What to think about our first scripts?
In his latest book “Outliers,” author Malcolm Gladwell lays out something he calls The 10,000 Hour Rule:
The search for success has spawned a motivational industry worth millions of pounds and libraries full of self-improvement books.
It is practice, however, that makes perfect, according to the sociologist whose books have become required reading within the Conservative party. The best way to achieve international stardom is to spend 10,000 hours honing your skills, says the new book by Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best-selling The Tipping Point.
The greatest athletes, entrepreneurs, musicians and scientists emerge only after spending at least three hours a day for a decade mastering their chosen field.
“What’s really interesting about this 10,000-hour rule is that it applies virtually everywhere,” Gladwell told a conference held by The New Yorker magazine. “You can’t become a chess grand master unless you spend 10,000 hours on practice.
“The tennis prodigy who starts playing at six is playing in Wimbledon at 16 or 17 [like] Boris Becker. The classical musician who starts playing the violin at four is debuting at Carnegie Hall at 15 or so.”
3 hours a day. For 10 years. A daunting challenge. Is it possible to speed up the process? Let’s say it takes 6 months to write an original screenplay. So you knock out 2 per year. That’s 1o scripts in 5 years. That’s how many original screenplays Larry Kasdan wrote before he sold The Bodyguard and began his career as a screenwriter.
Whether it takes 10,000 hours of writing, 10 original screenplays, or whatever magical combination of X amount of hours spent to create Y amount of scripts, there is one immutable fact about that process: Your first scripts will range from fair to bad in terms of their quality. And there they will sit. In a stack. In a corner.
Which leads to the question: What should we think about our first scripts? Should we be glad we went through the process of writing them as we churned our way through the requisite amount of time spent ‘practicing’ our craft? Embarrassed by the lack of quality exhibited in them? Save them to remind us of how far we’ve come in our writing? Recycle them? Use them as doorstops?
I was inspired to wind through these thoughts after reading this poem “The Surgeon” by Alicia Suskin Ostriker about a surgeon recounting the first death of a patient:
The Surgeon
I was still a kid
interning at State
he reminisces late in the meal —
It was a young red-headed woman
looked like my sister
when the lines went flat
I fell apart
shook
like a car with a broken axle
Went to the head surgeon
a fatherly man
Boy, he said, you got to fill a graveyard
before you know this business
and you just did row one, plot one.
“You got to fill a graveyard before you know this business… and you just did row one, plot one.”
Each script we write that doesn’t sell does feel a little like something in us died. After all our excitement, the brainstorming and character development, the actual page-writing, rewrites and revisions, we send it out. The response can vary — some interest, but not enough to the harsh void of silence.
In other words: Rest In Peace (RIP).
But hopefully Gladwell is right.
With each script we write that doesn’t sell…
We’re working our way through hours writing en route to 10,000.
We’re knocking off scripts en route to 10.
We’re filling a graveyard, one plot at a time.
All in pursuit of “knowing this business.”
What do you think about your first scripts? How do you feel about them?
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