Sometimes watching something really good is inspiring. Sometimes it’s paralytic, because you end up staring at your own words and muttering, “Why aren’t you better?”

So, reasoning from this experience, you know what you might find fun and inspirational? Read something bad. Something really bad. It doesn’t have to be in script format — in fact it’s likely not to be. Look for something abominable — there’s loads of it on the web. Read someone’s first try at Simon and Simon fanfic or whatever. Find something really bad and truly roll around it in.

What you’re going to notice are all the things that you do really well. The things you do so well that you don’t even think about them anymore. The mistakes you don’t make — totally on-the-nose dialog, stories with no events in them, characters who are clearly awkward stand-ins for the author of the story. If you’re writing spec scripts, you aren’t sitting at a keyboard for the first time, pushing the notion of fiction around in your brain like an interesting new insect. You’ve either learned, or have always instinctively known, things about writing that others don’t (yet) have access to. It can be very encouraging to remind yourself of all the things you know, all the weapons you have in your arsenal, to look back at the road you’ve traveled to get here.

I’m not going to say that some of the submissions I get for Kaleidotrope are bad — or, even if I am saying that, I have to keep in mind T.S. Eliot’s admonition that “a bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one.” I’m just saying that there’s a lot to be said for reading something that clearly gets it wrong. Writing workshops, for instance, work not just because they offer criticism of your own words, but because they get you critically thinking about why some things work and some things don’t. Learning to spot the flaws in someone else’s writing can definitely help you spot them in your own.