My Screenplay Revealed Embarrassing Character Defects
By: Taylor Foreman
Tags: Writing, Growth, Screenwriting, Life, Creativity

My Screenplay Revealed Embarrassing Character Defects

Photo by Matthew LeJune on Unsplash

The only way to survive in Los Angeles is to make friends with writers who will be brutally honest with you.

I wrote a pilot script about a down-on-his-luck snake-oil salesman in the Old West who accidentally discovers penicillin. It’s a half-hour-historical-fiction comedy. It’s what I would watch! The main character is the snake oil salesman, Delroy. Delroy really wants to seem important. In fact, he would do just about anything to seem important — even secretly drug his only friend with cocaine. Delroy is admittedly an aspect of my own personality. Inflated greatly — but still part of me. It’s fun to take the selfish, image-driven part of me to the extreme. What is the outcome of living this way?

Well, I gave one of my first drafts to a writer and a close friend.

“I feel like Delroy didn’t deserve to discover penicillin at all. I was rooting against him because he thinks he can cheat his way through life. He needs to have more recompense.”

Hard notes are like getting punched in the face. But if you have a glass jaw, you won’t survive long enough to get better.

It was a good note. And — just like most creative notes — it wasn’t about the script.

It was about me.

Writing unconsciously reveals who you are

When writing something creative, you make thousands of decisions. Should this character go here? Say that? What are they wearing? Who wins in the end?

How do you make those decisions? Randomly? No. When making those thousands of decisions, we consult our unconscious beliefs and values. When our beliefs and values are underdeveloped, our writing is bad.

That means that becoming a better writer is the same thing as becoming a better person.

Spiritual work is training for writing

My good friend — the same one who gave me the notes — has been growing spiritually for the last couple of years. He meditates, does morning pages, prays, and makes amends every single day.

When he started, I was happy for him, but I didn’t feel like I needed to do it too. I was fine, I figured. He might need that, but I’m a pretty good person (Enter: Delroy).

After a year of doing the work, I noticed something in my friend: He had become a much better writer than me.

I read his most recent script and was nearly knocked to the floor. It was better than anything either of us had ever achieved before. I realized that it reflected a deep shift in his character.

Not only that, but he started to get meetings with people in high places. It wasn’t just my opinion of him — the world was telling him: Keep going!

That was all the hint that I needed to get serious about spiritual work.

The art of getting humble

Just like Delroy, I believed that I needed to cheat my way through life on some level.

I believed that I could twist the fabric of reality in my favor. I arrogantly assumed that it wouldn’t snap back and hurt me (even though it had plenty of times before). What I really needed was a big ‘ol dose of humility.

Getting humble is the same thing as engaging in the world. For me, it means:

Reaching out and encouraging other writers Accepting where I actually am Letting go of any expectation of where I should be by now

In the script, it meant that Delroy had to get humbled — hard.

I don’t want to go into too much detail, but it meant that he literally had to give his adversary a moldy handjob to save his own life. Then, and only then, was Delroy given the right to accidentally discover penicillin.