Can You Suck Just A Little Bit More, Please?

I've been busy vomiting out a draft of my latest project, so my poor little blog has gone neglected. In spite of this, it's still received a steady flow of traffic. Regular readers checking for new posts, I get. People following links shared through various social network platforms, I get. What I don't get is the Google search traffic.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people find my little blog by googling the following search terms:

- Can I Write

- How To Fix A Bad Script

- How To Tell If Your Script Sucks

And my all time favorite:

- Does My Script Suck?



Yes. It does.





You suck. I suck. We all suck. Get over it.





People, I've been over this many times before. Asking the Google Gods if your script sucks will not make it suck any less. It's pathetic.





But I'll take pity on you because I've been there. (Not the googling part, because I reserve that for porn and buying tacky crocheted Buffy and BSG fan art off of Etsy. I'm talking about the sucking part.) I'm going to let you in on a little secret that will save you years of grief, massive therapy bills, and

an endless string of bad choices in sex partners.

(Okay, that last one might just be me.)



The secret? You're supposed to suck.

Did you catch that?

YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO SUCK.

Fear of sucking is what drives us. It is the single biggest force behind our need to produce better scripts.





Your scripts are always going to suck. No matter how good you get. You'll write one. It will suck. You'll write another. It will suck. You'll write a few more and they'll still suck. But guess what? You'll go back to the first one... and it will still suck. But because you have time and experience at sucking, you'll be able to see exactly why it sucks and fix it. Then it will still suck, but at a much higher level. That's how it works. You could be pulling in seven figure deals and you'll still suck. But it will be worth seven figures.





When you stop thinking you suck, that's when you start writing garbage.





The danger is using your fear of sucking as an excuse to not write, or worse, getting trapped in the vicious cycle of suckage. I'm sure you've seen the cycle at work - those writers who rewrite the same single script over and over for years and decades, never moving on, never writing another script, never getting any better in an attempt to make their one and only suck less. It won't. You're not learning anything. You're just reworking the same pile of shit over and over.





Get out there and suck on something new. Revel in sucking. Pump out as many scripts that suck as you can. Accept that you're always going to suck and do it anyway. Do it 'til your fingers bleed and people are lining up to pay you to suck.





Just, for God sake, stop asking if you suck. Pros know they do, and own it. They use it as fuel to further their career. Stop wondering if you suck and just suck already. Don't waste valuable time asking Google for answers when you could be writing, 'cause while you do, those pros pump out ten Act Two pages and still have time left over to take a leisurely dump.

I'm going back to rework my vomit draft now, and hopefully I'm going to suck huge monkey balls.

But let me ask you, how often and how well, do you suck?



