And then you reread it later on, and you realize how clunky and unsmooth it reads, that it has no beats to speak of, or it's just poorly written or worded.

Moments like that make you want to give up. It doesn't happen that often, but still...

I tend to run into this phenomenon during rewrites.
I'll revise a scene on the fly and feel good about it, then revisit it and feel blah.
To avoid this, I tend outline and write treatments before going to script.
A scene shakes and bakes better in my brainpan this way.
The "happy accidents" on the day of writing the script are more detailed oriented then.
Since I've beat out my scenes in various forms before going to script.
I typically draft out a story at least three times before it goes into formal script form.

E.D.

This is happening to me less and less as I continue to write. What I've learned is that if there's anything you feel unsure about... forget "clunky, unsmooth, poorly written, etc.", I'm talking unsure, even just a little bit... don't let it slide. Rewrite it until you feel secure with it. I feel like a lot of this stuff is a matter of being lax. Thinking something isn't all that bad. It almost always bites you in the ass later. I've written several scripts in which the problems everyone points out are problems I was thinking about to begin with.

Quoted from James McClung This is happening to me less and less as I continue to write. What I've learned is that if there's anything you feel unsure about... forget "clunky, unsmooth, poorly written, etc.", I'm talking unsure, even just a little bit... don't let it slide. Rewrite it until you feel secure with it. I feel like a lot of this stuff is a matter of being lax. Thinking something isn't all that bad. It almost always bites you in the ass later. I've written several scripts in which the problems everyone points out are problems I was thinking about to begin with.

True words.

I expect my first, second and even third draft to be full of things that annoy me on a later read, that’s why God invented rewriting.

I tend to write 3 clear paths through a scene if the script is something I'm truly passionate about.  

-- 3 different out comes of polar opposite means

-- I then take the scene I like best and put the other two aside in their own (OFF DRAFT 1&2 folders)

-- I then move onto the next scene, writing 3 more outcomes

-- I then take the scene I like, put the other two in their respected folders underneath the previous scene(s) I wrote.

When i'm done with the script I tend to have 3 scripts, same theme, different outcome and way we get to it.  It's not for everyone and, again,  I only do this when I'm working on something I'm truly passionate about --  I don't think this would be the best method for writing if you're writing a short or just starting out all together.  But this method has given me very different results on certain scripts.

Quoted from fionaman And then you reread it later on, and you realize how clunky and unsmooth it reads, that it has no beats to speak of, or it's just poorly written or worded. Moments like that make you want to give up. It doesn't happen that often, but still...

Good post.  

This is something that I've given a lot of thought to, and I've found that it's not necessarily something that only applies to my screenwriting.  I think the same thing could be said for some of my "professional" writing.  

Recently I had to write up a yearly report for work, and I was looking at what I had written the year before to see what I could re-use to save some time.  Some of it I took almost verbatim, while other parts I tossed out, and found myself wondering, "What the hell was I thinking when I wrote this".

Similarly, from time to time, when I'm doing some house cleaning, I'll come across a paper I wrote in college, and I go through the same thing.  I mean it may have been well written for an 18-21 year old kid, but now I kind of cringe at it.

So what does it mean?  I have no idea.  Not to get too deep about it, but the only thing that I can think of is that we change as people over the course of time, and that is reflected in our writing.  What seemed well written at one point in our lives can seem like tripe only a couple of weeks or months later given what has gone down in our personal lives.  In that sense, I like to think that my writing will continue to improve indefinetly over time because I'll have learned more.

In a perfect world, you can write something, and let it sit for a while and then re-visit it.  Even a week later, I gurantee that you will find things that you would change and can't believe that you wrote the first time around.  Of course, that isn't always practicable with deadlines and such, whether it be for work work or screenwriting.  So, who knows.  Ultimately, I think that at some point you just need to let your writing go, otherwise you'll be re-writing till the cows come home.

I'm going to have to re-visit this post in a few days and wonder what the heck I was writing about.

CR