The Art Of Mind’s Blog

by Scott Benton, Screenwriter, Los Angeles, CA

I know what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking, “I can’t write, paint, sing, play music, sculpt, put a speech together, build a model from scratch, cook, craft a cabinet…” You name it. I know you’re saying you can’t do any of these things, because deep down you’ve told yourself that if it isn’t done right, it just isn’t worth doing at all, or even starting. You’ve been meaning to do these things for years now, and maybe you will, but not today. Soon. Later on. At some point in the very near future.

And that’s exactly what I thought for ten years too.

For ten years I sat down frequently to do my writing. I desperately wanted to learn how to write a full-length screenplay, and I tried everything imaginable to get myself there. I took classes, I read books, I did research, I got up at 5:00am and worked on note cards until I absolutely had to get to work. I used up as much time on my weekends as I could sketching outlines, writing notes, trying this, trying that.

And it all sucked.

I did this for ten years not knowing why I couldn’t write a script. I figured I just wasn’t a writer, but I still had this burning desire to figure it out. So I kept trying, and trying, and trying, and like in a dream, after all that time, and after all that work, I looked down and realized I hadn’t left the starting gate. I was right where I always was, no further along than the day I started writing. After ten years, I still hadn’t finished one thing.

Why?

Because I thought exactly the way you’re thinking right now—right this minute as you’re reading these words. I thought it had to be perfect. I thought it had to be smart. I thought it had to be meaningful. I thought it had to be art, and it wasn’t. I thought this way every day until I convinced myself I had failed. Utterly. That I had ultimately wasted my life. That I should leave town immediately because I had proven to myself I cannot write anything.

That was before I had my epiphany.

I was standing at a map I had taped to the wall of the United States. I knew the game was up for me, and so I took a dart and paced off ten steps and turned around. I decided to throw that dart, and wherever it landed on that taped up map, I was going to go to that town and start my life over again. When you fail badly, maybe it’s time to pack up and do something different. People start their lives over all the time, and there I was about to hit the reset button.

But as I stood ready to let that dart fly and spin towards my future home, a thought pressed up through the darkness of my thoughts. It angrily stepped onto the little screening room in my mind, with giant subtitles that shouted out:

JUST WRITE THE BAD VERSION…

So I put down the dart, and I had a long conversation about the writing. I made a deal with myself, and one that if I didn’t keep, I promised to kick myself out of town and go wherever the dart landed.

The deal was this: I would write, but I would only write BADLY. I would do whatever it took to get a screenplay completed, even if it was the worst script ever written in the history of bad scripts. It didn’t matter if it made sense, or was written in gibberish or numbers, I was going to get something done. I would allow myself to stay in town as long as I kept writing and didn’t stop—and you know what?

I got a 750-page book done, and then a screenplay, and then another screenplay, and it seemed like I couldn’t stop writing.

That was the key I discovered, and something other writers talk about as well. When I say other writers, I’m not talking about my friends next door, or an uncle, or some unpublished nobody. I’m talking about the real deal. I’m talking about people you already know. They all say the same thing. Here’s a quote. See if you can guess who said it.

“The first draft of everything is shit.”

So that’s not some friend of a friend, or a t-shit I saw on Venice Beach. No, that’s Ernest Hemingway—Hemingway. One of the most famous writers ever. So if you doubt what I’m writing, how about Hemingway? He said the same thing. He knew he had to write badly in order to write anything at all. He knew that when he finished something, and read it back, that it was going to look and sound terrible, but he pushed through anyway. He wrote the bad version first, and then he went back over it.

And that’s what I had to do, and that’s what you have to do. Stop trying to convince yourself you have to do the perfect version of anything. Always do the bad version instead. At least then you have something to work with, and something to improve. Until you do the bad version, you have nothing. I had ten years of nothing, and it’s not fun. Once you get this simple idea into your own head, this nothing trap becomes an easy tangle to extricate out of.

Give yourself permission to do the bad version too, and then you won’t be able to stop.

Look at my own writing here. I’m sure you’re tearing it apart. I wrote it knowing it would be terrible. I put it together knowing it would have mistakes, and contain unclear thinking. I wrote knowing you would break it down. I wrote knowing there were twenty, fifty, one hundred, ten thousand other writers who could do it better than I can. I know there are pacing problems, formatting problems, maybe a typo here and there, or the overuse of clichés.

But I don’t care, because I know the first draft is not the final draft, and I know I’m going to go back and do some more work on it, to make it the best writing I can. And you know what? You’re still going to criticize it, and it might even make you feel nauseous (do you know the correct word would be “nauseated,” and not “nauseous?” If you look it up in Strunk and White, to say you feel nauseous means you are making OTHER PEOPLE SICK).

So I made a mistake. It’s imperfect. It’s the bad version. It’s wrong.

So what.

Give yourself permission to write or paint or dance or play or build the bad version of everything. If you can cross that imaginary bridge and get yourself to the page, or the easel, or the floor, or the piano, then you’re going to find a couple of things starting to happen.

First, you will find you won’t STOP writing. You’ll find you can’t possibly quit painting. You’re going to see that you’ve written ten songs in a week. You’re going to remove another stack of books from your shelf because you need the space for your new sculptures. You’re going to finally get yourself going, and that, my friend, is one powerful key you can’t pass up in order to make more significant progress than you can ever imagine.

Second, you’re going to get better. A lot better. You already know the more you do something, the better you get. It’s a simple law of nature, and it never fails. It won’t fail you either.

So just do the bad version. You’ll be glad you