Know your strengths and weaknesses as a writer.

When it comes to being a good writer, it's really important that you know your abilities well as a writer. It's important that you have a good grasp of what you're capable of doing as a writer and that you know what your strengths are when it comes to the craft.

After all, the more you are aware of your capabilities, the easier it becomes to make right decisions. The more aware you are of your skills, the more likely it is that you'll get your projects done they way they should be.

The reason that I'm writing about this is that even though I think I have a relatively solid grasp of my abilities as a writer, this hasn't always been the case. There have been times when I have overestimated my skills and have failed with my tasks. 

For example, years ago, when I tried writing my first movie screenplay (in 2008), I did not get the project completed. I wasn't even close to coming up with a script that made sense and that had potential to become a movie.

The biggest reason for this was that when I tried writing the movie script, I didn't know the fundamentals of storytelling. I didn't know that I was still an amateur and only at the beginning of my journey as a screenwriter.

By that I mean is that when I started writing the movie, as a writer, I had only managed to complete my very first television spec scripts. I had just finished my 'Boston Legal' scripts, which gave me confidence that I could write movies too.

Naturally, even though I felt confident about myself, I was still clueless about the craft as a whole. Even though it took a lot of talent to write tv scripts, I had very little knowledge about the story structure or how to create my own material.

After all, when it comes to those drama specs for Boston Legal, I was writing for an existing television series. I didn't have to know anything about creating characters from scratch, coming up with overarching storylines or anything else.

So not surprisingly, when it came to this movie writing task, it was just a total failure. I spent months writing stuff that had no organic premise, no interesting characters or anything that would have given the story any direction or momentum.

As a whole, the whole thing was such a disaster, that it took almost ten years before I had the courage to try writing movies again. I didn't have the nerve to try again until I had learned more about the craft and felt that I knew enough to give it a go again.

In that sense, when it comes to the craft of storytelling and writing in general, it's so important that you're aware of your strengths and weaknesses as a writer. You should be aware of what you can do and what are the things that you don't know enough about.

After all, even though it's true that you don't need to know everything about the craft before you start writing, you should know at least the basics. Writing movie scripts is too much of a crapshoot if you don't know how the fundamentals work.

In the end, in my case, being so clueless about the fundamentals clearly hurt me as a writer. It was so unfortunate that I didn't know the basics of story structure and that there were so many things that I still needed to learn as a writer.

After all, had I known about the basics of story structure earlier (Blake Snyder's beat sheet for example), that would have helped me immensely as a writer. It would have made my learning curve so much easier than it turned out to be.

In that sense, I can only hope that those who think about writing movies manage to learn the basics first. I hope that they manage to pay attention to the fundamentals of story structure instead of getting too excited about their strengths and abilities as writers.

After all, if they manage to do those things, writing movies will become so much easier for them. It will become so much easier to come up with screenplays that are good enough and that have the potential to be produced for the big screen too.