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My One-and-Only Beautiful Baby

“I have been working on the screenplay for 10 years.”

Few screenwriters and playwrights earn a living, and even fewer do so with only one or two produced works. To make writing a career, you must be receiving residuals and royalties from a larger collection of works that are being seen by audiences constantly. Yes, there are stories of one-hit wonders, able to survive for years on a single movie deal (few plays are that big, outside of Broadway musicals), but those are outliers.

The more scripts and manuscripts you have in your portfolio, the more likely you are to have the type of play or movie a producer wants.

After you complete a work, you should begin another project. After you type fadeout, curtain, or the end, take only a short break before beginning the next story. I do not wait to edit and refine the first work before starting the next.

Since a good writer often asks other writers and editors to review a manuscript, use the time while others have your work to brainstorm and plan the next. You might be surprised at how many ideas that did not fit in your first story will fit in a future work.

Do not let perfectionism getting your way. The more works you do write, the better each new work will be.

I cannot tell you that a screenplay, stage play, or novel should only take a year to write. I understand that many authors have full-time jobs and other obligations unconnected to writing. However, it should be painfully obvious that 10 years is much too long for finishing a screenplay.

An approach that works for me is to set a clear and realistic goal for producing more than one work per year. I attempt to complete four plays or screenplays each calendar year. Many of these will never be produced, but each script improves over previous works. When time permits, I do go back and update unproduced material, applying lessons that I have learned since the first draft was finished.

Blogging weekly and writing a monthly published column help me develop good working habits. Find a way to write on a deadline. Discipline is essential.

Most poets I know write dozens or hundreds of poems each year. They fill notebooks, experimenting and learning as they write. For many years, I filled one or more notebooks every two years with mediocre poetry, and that routine improved all my writing.

Likewise, short story authors, essayists, and other writers practice their forms and genres regularly. Again, my own experience is that blogging on a weekly basis and more frequently when possible improves all the writing on which I am working.

Unfortunately, I have met many aspiring screenwriters, playwrights, and novelists deeply attached to a single work. This is their “one and only beautiful baby” problem.

I cannot explain why these long form authors become stuck on single projects. If anything, I have far too many projects and struggle to focus on refining and marketing my works. For me, the thought of working on a single story day after day, year after year, is frightening. Familiarity breeds contempt, and I am certain I would begin to hate any work that demanded my attention day in and day out.

Writers should have more discipline than I demonstrate. Even my finished drafts should be polished and submitted to producers and publishers, but as I finish one work I am likely to begin two or three others. Therefore, a part of me does admire the writer able to focus single-mindedly on one manuscript.

The beautiful baby problem is not constructive. Spending months and years refining a single screenplay, stage script, or novel seldom results in production or publication. I have met many writers who optioned a script or had a play produced that wasn’t the work they intended to pitch to a producer. The cliché is true, producers will ask “What else do you have?”

I lose track of what I have written. When I go through my computer directories or the stacks of handwritten pages, I rediscover old works. Some writers don’t understand how I can do this, but I write so much that I could never remember it all. (I have tried to keep an inventory of projects, so I can return to old works later.)

Write, write, and write some more. Do not let your one-and-only get in the way of earning a living. Do not allow yourself to become “stuck” emotionally on the success of that one great story you need to share. Move forward and keep moving.