screenwriting advice | Andrea Mann

Why painting walls is like writing drafts – and why it’s progress, not perfection, that matters

My husband Frank and I have bought a house together (for the very first time!) and been doing it up (also for the very first time!).

It’s a Victorian terrace which has needed a bit of love. In other words: we’ve* been stripping wallpaper, sanding and painting (and Zinssering – iykyk) walls, pulling up carpets and smashing open fireplaces. We’ve had the house fully rewired, our chimney newly flaunched, and we’ve learned what the word ‘flaunched’ means. We’ve put a log burner in one of the aforementioned smashed-open fireplaces, installed a new bathroom (during which our plumber discovered tiles upon tiles – literally), and created a new partition wall with pocket doors. Pocket doors!! I can tell you now that those long winter nights are going to fly by, mainly because I’ll just be standing by this archway, sliding doors in and out of it:

*_{There’s gold in them there hills doors in them there walls!}*

In short: the summer has been filled with a fascinating, time-consuming, fulfilling and at times slightly stressful project, and I’ve never used so much hand cream in my life.

The whole experience has also been an excellent reminder of an adage I’ve told myself (and fellow writers, and fellow recovering people-pleasers) numerous times: that ‘perfect is the enemy of good’. Or indeed, the enemy of done.

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Learning to ‘trust the process’ can change your life. Trust me. (And the process).

I’m in the first draft of a feature script at the moment, with all the ups and downs that entails.

The ups include thoughts like: I’m writing a film script! I used to manage a cinema and now I’m writing a film script!! – inwardly screaming and running around the house like Olive when she’s told she’s through to the finals of the Little Miss Sunshine pageant.

The downs include rather different thoughts, like: What the f— am I doing? Should I really put that there? Is this rubbish? Oh god, it’s rubbish. Is this script going to be any good? At any point? I bet Mike White’s scripts are great off the bat! …and so on.

I often talk to other writers and creatives about how a) the voice of your Inner Critic never goes away but b) you can help it to become quieter, and less frequent, by doing such things as nurturing the voice of your Inner Best Friend instead.

When I’m in the thick of a first draft, my Inner Best Friend reminds me that they’re known as Shitty First Drafts for a reason. That nobody will see this draft but me. That it doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be written. That it doesn’t matter if it’s rubbish for now, as long as I push on through. That I should just keep swimming. At which point I realise that my Inner Best Friend is, in fact, a fish. Called Dory.

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