Why throwing away your script is the best advice I can give.

I want you to take your script. You know, the one you just spent countless hours, blood, sweat, and tears writing. The one that is your baby. The one that is the most important piece of art you have created.

I want you to throw that shit in the trash.

Ok. Not literally, even though it might be therapeutic to physically throw away a 120 printed page script right into the trash can. But I want you to take your script and throw away the entire idea. You are now asking, why would I do that? My script is good! It got a great score on the Black List! I already have some producers interested in financing it!

Good! Throw it away.

When you throw your script away, I want you to take the core foundation of the film. Your characters, the themes, even the inciting incident and rewire your brain to look at them in a different light. This exercise will force you in a box (and if you know me, I love being put in a box. Not for kink reasons, but because it forces you to create a solution to get out of one). This is an exercise I recently implemented with my own work. I have been working on a script, it’s like my Moby Dick, the elusive whale that I have been trying to catch. This has been 15 years of my life, and its been written, filmed as a short, rewritten, turned into a feature, rewritten as another feature. But so far it just hasn’t landed where its needed to.

Even now, writing this blog, it’s not done and I am sure its going to go through more iterations. But back to the exercise. I had this script, or really at this point it was multiple scripts, outlines, and pages of story notes. I “knew” the story, but it still felt all over the place. My writing partner, Shimon and I recently had a meeting on the script and we both agreed we needed to actually be able to answer “what is this story about?” Which is kinda crazy for a story we have been working on so long. I know what its about, but that doesn’t mean it was working. So we gave ourselves homework. Write a three act structure for our characters, each one.

It was hard to write. Because I didn’t know what their journeys actually are. What their “wants” and “needs” are. We have been trying to shoehorn years of hard work into these new drafts and it was becoming disjointed and worse, diluted. So, I threw it away.

Not the entire concept, but the major thru lines of the story. I kept a couple key characters, killed one off completely, and even made a genre shift.

You know what? It’s sorta good. Like “Hey, I’d watch that movie” good. It’s a story I can actually pitch to you in a logline. You get so hung up on the work you create, that sometimes letting go and re-envisioning it can spark new ideas, stronger stories, and more complex characters.

Now what if your script is already solid? You love it, everyone loves it. Throw it away. Try this as a thought experiment. Look at your story through a new lens. If your story is as good as you think it is, it will hold up and will be the strongest version of itself. But maybe… just maybe, you will discover something new that will take your story to the next level.