If you’ve seen Neil LaBute’s Your Friends and Neighbors you’ll know the line “Is it me?” plays a particularly brutal and brilliant role in the film, coming from any number of distraught characters in any number of devastating situations.

And yet, even though everyone keeps asking “Is it me?” throughout the film, nobody really wants to hear to the answer. You get the feeling that "YES. IT IS YOU!" blaring from a S.W.A.T. bullhorn would still go unnoticed, characters fighting like hell to avoid the acceptance phase at all costs.

Screenwriters have our own special version of “Is it me?”

It's called -- “Is my script any good?”

Hardcore, right? Welcome to Tough Love. Perhaps the only questions more difficult are “Am I good in bed?” and/or “Am I (gulp) big enough?”

(Women may want to fill in that blank with something equally resonant but far more anatomically desirable.)

So yeah, popping ourselves this question is pretty fuckin' personal. Tantamount to launching a drone strike on F.O.B. Self-Confidence. A swirling avalanche of self-loathing and self-doubt immediately buries you. Real Life and the World Outside remain bright and filled with promise, gloriously presented in 16x9 DTS 5.1 Blu-ray. But inside? Dear Lord, inside is a terrible, unholy place -- a bad, sunburned mushroom trip on the beaches of Screenwriter Hell.

But why? Why should this one, simple inquiry have such a destabilizing effect on us, both sage veteran and total newbie alike?

Straight up? Because the answer -- the real answer -- means so damned much. At certain times in a writer's life, it can feel like it means everything.

In the space of a text message, a truthful verdict has the power to ennoble or obliterate our fondest dreams and most sacred aspirations. Basic concepts such as being able to pay the rent or buy yourself or your parents a home. Silly things from replacing your Craigslist '92 Toyota MR-2 to the fantasy of actually having health insurance and being able to get your fuckin' teeth cleaned. All these slim, beggarly hopes walk that slender tightrope between words like "good" and "bad", "yes" and "no", "they want to meet" or "they passed".

There's all that other heavy shit, too -- the psychological. Wanting to feel that we've "made something of ourselves", in spite of a merciless business and ridiculous odds; "that we were right all along", even after calling ourselves liars, 2 a.m., a fresh day's uncertainty lurking behind the coming dawn. And lastly, that perhaps what we write and think does have some real value.

That we're not just kidding ourselves.

So, logically, yes -- when we finally complete our bloody climb and plant our flag atop Script Mountain, forced to stand naked and needy before any friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend connections (aspiring execs, junior agents, puppy producers) or straight-up cold calls we might have the balls to make, and then ask "Is my script any good?"...well, yeah, it's SCARY. This really means something to us, and via that single, heartfelt Final Draft PDF we're risking an epic level of personal exposure and disappointment.

Which is precisely why asking that worrisome question "Is my script any good?" is absolutely essential before making any of those moves.

Because in the absence of hard, honest truths about your work -- most of which you're probably not going to dig -- how can any screenwriter get where they're striving to go?

Screenplay Links

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• Screenplay - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  
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• Unproduced Screenplays - a world of unproduced screenplays
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