Every time I've had to throw out a story it's because I made the same mistake.

And it's annoying and miserable to keep forgetting and remembering. Also, I dish a little about TV being hell 2 make.

Nothing will prepare you for the dreaded ‘page one re-write’ like working in TV. Back when I was an assistant I’d watch, mouth agape, as writers came shuffling back to the writer’s room from a table read or notes call, looking mugged, grief twisting their tear-streaked faces, heads of unwashed hair¹ wagging: “They threw the episode out.’’

And what could that possibly mean? Threw it out? Like trash? Like, all of it? Yeah, all of it, and not because it was trash (necessarily), but for any number of reasons it just didn’t work.

At first I thought this was exceedingly rare. I’d feel compelled to start a GoFundMe for the poor writer who’d suffered this misfortune—surely they’d be booted from their PWGA insurance soon, never to work again, go hungry, self-harm, have to sell their plasma, etc. And while that may all still prove true, it’d be because of the state of the industry in general—not because their script was thrown out.

Scripts get thrown out or re-broken all the time, and seemingly at random.²

It’s so rarely the writer’s ‘fault’ when an episode is scrapped. The thing about TV is that getting anything on the air is an obstacle course that requires the wildest combination of luck and tact, navigating gatekeepers at cross-purposes and a LOT of cluster-B personality disorders. And the show-runner, you find out quickly, is most often just acting as middle-management, tap-dancing and fire extinguishing and hostage negotiating (the hostage, in this metaphor, is the creative itself—its captor the algorithm, the machines that say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to us) with the powers that be.

So I’ve seen A LOT of things thrown out. Outlines, scripts, even whole episodes that have been shot; entire series that have been filmed and scrapped, never to see the light of day. It’s so shocking and insane. But, TLDR: TV writers learn to grieve quickly.

I was grateful when I started writing fiction that I’d already had the exposure therapy I needed to throw out large chunks of material without wanting to die. In fact, I’ve almost started embracing cuts to a fault, sometimes at risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater because I find it so thrilling to throw out huge swaths of text that don’t work. It’s liberating, like donating clothes that don’t fit or finally throwing out the empty cans of seltzer rolling around your feet on the floor of your car.

But the page-one rewrite is still the worst of injuries in writing life, it feels like its possibility looms over any project, at any stage, and I’m never not bracing for it on some level. A page one rewrite (when you have to find an entirely new story, throwing out major elements of plot, character, or even premise) always feels like a monumental failure, especially outside of the Hollywood machinery, where it’s not as easy to blame bad luck or miscommunication or internal politics or external politics or the algorithm or whatever guillotine fell on top of your helpless episode of television.

Sometimes, you have to decapitate your own story.

Luckily, I’ve started to recognize the most common, almost unanimous diagnosis when it comes to a story I’ve written that’s so fucked up I have to start over. It’s when:

The characters just aren’t active enough.

And you’re probably like … well yeah babe of course.

But it’s crazy—I know this fundamentally, that characters have to stay active, that our heroes have to drive their stories and not the other way around, and still, I’m so often surprised to take a look under the hood when a story truly isn’t working and see this same problem again and again and again. Where is your protagonist? What is driving them? This has to be shown through choice. This door or that door? Yes or no?

A character making a choice is the way virtually all stories start (truly start), and I try not to move on from the first 5-10 pages of a screenplay or the first 20ish pages of a novel without a character making a life-altering decision.

But then there’s also all the character-illuminating micro-decisions along the way, starting from the very first moment we meet a character: Do they speak up or bite their tongue? Will they pay extra for the guac or not? Text back STOP to the Democrats’ texts? Wait in a long line, ignore a phone call? Why or why not?

CHOICES build story, drive plot, illuminate character! I am PRO-CHOICE!

It’s nice to do this work before a story is so broken it has to be scrapped. So this is what I’ve started asking myself beat by beat, page by page, chapter by chapter:

Is there any single thing element here that could be turned into character choice?

A little can go a long way. It can be as simple as spotting a moment where you’ve given a supporting character a line when your main character is standing right there, and is equally invested in the answer—why not have them speak up, or at least give some thought as to why they stay silent³; OR it could be as tricky as going back and re-writing a story turn so that it’s the direct outcome of a character’s decision.

So often we THINK a character is active, only to discover information is constantly reported to them instead of being discovered or sought out; characters are summoned, apprehended, blind-sided—things happening always to them and not because of them.

At the scene level, I’m constantly surprised to discover missed opportunities to give characters choices, even small ones. Antagonists often show up and simply boss my protagonists around. A good antagonist (oxymoron?) sets traps. They might force hands, mislead or manipulate, but still: what’s more interesting? A story where someone is held at gunpoint for 300 pages? Or the story of someone who tests fate, takes risks, breaks rules, and then discovers they’re staring down the barrel of a gun, and they’ve got no one to blame but themselves? A story where they (and we) can retrace all the steps back from the impossible position they’ve put themselves in?⁴

Virtually every story turn should be the outcome of a choice made by a main character. We love to watch people become the architects of their own demise, and/or crawl out of the holes they’ve dug themselves. This is why I find outlining so invaluable: I have a chance to stress test every story move, ensuring everything that happens can be traced back to a moment a character decided to DO something.

Still, I slip up. That’s why I’ve tried to train myself to not let any micro-choices slip by in my writing, either. This helps build the active-characters muscle, it forces me to interrogate what my characters think they want, what they really need, and how they can make the most mistakes, maximizing tension and momentum on the page.

Each choice is a chance to show how a character is growing (or regressing), moving forward (or backward), and gives us that thrill of watching someone else move through a circumstance where in real life we might freeze up—and surprise themselves along the way.

OK, now you. When and how do you know a story is dead? When have you had to throw out an entire story or project, and why? Was it because an algorithm said so? (If you answered yes, you’re probably a TV writer, too!) Let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading, have a nice week, and I hope no one is mad at me,

Dan

1. Sorry lol I’m having already having too much fun :/

2. The scripts themselves are more often than not assigned somewhat at random, by the show-runner, often ahead of knowing their exact contents, doled out in order of level (EPs first, then Co-EPs, then producers, etc.)

3. I think especially in fiction, where we’re gifted with the tool of interiority (harder to come by in screenwriting, barring V.O. and other conventions), a non-choice can be argued as active. It’s a little harder to pull off, and I’d try and frame it in the positive— e.g. in this beat X character choses to lie instead of X character ‘neglects to tell the truth.’

4. I feel compelled to say this is only one story shape, and there are plenty of ways stories can unfold that don’t look like this. Still, hopefully my pro-choice argument is made clearly!