Friday, September 5, 2008

Saying goodbye (to a script)

It's hard to stop writing something. I'm having a hard time with my Monk spec, and I'm seriously considering calling it quits. Which sounds easy. But is surprisingly difficult. It's like that friend that you don't really like hanging out with anymore, but every time she calls you just can't help but say "sure! let's go to the movies! that sounds like fun!". I keep meaning to start working on the My Name is Earl spec, but every time I open final draft I just keep going back to Monk.

I think it's hard to be emotionally detached from something you've written. You put so much work into a project, that you don't want anything bad to happen to it. And you put so much of yourself into that it starts to resemble yourself. But when you create something, you constantly have to step back and re-evaluate what you're making. I think that's one of the hardest parts of writing, much harder than the writing itself. Anyone can just put good words down on paper, perfectly untalented people do it by accident all the time. It's much harder to look at what you've written and decide how to make it better. And sometimes, making it better means deleting the whole thing and moving on to another project.

In other news, I'm considering going to graduate school for screenwriting. Which means the next few months will be full of GRE practice tests and hunting down professors for recommendations. Also means I should try to write more scripts to show them. Here goes!

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