By Britt J.

Fear of finishing a screenplay can often suddenly strike in what appears to be a totally illogical manner – right at the moment when your creative juices are flowing just fine.

Unlike screenwriter’s block, this malady typically expresses itself as chronic avoidance, as opposed to frustration or struggle. It may consist of weeks, perhaps even months, when your back burner is turned down to such an imperceptible simmer that it’s beginning to look like your delectable stew might not even make it out of the pot.

Ever wonder why you frequently fall victim to such irrational self-sabotage? And why it’s generally your most promising scripts that continue to remain on hold?

I’d like to suggest that there may be a completely logical underlying process going on here –a rational, but inherently fixable process which is slightly more nuanced than a simple ‘fear of failure.’

If you’re a screenwriter who believes you might actually have a shot at someday succeeding in the industry – such a heady dream has likely been affording you a great deal of pleasure and comfort over the years. You may even have been viewing it as your ultimate ‘ace in the hole’ when it comes to an eventual career path – an aspiration you obviously wouldn’t want to let go of at any cost.

One surefire way to permanently protect such a cherished dream boils down to simple mathematical probabilities – i.e., playing the percentages – in which the likelihood of commercial success after completing a script has become far less motivating than holding onto the belief that recognition, fame, and fortune are right around the corner, merely awaiting your script’s completion.

While the dream itself guarantees the certainty of a happy ending – attempting to actualize it appears to offer only a remote possibility.   So why throw away a 100% certainty for a less than 25% probability? At face value it all seems quite rational to hang onto the dream at the expense of completing the script.

The best way out of this impasse is by re-thinking the logic and recognizing that the two outcomes are NOT mutually exclusive. And by this I mean that, after a sincere effort to turn your dream into a reality by trying to market your completed script to producers and studios, if it should happen that you don’t instantly land feet first into Hollywood as you had always envisioned you would, it does NOT have to signal the end of the dream.

It simply means that, at this particular moment in time, with this particular script, and for this particular combination of studios and reviewers who have seen it thus far – your original dream is still in the realization process — totally protected, safe, and well.

As Steven Pressfield argues in his book, The War of Art — specific dreams emerge within us for some kind of deeper, more meaningful purpose. They can be looked upon as personal guideposts to our innermost callings. And I believe that’s what makes our dreams indestructible unless we ourselves willfully choose to destroy them.

You need to ask yourself why you were inspired with the vision of writing and selling a screenplay and not, for example, of designing a perpetual motion machine.  It’s not accidental. There’s likely a reason behind it.

In contrast to all the comparatively trivial, short-lived, evanescent factors that may enter the picture – e.g., inadequate editing, inappropriate marketing, script reviewer myopia, film industry politics, and so on – your dream maintains a higher level of indestructibility and, ironically, a higher level of ‘reality’ than all these fleeting setbacks can ever have.

It is a gift that can never be taken away from you. And no matter how many times it may appear to have not succeeded – the actual truth is that your dream will still remain safely inside you, larger than life, as long as you let it. Otherwise it would never have been put there in the first place. Unlike the artificial, self-imposed time limits you might be inclined to set for yourself before labeling your goal to have ‘failed’ – in reality the time allotted for realizing your dreams is infinite.

The secret is to fully embrace the fact of your screenwriter dream’s indestructibility while you continue to move your script forward to completion.

By reminding yourself of this fact on a regular basis and truly embracing it at your very core being— ‘fear of finishing’ will hopefully and gradually become one less hurdle to have to overcome as a screenwriter.

Britt J. is a clinical psychologist, advertising copywriter, and novice screenwriter who experienced a few of her own ‘fear of finishing’ skirmishes in the past and was determined to finally do something about it.

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