As a screenplay is never finished until produced, I'm continuously revisiting, editing and revising my work. Now that I've three features and ten shorts under my belt, I'm getting this feeling of writer schizophrenia. I'm mixing names, scenarios, intent and interaction. I'm jumping from one piece of work to another as thoughts and ideas cross the mind. It's not just frustrating, it's exhausting!

Any suggestions from the masses to help keep my head on straight? How do you approach this issue or should I be checking myself in someplace for observation?

Use it. Mind expansion!

Perhaps write a script about a schizophrenic writer....

Happens to me all the time. My process is usually:

1. I have a great idea
2. I start to write - Man, this is going to be great
3. Wait - this is starting to sound just like --
4. I hate this - I suck at writing.  
5. I go play poker, have a beer - hmmm - what if I....yeah, that's it.
6. Start writing again - I knew this was a great idea
7. No it sucks.

Rinse and repeat

So true. I start to live the persona and take on the speech patterns of the character. I better stay away from pirate themes. Argh.

With the exception of "mixing names, scenarios, intent and interaction," sounds like you're on a roll. I'd be concerned about jumping aimlessly from one project to another, but it seems like you're giving the ones you've written their proper due as well, "revisiting, editing and revising" them. If anything, it seems like you can't stop writing. Is this really a problem you want to get rid of? Perhaps I've misunderstood what you mean by "writer schizophrenia."

How long have you been writing, btw? Three features and ten shorts doesn't seem like that much to me generally speaking, but if you haven't been writing very long, it could be a pretty decent benchmark.

I'm still a newbie, I've only been writing for just over a year now. It's primarily a focus issue that I'm trying to deal with as I'll be busy on one piece of work and start thinking about another. Thankfully I've yet to write a character from one story into another.

No desire to stop writing, that's for sure. I wish there was more time in the day!

ALL great writers borrow liberally from the characters of other great writers. And they also borrow from characters they themselves used in the past. It's not a problem.

The only problem is if you lean too heavily on any of these borrowed characters. So keep trying to expand your range of characters. Read other books and lit, watch movies, observe people.

The fact that you are being productive is a good sign. Keep trying to expand your character range and seeing the world through their eyes. You're off to a promising start!

Just to clarify, I understood "mixing names, scenarios, intent and interaction" to mean losing track of which elements belong in which scripts whilst working on multiple projects. That is to say you could be writing a character in one script but thinking about a completely different character in another script and thereby confusing the personalities of the two, or find yourself in a situation where you know who the character is but have lost track of the plot and are not sure how they should act. In short, everything gets fragmented and mixed together. That's a serious problem to have if that's how you meant it, but I might have misunderstood completely.

If it's a simple matter of riffing off elements of multiple scripts and having each script offer a different take or head down a completely different road perhaps based on the same idea, that's something else. Go to it if you're enjoying it. If you're just starting out, you're really not doing yourself any favors denying a particular approach. But if that's the case, I think Kevin (leitskev) might have a point generally speaking. Care to clarify?

In any case, I'm of the mind that the more you write in the beginning, the better off you'll be in the long run. You'll certainly learn a lot very quickly. You can also get a lot of any shitty writing you might have in you out of your system. I don't think I wrote anything halfway decent for at least five years of having started writing (I'm honestly not sure if anything after that is any good either). If right now you've got the enthusiasm and the will to actually write consistently, I'd say you're in a good spot.

Clozaril is good for schizophrenia. If you're on the NHS, you get it for free.