Excitement trumps fear.

I wrote a short screenplay the other day.

It wasn’t great by any means, but it was unusual for me in that I got an idea, sketched out the basic idea, and pumped out a first draft in an hour. See, what I normally do is get an idea, get excited, throw some ideas on paper, and then… “let it simmer”. Which is really just my way of rationalizing the fact that I’m scared to death of writing. Because, as some of you may know, if you “let it simmer”…it—whatever “it” is—never gets done.

Emily Blake just blogged about something similar, when people are terrified of writing garbage, so they just don’t write.

If I never try, I can always suffer under the delusion that I am awesome, I just never had an opportunity to prove it. But if I try and fail, then I'll have to face the fact that my lifelong dream was a fantasy.

And I think my problem is essentially the same. I’ll have an idea, love the idea, sketch out the idea, maybe even make a detailed outline of the idea, but I’ll never actually make it into something more than an idea.

So what do you do to defeat the crippling fear of sucking? How do you move your idea from just being an idea to something more than that, be it book, short story, or screenplay?

Well, I think I may have finally figured it out: Get excited, and try as hard as you can to stay that way.

Most of the time, the reason why I stop working on something is because I forget what it was that made me excited about it in the first place. The fun drains out of it, and it becomes something I have to do, rather than something I’m excited that I get to do.

Excitement trumps fear.

And since excitement fades as time passes, you’ve got to get as much done on an idea while it’s still fresh in your mind. You know what it’s like when you’re making an outline. You write down the basics of the scene, and probably even hear snippets of dialogue in your head, the different beats and how they all play out. But if you’re me, you never think to write these out, because you just assume that when you sit down to write it, the ideas’ll be flowing in the same way. But then when you actually sit down to write it, all that’s gone.

This time, I decided it would be different. When I got the idea for the short and outlined the idea, I looked at the clock and realized I had an hour to kill. So I wrote it.

When I finished, I wasn’t sure if it was really great or a piece of shit. Now, having looked over it a few days later, I know that it’s somewhere in between. But now I know for sure which one it is. And I think it’s better to have a mediocre reality, especially one that I can work on to make better, than an imaginary masterpiece.