One of the most stressful parts of being a creative is dealing with failure. What if the transition between act two and act three doesn’t work? What if your secondary character’s story arc doesn’t make sense? Even worse – what if your protagonist’s story arc doesn’t make sense? 

The endless possibility of “what-ifs” that highlight the shortcomings of your screenplay can stop you midsentence and make you never return to your draft. 

But what if failure was a part of the process? Instead of looking at it like a bad word with baggage, failure can help screenwriters – at least that’s the philosophy that Inside Out 2 screenwriters Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein and the rest of the Pixar team live by. 

There are several reasons why failure can be a screenwriter’s greatest tool, but you have to learn how to embrace failure first. 

“Fail Early and Often”

Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull introduced the idea of failing early and often in Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. He noted that people are often terrified of being wrong and are uncomfortable with the unknown, which is why they often choose safety and security over trying something new.

Unfortunately, this is how we get tropes and predictable stories. Fear of failure can lead writers to rely on familiar formulas rather than taking creative risks.

However, embracing failure can radically change how screenwriters approach storytelling while also helping them develop their skills. Catmull notes that mistakes are a part of growth, and there is no need to fear them.

“Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality),” Catmull writes.

It’s kind of like riding a bike. At one point in your life, you didn’t know how to ride a bike. But after falling off a handful of times, some wobbly laps, and a few scraped knees, you learned how to ride. Developing a new skill requires you to trip and stumble along the way, but you need to fail to learn and grow. Yes, failing will still feel uncomfortable and painful, but learning to embrace that awkwardness can open the door to endless opportunities and eventually lead to great storytelling.

Making mistakes means you are taking a risk by trying new things, but failure can also help with another aspect that will benefit writers in the long term. 

Failing Can Save You Time (and Brain Power)

Beyond fueling creativity, failure also speeds up the writing process. When you stop fearing mistakes, you free yourself from the mental paralysis of overthinking. Instead of being plagued by what-ifs, you can move forward confidently, choosing a direction for your story without hesitation. In other words, embracing failure allows you to make decisions quickly.

Outlining is a crucial part of many screenwriters’ creative processes, but it can also become a time-consuming trap. The endless pathways a story can make it tempting to overanalyze every option, develop excessive plans, and obsess over what might go wrong. But a fearless writer can charge into uncharted storylines, allowing them to complete the first draft faster.

This is what Catmull calls the “upside of decisiveness.”

“If you seek to plot out all your moves before you make them — if you put your faith in slow, deliberative planning in the hopes it will spare you failure down the line — well, you’re deluding yourself,” Catmull writes. “Moreover, you cannot plan your way out of problems.”

Writers who overplan in an attempt to avoid mistakes often become too attached to their story, making it even harder to edit later. Instead of refining their original idea into the best version possible, they become stuck in a cycle of fear and stagnation.

So, how can writers break free from this rut and find the best direction for their story?

Trust You’ll Catch Your Mistakes 

Rather than spending time and energy trying to prevent mistakes, trust yourself — and your readers, if you’re sharing your screenplay — to catch them. After all, that’s what editing is for.

Mistakes are part of the learning process, so embrace them during writing. When writers go back and reread their work, they are looking for errors and thinking about how to fix them — that’s the essence of editing.

At Pixar, Andrew Stanton, director of A Bug’s Life and Finding Nemo, encourages creatives to “fail early and fail fast” and “be wrong as fast as you can.” Once you get mistakes out of the way, you can fix them quickly and move on to the next task. By tackling mistakes head-on, you’ll refine your work and, eventually, have a finished script.

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The fear of failure is natural, but embracing it can help you grow as a writer and finally complete that first draft. Many screenwriters never reach this milestone because they get stuck fearing the unknown. Trust yourself to tell the story — then go back and make it great.