“Sometimes you’re gonna lose the patient”

The Bitter Script Reader chimes in with a thought provoking post: “Sometimes you’re gonna lost the patient”:

It’s a scene we’ve seen countless times on an equally countless number of medical dramas. A critical patient goes south on the operating table. Blood pressure drops, they’re bleeding out, their heart stops. Our heroic doctors do whatever they can. They autotransfuse, they pull out the shock paddles, perform CPR and when all else fails, they do what us ER viewers know is always the last resort — they crack the chest and start shocking and massaging the heart manually.

But for all their efforts, for as much as those doctors try to practically force the patient back to life, there’s often nothing that can be done. Some days, that’s what it’s like writing a spec script. I’ve seen it from both sides. There are plenty of times where I’ve dealt with the same writer who has come back to me again and again for notes and guidance. Sometimes they take my input and the story gets better; sometimes they don’t take my specific suggestions, but my critiques encourage them to rethink some areas and come back with better ideas… and sometimes there’s just no saving the idea.

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There are some scripts you’ll write that ultimately aren’t meant to be shown to anyone else. Some screenplays are more valuable just for the experience of having written them. There are things about writing that no teacher, book, executive or reader can help you learn — you can only learn by doing. Now, if you’re lucky, sometimes those “learning experience” scripts might be salvageable. However, since they were often forged out of inexperience, they might have structural deficiencies that make it more difficult to rewrite easily than something you’ve developed since learning “on the job.”

TSBR is quite right: Some scripts just need to die. There are inherent problems with the concept, set-up, collection of characters — or it’s just a plain bad idea. If you’ve spent more than a year writing and re-writing your script, and the story still hasn’t taken off, perhaps it’s best if you pull the plug on the sucker.

But before you euthanize said project, perhaps step back and take a macro look at the story:

* What if you changed its genre? Take a drama and see how it feels as a comedy. Or a thriller.

* What if you changed the gender of key characters? Turn the male Protagonist into a female. The Nemesis into a male.

* What if you switch Protagonists? Instead of writing the story through the perspective of your current Protagonist, what if you imagine it through the eyes of the Nemesis? Or the Trickster?

See if any one of those tacks resuscitates your story.

If not, put the poor thing down. Sure, it will be painful. But as TSBR says, “you can only learn by doing.” And there are lessons you will have learned from writing that project.

Now take those lessons and get right into starting another script.

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