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even if you wanted to, right? You’re pregnant. Embrace it.
    This is the juice of being a writer. This is as good as it gets, right here in the thick of this first draft. You’ve got to be fully conscious of this moment and know that this is what you do it for. You don’t do it just to show off the finished product or to be recognized as some great genius or to get paid a lot of money. All of those things are nice, and I wish every writer in the world that kind of success, but at the end of the day that’s not what writing is really about.
    It’s about the doing of it. That’s the only part of it that’s truly meaningful—the actual act of writing.
    If you have the writer gene you know exactly what I’m talking about here, even if you won’t (or can’t) bring yourself to admit it. As writers, we’re so full of passion and ambition. We have so much to say to the world, so many things we want to express, that we sometimes get caught up in this grand notion that the next script is the one ; the next book is the one ; the next great whatever is the one . But the truth is, it’s the little moments of pleasure you receive along the way, the little successes that make it all worthwhile—writing a breakthrough scene or fixing a problematic line of dialogue or realizing that cutting a character will strengthen the whole piece, even when it’s a character you’re in love with. Especially when it’s a character you’re in love with.
    Understanding and accepting this reality is so vital to your career. Why? Because no matter how much you’ve written in your life, you still have to start at square one each and every time. No two stories are the same, yet you will run into the same problems on story number one thousand that you ran into on story number one. Sure, some will come together easier than others, but you never get a free lunch. You still have to make each and every story work in its own unique way.
    And what’s the only thing that you can really count on through all this, the only thing that’s consistent from one effort to the next? That’s right, your process. Your process. Not the one that someone else has neatly laid out for you in a book about writing (including this one). The process that you’ve developed for yourself, the one that makes sense and works for you , the one that you will never enjoy more than when the story belongs exclusively to you. The one that you have no choice but to hone, refine, and love. That’s where your gold is.
    After all, if you’re going to spend your entire life doing something day in and day out, year after year, you better love it. Otherwise what’s the point?
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Villains vs. Villainy
    There’s one particular storytelling element that is especially relevant to this discussion about keeping your original story to yourself while it incubates. It has to do with the tension or central conflict in a story, which frequently involves the presence of a villain.
    It’s often said, and I think quite correctly, that the best villains are the ones that aren’t just evil, but are truly flawed human beings. While you clearly don’t empathize with these characters in the same way that you do the hero of the story, you understand their motivation, and you can see why they’ve become such a powerful force of antagonism in the hero’s world. In the case of theater, film, and television, if these villains are also portrayed by gifted actors as real, believable people, then their twisted, immoral agendas enhance the experience all the more.
    In some stories though, there is no villain in the form of a person. The true villain is a thing, an idea, an emotion . Take Romeo and Juliet, for example. There are characters in the story that antagonize in various ways, but the real villain is the intolerance that exists between the two families, the fear of the other . It’s this human