May #3 - Write the Bad Draft

This week is all about making time to be a horrible failure

Back at it again on another Monday, kicking off a week of writing and another week in the May Writing Challenge.

By the end of the month I’ll gather some feedback from folks who participated, crown some Lords of the Page Count, applaud those with the highest writing streaks, and we’ll start it up again next month.

I’ll say that for me, having the little extra pressure to write every day has been extremely helpful. I’m on a first draft of a new pilot that my writing partner and I sold as a pitch, and no matter how many times I do it, I always feel like I have no clue how to write when I open up a new document to get started. The truth is that I don’t, because I’ve never written this before. I’m afraid I’m going to write a bad draft, which makes me not want to write.

The trick for me is that I have to write the bad draft. I have to accept that I have no clue what this show looks or sounds like until I’m revising, so I better get to that point as quickly as possible. I have to make a ton of decisions knowing most of them will be wrong. Let it be slow and bad. Let it wander and take four pages to figure out the point of a scene. After that I may actually crack what I really want to write, but not before. Never before. And yes that sucks and never gets easier, and I somehow always trick myself into thinking that the next pilot will have a sharp first draft, only for the cycle to repeat.

The only way to write the decent draft is to write the shitty draft, and the only way to write the shitty draft is to give yourself time to be shitty at this. We don’t prioritize being bad at something enough. We focus on progress and skill, and it feels like every step should be a step forward, but that’s not how creativity works. Sometimes you need to read the absolute dog shit that came out of your brain before you can find the perspective that gives you a unique way into the material. You need time to be a miserable failure. That’s where this writing challenge has helped me. I’m failing extremely hard. I’ve written 21 pages of this script, and I like maybe a half a page of it. But it feels good. And now I’m starting to see why I don’t like those other pages and what I can do to adjust some things, refocus some characters, build a bit more of a solid emotional structure and get to a point where I don’t hate the pages at all.

This challenge has been miserable fun, and hopefully it’s been helping you too.

So for those who haven’t joined in, now is a great time to warm up before the June challenge. If you aren’t used to writing every day (or even most days), download the writing tracker and get started this week. Open up that idea you’ve been putting off because you’re too busy. Jump into the Residuals Discord and share your progress, your challenges, ask some questions to the hundreds of professional writers in the group, share resources with the nearly 1700 members who all have a story to tell.

Spend ten minutes a day working on your script or novel or comic or short or whatever, and I’ll bet you end up finding more and more time for it as you go. The great thing about writing is that the more you do it, the more exciting it gets. And once you finish you project, you’ll be able to look back over the months of these writing challenges and see that it wasn’t about spending three sleepless nights writing a single perfect draft, but months of little moments where you chose to fail at your project until one day it wasn’t a failure anymore.

Want to dig in a little deeper? Let’s try out the Substack chat to keep this conversation going. Share in the chat what you are currently afraid to fail at. Then take a minute to read others and give them some words of support to push through the anxiety and get to the other side.

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Chris Amick is a Film and TV Writer/Producer in Los Angeles with credits including Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, Die Hart 2, Kung Fu Panda: the Dragon Knight, Final Space, and more. His latest project is as Executive Producer on the existential thriller IT ENDS, which premiered at SXSW 2025. He teaches writing classes here.