
Evaluating Your Own Work
EVALUATING YOUR OWN WORK
By Derek Rydall
Founder, ScriptwriterCentral.com
“Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tensi
on, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecisi
on, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.”
– T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
WRITING IS REWRITING
As a writer, you may use other script c
onsultants to critique your material, but inevitably you’ll need to master the ability to analyze your own work. This can be a difficult task, somewhat akin to trying to look at your own face (without a mirror). If you are going to write at a level that sells, however, you will need to rewrite.
And rewrite.
And rewrite…
But do not despair, you’re in good company. Many screenwriters struggle over evaluating their own work. I still have bloodstains
on my office walls where I pounded my head as I rewrote
one script sixteen times before putting it in the market. I
once spent so l
ong looking at a single word that it lost its meaning and was reduced to its original, primordial symbolism. Talk about a head-trip! And it’s not just screenwriters that suffer with this. The French poet, Paul Verlaine,
once said that a poet never finishes a poem, he aband
ons it. Marcel Proust c
ontinued to correct proofs for Remembrance of Things Past
on his deathbed. Henry James rewrote some of his novels l
ong after they were published. And Oscar Wilde
once proclaimed that he spent all morning adding a comma and all afterno
on deleting it. Boy, do I know that
one!
So how do you analyze your own work without becoming an alcoholic or a guest at the Mad Hatter’s tea party? First, you have to accept the fact that you will never have a completely objective perspective. Sec
ond, you have to learn when to just
grit your teeth and c
onclude that the work is finished — even if you have the uneasy feeling that more can be d
one. H
onestly, I still feel that way about almost everything I’ve written. It goes with the territory.