I'd say 90% of the time, I look at what I've done for the day and say to myself "God you suck." It's that one day out of ten when I finish and say "Huh, that was pretty good" that I do this. That one day makes it all worth it.

Long time reader, first time poster. Here's what is compelling me to share: just been reading "writing from the inside out" by dennis palumbo, screenwriter and therapist.

he talks about treating your writing as you would a child, or a child's work. would you tell your child you hate her story? of course not. so why, why, why would you treat yourself that way?

so mahmoud, don't make such a big deal about "hating" your writing and then getting leavened when your friends think it's actually okay. think, instead, how you would treat a child, and urge a child to consider his or her own work. would you want your daughter to hate her work until her friends thought it was okay? do you look in the mirror, hate how you like, and wait for your friends to compliment your shirt?

it sounds like i'm being pithy, but i'm not. your writing is precious. your writing is fragile. you, as an artist, are precious and fragile. treat yourself and your work as such.

that doesn't mean that your work can't improve; that doesn't mean that your work may not be your own best output. it simply means that in order to get to the place where you can reach your own highest and best art, you need to nurture, love, and protect yourself.

life is too short for hate. for a long time, i loudly and angrily detested some politicians. then i realized that i was wasting valuable energy. and they were famous and powerful people! that wasn't even turned inward!

please, don't turn hatred inward and onto your own work. how on earth will your talent and output ever grow to shine if you are raising it like mo'nique in precious?

Sorry, 2nd sentence, third paragraph, meant "hate you you LOOK" ...

we all struggle, and sometimes it hurts and sucks. but point the anger and pain somewhere other than your script. love it, nurture it, and help it to grow. nothing grows in hatred.

This is a great question, because it depends on your personal view of where inspiration and story come from.

If you're one who believes story(inspiration) comes from within you and is a direct reflection of you then it's probably better to hate your work as you write, because it's going to have as many faults as you have, and I will say personally, those faults can be numerous. If you hate your writing, you will grow to love it because you will constantly be changing it to what you know is right and true. And you just can't help love what's right and true, especially when it comes from within yourself. We often contrive our outer appearances to mask our true selves because we're afraid of the judgement of strangers. Just as you can contrive a mask for yourself, you can contrive a mask for a story, and it becomes a facade. This is what Shyamalan seems to be struggling with lately.

If you're on the side that believes story comes from without, or at least CAN come from without, from some transcendent something, then it will be easier to love the story. You have, if often superficially, removed yourself to an objective position and are more or less channeling something. You can write page after page and be enamored by it because you aren't praising yourself, you're praising this gift you've been given as well as the giver. This is a little touchy-feely I know, but this is also a good view to take to remove yourself from remorse. If something was bad, it wasn't your fault, it was the source. If something was good, that's great, and you're grateful to the source. This is the view artists had before the 13th century or so, I think it's a greek thing. Now, this doesn't mean you can't also hate the work, as I said, it can be bad sometimes. It just means it's far easier, in my opinion, to love it.

I sit between these two things, because I think the latter is improbable and the former leads to a dead end. I believe inspiration often always comes from without, and even some of the writing and story and plot and all that comes from a source that isn't us. But, we have to hold that inspiration to our own standards, we have to love it AND hate it. We have to know when it's good and when it's bad. You shouldn't constantly enamored or begrudged, you have to be both. You should be able to write ten good pages and feel that high we often feel, and then get to page eleven and realize this page is crap. That's our job.

I hold myself to a stupidly high standard that I know I will never meet, so I obligatorily hate the work at least a little. If I ever end up in a story meeting, I know what I believe to be weak points and I'll always have other ideas, even if the story seems "perfect."

So to sum it up in a line that would be insane out of context...it's okay to hate a little, it does us good.

And once again, GITS for the save!

Needed this post today. Thanks!

(and thanks specifically to you Marc. your words are good and real and true.)

Me?

I spent a decade and some change hating my work. It was a long, good hate. Woke up one morning and decided to try something else.

Don't get me wrong, there are still moments of great dissatisfaction. But that, of course, is necessary to keep one's game sharp.

Here's another way of looking at it. When you write anything for fun or for profit, you always have problems. Therefore, like life, writing is just a series of problems that need to be solved. So you either solve them or just sit there and hate the problems without solving them. And you know where that leads... (*twist cap, tip bottle, glug glug glug, **HIC!***)

Sadly, I realize that all that hate and bile I expended on my work back in the bad old days was, ultimately, just a thinly veiled excuse to avoid doing the actual work.

Guys. Mr Scott. Thanks a lot for the wonderful responses.

@Marc

Thanks a lot for the advice really appreciate it. I'm just learning the craft now, and it's always tough. I harsh on myself. That's one of characteristics. So definitely it'll reflect on my work.


