Lesson 9 should be in your inbox in less than 90 seconds.
One of my big regrets in my early teaching was not encouraging short films earlier.
I didn't write short films when I was learning, so I made the classic teacher mistake of, "If I didn't learn that way, then you shouldn't either."
This is a huge fallacy that afflicts many experienced professionals. They tend to have a blind spot for anything they didn't do when they came up.
But I started out as an actor and then a playwright. I had been in the mindset of a storyteller and performer since I was 16 years old.
I had performed dozens of stage plays, countless scenes; I had context for conflict and dialogue and an audience's reaction. When I started writing drama, I wrote monologues and eventually twenty-five stage plays with the last five produced.
I had context that most don't have when they start writing, and it was the height of hubris to think how I learned to write screenplays was the best way to do it for anyone else.
Many of us have a tendency to keep rewriting something until we get it right.
This is not the worst instinct, as writing is definitely rewriting. We want to fix, adjust, polish and perfect. Multiple drafts will always be the norm and they should be.
Sometimes dozens of drafts!
But early on we are likely to start projects that maybe weren't ideal. They're conceived wrong. And no amount of rewriting is ever going to save that.
This is normal and part of the maturation process.
The mistake is to keep working on it when it was doomed from the start.
The trick is to know when to move on.
Because when you move on you get to bring everything you learned from the previous project and put it into a new one.
One that starts fresh. Unencumbered by previous drafts. You can avoid the same mistakes rather than pulling your hair out trying to fix them.
This is when you will see the most growth.