I learned something the hard way and this is on a bit of a side note.

Listen for the little bell inside your head.

Rewrites are needed of course -- but can evolve into nitpicking sessions that add no value to your script -- and drive you bonkers in the process.

This delay can arise from, "what the hell will I do with it now?" which will then be followed by "what if I send it out... and it stinks?"

But here's the kicker -- you will never know until you get it out there.

Fear can do strange things to folks. But trust your instincts, the little bell in your head will eventually ring --

Or go to a friend for a "friendly" nudge... "Get off your ass and send it!"

Rewrite -- rinse -- repeat. But know when to let it go.

We all know the guy that has been working on the same screenplay for twenty years. Count yourself in the awesome category for finishing even one draft.

My, current, third draft is burning me out. I'm going to wrap it up, attack a new story, and come back fresh.

Good advice, Mr. Meyers.

I have written 11 drafts, so five is nothing. If you truly believe in the story, then everything should click into place eventually. Eleven is extreme, but it helped me understand structure. The advice from Scott is perfect, step away from it for two weeks and work on something else. The writers of "While You Were Sleeping" struggled for years until they figured out that the story should be told from the female's POV.

Scott !!!~ question.
if a one writer is to be a member of agency.
when a writer gonna script contract with film studio,,
agency has take off part of the salary?? like sports star or actor

It is a must to step away from a script from time to time.

Two of my scripts I've actually started over from scratch, rethinking structure and story.

When a new idea is calling I have to get it out. Today I have my methods to handle it, but it used to be very frustrating when I was in the middle of something else.

It is *always* better to finish something you've started, even if you know it's going to be utter crap. Doing this establishes the mindset that prevents you from jumping from one project to another until you finally look back at the end and realize that you never really accomplished anything, that after all your work you have only a string of incomplete manuscripts that went no where.

My default mode is akin to Wolf Lahti: Finish what you're writing before moving onto something else. However as per my mantra -- "There's no right way to write" -- that is not absolutely always the case. I can remember one spec project B&M wrote that was a real slog. At one point -- and this had never happened before -- I said we should just set it aside and move onto something else. Instead we continued to push our way into the story. Finally did find a way out and finished the draft. Our agents with one exception either didn't get it or hated it. So there we would have been better served to junk the project.

But more often than not, I find writers need to learn to push themselves past what they believe to be their threshold of 'can't go any further.' When you read how Michael Arndt wrote over 50 versions of one sequence in Toy Story 3, then you begin to approximate what it's like to be a professional screenwriter. You must be able to push, push, push yourself.

So as I say, my default mode is finish projects. But I'm not going to say it's a rule or law because sometimes the smarter course of action is to set it aside.

How to know when to do either? That's the rub!