So when it comes to being a writer, it's not exactly secret that revisiting your scripts isn't always easy to do. It isn't always fun to take another look at your earlier writing projects and see whether they happened to be as good as you thought they originally were.
Indeed, especially when it comes to projects that didn't go anywhere, there's a good chance that you won't like revisiting these scripts. Even though taking another fresh look at them might be beneficial learning-wise, that might sometimes be a bit too difficult to do.
So the reason that I'm writing about this is that during the last week or so I've been actually trying to revisit my earlier writing projects. I've tried to take another look at the quality of them and see whether my previous assessment about them was correct.
Motivation-wise, the biggest reason that I decided to check them - not that surprisingly - has to do with my children's book. Now that I finally got the book finished and managed to make it as good as it can be, I thought I could safely check my earlier stuff 'risk-free'.
So when it comes to this task, the first thing I have to say that I was a bit surprised how I had managed to distance myself from my earlier projects. Even though a lot of time had passed, I thought that I would still be more attached to my tv specs emotionally.
Indeed, especially when it comes to my Big Bang Theory and Modern Family scripts (I wrote seven of them), those were a really big thing to me. I was so invested in them and had high hopes about having a career breakthrough with the specs (didn't happen).
Expectation-wise, when it comes to these scripts, once I was about to start reading my favorite Modern Family spec script, I expected to see some solid stuff. I wanted to see a well written spec that had good flow and that had jokes and funny moments that would make me smile.
However, once I finally started reading my favorite Modern Family spec, things didn't go as well as I had expected. Once I started reading, I noticed right away that I had trouble adjusting to the pacing of the script and couldn't get a proper feel of what was going on.
Indeed, no matter how hard I tried to read my story about Mitchell's big day as a courtroom lawyer and Jay & Phil going to the auction event, I just couldn't get it. Especially when it came to the storyline about Haley & Alex, I felt that what I had written was just hopeless.
Not surprisingly, based on the reading, I was now pretty confident that I had been previously wrong about the quality of this script. This one, that I knew was the 'best' Modern Family script that I had written, most certainly didn't seem to be that good in retrospect.
So based on this unexpected and unfortunate reading experience, one might have thought that I was now really disappointed about the whole thing. You might think that since my best 'old' script didn't make much sense, I would feel terrible about myself.
Yet, even though it now more or less appeared that the script wasn't even remotely as good as I had expected, that wasn't the end of the world to me. I wasn't thinking that just because this script in my opinion didn't look good at all, all was somehow lost.
Indeed, the biggest reason for that was that I had recently done bigger and more demanding projects that were more challenging story-wise. Especially when it comes to my 'two years plus' book project that required tons of talent and effort, I was in a good place now.
After all, that book project had a story that required like ten times more story beats compared to a sitcom episode. The fact that I had finally managed to come up with a full length story (with 30+ chapters) was something that really made me happy.
The second reason was that just because I felt during that day that the script didn't work, that didn't automatically mean that the script was bad. It might have been that I just had an awful day and that I hadn't been able to adapt to the sitcom format as reader.
So not completely surprisingly, a couple of days later when I started reading the spec the second time, it turned out that my hunch was correct. As I was this time able to adapt to the sitcom format, the script suddenly started to make a lot more sense.
Indeed, even though there were some tiny mistakes in it, overall the spec was genuinely solid. The way that I had managed to read the characters, come up with solid storylines and execute such a wonderful, kind and clever script was just life-affirming.
In that sense, when it comes to this thing as a whole, I think it's pretty clear that we as writers (considering this task), every now and then, should revisit our older scripts. We should look at their quality and evaluate them, even though it might be a bit difficult to do.
After all, when you as a writer keep looking back at your earlier scripts, it - first of all - gives you perspective about yourself. It shows that over the years you have probably done a lot more things that you can even remember having done as a writer.
The second thing is that once you look at your earlier scripts, you get to know what your strengths and weaknesses are and have been. You'll get to see where you have been good at and what you can perhaps do even better when you start working on your next project.
In that sense, as I'm currently thinking about my next project, based on one of the spec scripts that I just read, I think I got some fairly good feedback from it. I got information that I can use when it comes to considering my next project and its genre.
After all, in my case, even though I haven't been feeling that great about my comedy writing skills, I shouldn't be thinking that as a writer I'm not able to write to funny stuff. I shouldn't be thinking that I'm only good at writing drama and that's where my strengths are.
On the contrary, especially when it comes to that Modern Family spec that I wrote years ago, that one is still good stuff. It's good stuff and shows that even though I've done different things lately, I can still write comedy too if I'll just decide to give it a try.
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