My very first screenplay was ghastly. Oh, the pain of reading it! It’s a mythological fantasy adventure and it was great fun to write. But it’s ghastly! So is everyone else’s first screenplay. So what? Well, I’m spending several hours a day rewriting it, that’s what! And, it is such a bad read that I wear a paper sack over my head so I don’t have to see my own reflection in the screen of my laptop.
I love the story, but I can’t think of anything mean enough to say about the writing. This particular screenplay, however, is the only one I’ve written that ever advanced in a screenwriting competition. How is that possible when the writing is so poor?
In Writing the Wrong Story, I mentioned that I didn’t ever want to give anyone who reads my work cause to say, “it’s not a bad story, it’s just written that way.” Well, it took reading my own blog and two and half years to figure this out (yeah, I’m really that green of a newbie). Never say never. My first screenplay was not a bad story. It was just written that way.
