week 35

Bringing a long-lost friend to writer’s group

It was the script whose feedback nearly destroyed me. I had never been shattered by feedback on any piece of writing before, but that one nearly did me in. One week I got a bunch of people were laughing in my then-writer’s class, saying how great it was, and a few weeks later it was ripped apart by someone in the industry. I tried to shake it off, but for days I shame-spiraled and every time I thought about it I would get tunnel vision and stare blankly, completely oblivious to anything going on around me. It made me feel like such a fool to think it was any good, to think it had any potential… to think that I had any potential. I took a year off of screenwriting to make a children’s book, to write things that had nothing to do with scripts. I wrote a novel, and then put it away before revising it. I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t that I was scared to write another script or revisit this one, it was that I was dedicating my time to focusing on projects I could complete with nobody else’s help. And then I went back to screenwriting, but with everything I wrote I had to shake off this ghost. I stopped trying to write anything remotely funny and dove headfirst into thriller. Bloody, creepy thrillers, with psychological messes. I still had to shake off the ghost.

I still love writing psychological thrillers, but I also like to try my hand occasionally at comedy. I threw this project into the ring at my writer’s group, knowing its flaws but also having confidence that they would be kinder with their feedback. As always, they buoyed me with comments of what was working well and how I could fix the problems that were there. They made me feel like I could do something with it. They made me reconnect with my long-lost friend of a script that I had loved so much and that I’ve been missing for the past… (oh dear… three years?). They helped me love the feedback and revision process. It still has quite a ways to go before it’s industry ready, BUT— my old friend has legs.

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week 34