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The famed theatre director Harold Clurman once said “bad work is the manure from which good work emerges.” He was talking about the crap plays on Broadway at the time, but I think this is a wonderful quote for Writers to take note of and learn from.

Your initial idea, often called the seed of the idea is in fact, for the purpose of this metaphor, a SEED, and for a seed to grow from a tiny little thing into a big strong PLANT (screenplay) it needs MANURE. What is manure? Well its shit, both in the real world and for the purposes of this metaphorical theory. Basically to make your seed grow you need to throw as much shit on it as possible, because leaving your seed to grow with no added nutrients wont work. As you heap shit onto your seed over time the plant will grow bigger and the stronger.

Why do I love this idea so much? Because it gives you licence to come up with shit. It makes it OK for you to sleep at night without feeling guilty that all you gave your seed today was endless shit, because you know what? After your seed has festered under all that shit over night, or maybe for a couple of days, it will start to grow into a plant. Your seed wont grow at any where near the same rate if you don’t put any manure on it, so it teaches you to not be so precious about your ideas at the expense of never making progress.

How cool is that? This simple analogy gives writers permission to write stuff that isn’t perfect. And since battling with your own insecurities and personal battles is half the struggle of screenwriting, by eliminating the guilt associated with only having crap ideas it frees you up to come up with great ones!

Many of the hang ups writers face are simply cured by removing the guilt attached to those feelings… removing the guilt from procrastination, removing the guilt from writing blocks, etc, The knack is just knowing how to remove that guilt, and in learning the seed and the shit theory I believe everyone can remove those negative feels about the crap you come up with.

In the past I used to worry endlessly about whether I should put an idea down or not, does it fit or not, will it work or not. Now I just make a note of the idea and move on, because now I know that simply having that shit out of my head and festering on the seed is going to help it grow.

I have a terrible first draft feature film sitting in my drawer at the moment which I need to get on with soon, but the fact that its terrible has never bothered me in the slightest, because I knew it was always the start of a long process, and simply by having a first draft, as shit as it may be, I am now in a much stronger position to go forward and write the killer feature than if I had stalled and waited for all the good ideas to turn up.

Actually, I’m going to take a moment out here to say that I don’t really condone people writing without proper planning. I think that nearly everyone will benefit from planning the film properly before they sit down and write it. What I am NOT saying here is that you should go and write the first page of your screenplay with the first idea you have and worry about fixing it later. What I am saying is that that you should start your PLANNING with the first idea that comes into your head, and continue to come up with new ideas regardless how crap until you have enough good ideas to write a screenplay that no longer sucks. When I talk about a seed I really do mean the early stages of your ideas life cycle. Actually writing the first page of the script proper usually comes months into the plants life.

Anyways, that aside, my main point in this blog is to comment on the fact that a lot of writers I’ve met in the amateur bracket let the fact that their first draft sucks get to them (but I am sure it is something that comes to haunt professionals from time to time as well). They don’t realise two things… Writing IS rewriting (first drafts of anything suck), and your seed needs shit. When you realise these two things you come to discover that actually writing a terrible first draft is a strangely liberating experience, because now you have gotten all that shit out of your system and onto the seed where its needed, now you have a healthy young plant and you can go forth and write the killer second draft.