achilles heel), and small moments where I couldn’t make a decision one way or another while writing and, surprise, my indecision showed on the page. Then there was almost two straight hours where I got in-depth COVERAGE (aka scary feedback) on my script.
It was the best thing ever.
Because within all the problems that were more clearly identified and defined for me were beautiful suggestions that will make my script so much better. And because the parts that I loved were the parts that they resonated with the readers as well, which reminded me of why I wrote the script in the first place and confirmed my instincts in what I thought were the strengths of the script, and in its potential. I thanked them at the end of the session profusely, and relayed the thing that I once heard, but have very rarely experienced: the best feedback makes you want to dive right back into your script to make it better. That is how I felt throughout the whole process. I cannot wait to jump back in and show them the script again, to fail so much better the next time.
the beauty in failing privately
I saw the Carol King musical “Beautiful,” getting home at 11:30 the night before I needed to get up early to leave at 7 am for a road trip to Iowa (today, as a matter of fact). While the reasonable thing would have been to go to bed as quickly as possible, I decided a small detour to the powered-off car in the garage to sit and belt out songs from other musicals I love until 12:30 am, when I would finally stop with a soar throat and a hoarse voice to sit down and write this blog. Though my singing was overall terrible, there were moments where I could close my eyes and hit the right notes or close-enough notes to enjoy how my voice sounded and matched the feeling I was aiming for— never for whole songs, but for short lyrical phrases, all of which happened to be the words that I emotionally connected with the most. Those moments of beauty and feeling connected with creativity and play and joy— being moved by the ideas within the words— generated the same simultaneous feelings of lightness and realness as those few moments I’d loved in my script. It’s not that the moments themselves make the piece whole, but those tiny slivers of promise make the experience itself feel like a promising endeavor instead of a doomed “what’s the point?” waste of time.
While I love to daydream of being the star of a musical, belting out tunes with perfect pitch to standing ovations as much as I love to daydream about giving my speech for an Academy Award winning script, it is so, so, so much more joyful to actually be in the flow of creative expression—no matter the results or how few and far between the glimmers of promise.
Happy writing, revising, singing, dancing and all forms of playing in the week ahead!