@Jeff

Exactly. that's what I'm feeling right now. I just wanna procrastinate the job. But reading GITS ,other scripts and sitting with myself and my characters prevent me from doing so.

Thanks a lot guys again.

SCOTT MYERS IS KING!!!!!!!

Friend of mine shared this link on FB the other day:

http://www.good.is/post/a-happy-writer-is-a-lousy-writer

Aside from that, I'm going to have to disagree and say it's not normal to hate your script. Possibly, this means your script sucks -- or rather, that you're not writing what you yourself would really enjoy, but rather writing what you think you ought to be writing in order to please some objective standard.

One shouldn't write from a place of hate, saying, "Oh, that's just how it is, that's exactly what John August and Gene Fowler and Ernest Hemingway have said." Surely, you're writing because you enjoy it. Surely, you're writing this screenplay because you like it, because the story resonates, because you've worked yourself into it. If not, then maybe you're doing something wrong.

Hate may make you more careful and so forth, as the link above suggests, but Jesus, if you don't love it at some point...what the hell are you doing being a writer?

Great comments, folks, but that's to be expected from the GITS community. I invite others to participate because that question -- hate or love your writing -- is a key one, isn't it? So much depends upon the mindset of the individual writer.

For me it's not so much the hate, but the shear frustration of translating the foreign language in my head into beautiful Final Draft poetry. Until it's complete to my liking, I will loathe it so...

It's downright painful. Sometimes I want to chuck it out the window.
After I have a good session I'll throw on a good song and bask in my small accomplishment, knowing that it's part of a much bigger one.

Let me define hate from my perspective as a writer.

Writing requires a tremendous effort. Our butts, chair & paper have some kinda a weird relationship that's based on... repulsion.

My definition of hate is the pain and sweat you put in making the blank page worth something after all. It involves the fear of failure and it's humiliation.

It's the act of pushing yourself into pouring some of your knowledge that could be based on reading, observing, and mostly personal experience to make your characters more real.

It's the frustration involved in the whole process of rewriting and realizing that there are lots and lots of unnecessary scenes and parts that amount to pages & the need to replace them with good scenes.


The only time I love writing is when I get this new idea and when I'm done. In between, I think it's hell on earth.

Hate means you know it can be better. That there is a divide between how you imagined it and felt it and what's in front of you. Then comes the craft, a whole lot work, and profanity, and fun. Wrestling with the words, these pebbles of public discourse, wow it can be satisfying (arriving at a perfectly distilled and succinct line of dialogue with layers of subtext? delicious!). Like every medium, and I've worked in a bunch (and never thought I'd find such joy with words), it's about wrestling something from nothing, and it's a grueling, and fundamentally satisfying, process. And if anyone doesn't love their script when they're done, they need to go back and keep working the clay. You gotta love it, it has to capture what excited you about the whole thing (and of course be exquisitely polished considering every nuance of the craft!).

I generally say to myself "OMG this is the awesomest thing ever!" while I'm writing.

Then I go "OMG this is the worst thing ever" when I'm rewriting.

Do I hate my script while I'm writing it? No, at least I don't think so. Over the years I've written or co-written 7 features and 2 TV specs and some have been more difficult births than others. In fact at this point, only 5 of those are in a state that I'd consider showing to somebody.

Every script has its problems, and struggles that come with translating an idea to the page. Yes, it's frustrating when a writer knows that they have to get from A to B but just cannot make that work. Frustration is normal. Hate? I'm not sure.

With most of my scripts, there's always that one "cool" element or elements that first got me excited about the story. Usually that's what sustains me through the hard parts of writing. For example, about four years ago I came up with what felt like a really clever idea for a "Wizard of Oz" sequel/reboot. It was one of those things where it started as an idle thought and before I knew it I was coming up with a lot of really great ideas.

Was it easy? No, some parts were damn tricky because I had a lot of subplots going at once. Then, soon after I'd gotten it into really solid shape, not one but TWO Oz feature projects were announced in the trades, to say nothing of "Tin Man." So yeah, the odds of me selling that script went from "long" to "near impossible." Even so, now and then I'll get an idea that I think might work for that script and I'll take it out and tinker with it, just because I can't resist trying to make this "dead" project better. It'd be easy to hate the script because it's useless to me... but I can't.

Everything I work on, even when I'm playing pretty solidly in a known genre, has to have something in the story that I haven't seen done before - something I'm excited about bringing to people. Like everyone, I have my days of not being happy with my writing, but "hate" is a pretty strong word.

One of my college screenwriting professors called the first draft the "vomit draft." He said that no matter what, you will always hate your first draft and it will always be bad, but the most important part is getting it all out onto the page so that it can be cleaned up later.