When we talk about the inner critic we usually focus on someone else’s inner critic—we read the article about the successful director that still suffers from self doubt, or we talk to the person in our writing group who just sold a script and they tell us they’re worried that everyone will think they’re a fraud. In cases like these it’s easy to see the inner critic for what it is: A nebulous cloud of doubts and worries that isn’t rooted in reality. But when it comes to our own inner critic, truth and fantasy become much more difficult to separate from each other.
Maybe we never really know if our screenplay is excellent. It’s a subjective process. But one thing you should make sure of before you send your work out into the world… don’t suck. There’s a lot of road between a good script and terrible one.
All the writers I know have at least one person in their past who told them they would never make it. In my case, it was a creative writing professor in college. Too often it’s a critical parent who thinks writing isn’t really a career or a disgruntled spouse waiting for the income to start rolling in to relieve financial woes.
