If you’ve ever seen the movie “Stripes” (one of my all-time favorites), you’ll remember this scene when Bill Murray has reached rock bottom:
Stripes – And then depression set in
Anyone worth their salt as a writer has had those moments when nothing seemed to work and they’re ready to ditch it all. You wonder if you’re good enough, whether it’s worth all the time and energy you’re putting into it, will anything ever become of what you’re putting on the page. The statistics are certainly not in your favor. Fewer than 1% of all feature spec scripts out there ever get made.
And I fell into that mindset recently. Even though I’ve had a script produced, even though we had other scripts optioned, I still found myself at that crossroads where self-doubt and self-motivation meet. The thing about reaching bottom, though, is that I’ve found there’s nowhere to go but up from that point (unless you decide to keep digging in that hole of self-despair).
So, what to do? Rick and I have a lot of projects going on, and so rather than try to torture you through how we find our way out of the current situation, we decided that it would be just as instructive for you new writers out there (or experienced writers who still are looking to break through), to take one of our projects that we wrote together, and how we took it from conception to completion and what happened after we optioned it. So beginning with our next post, we start looking at “According to Plan” and how we made it happen.
Lake Regret Movie 