Rewrites

​“No matter how many times you stir up a steaming pile of crap, it’s still just a steaming pile of crap.” Altos Budrys
 
“Books aren’t written - they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.” Michael Crichton
“I will sell no screenplay before its time.” Orson Welles.
 
There are two schools of thought on this. For the sake of this blog post, I will go with the latter. From perspective, I’d just cleaned out one of two filing cabinets and found two screenplays that needed to be spiffed up for my portfolio. I am afraid that the references had not aged well, and I thought If I were going to keep them, it would be best to send them over to the creative detail shop. 
The first step was to read through them both, and after I removed the taste of bile from my mouth, I went to work. Both needed major plotting work with a stronger focus on the characters. The arcs for the leads were okay, but the broad strokes I had used for the supporting casts were nothing more than stereotypes (I always knew I should have taken that staff writing job for Hee-Haw). 
I jumped into both projects and several weeks later had two new drafts. Both are better but are they worth sending out? Hard to tell, but it does bring up the age-old question, two of your creative darlings are drowning. What do you do? I guess my answer was to try and save them both.